This Week, Her Hand
And so the wedding drew near. On the day he left the fortress once more, Hyperion set out in the cleanest, most neatly kept clothes he owned, though he knew perfectly well they would be soiled long before the journey's end.
From that alone, Gemma understood. Hyperion had come to keep, in his heart, the princess of that distant kingdom—the woman who was to be his bride.
He had taken the throne, so I thought everything would go well from here. I never dreamed a problem like this would arise.
Watching Hyperion, who was visibly itching to go to the Empress, Gemma slipped in a quiet piece of advice.
"Her Majesty the Empress seems worn down by the volume of her work. Having been raised to the empress's seat so suddenly, the burden must be considerable."
"……!"
Hyperion had sense enough to catch what Gemma meant by speaking around the point. He asked Laniakea—who had gone tense the moment she saw him—whether she was all right, then turned his gaze, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to the documents she had been reviewing.
From then on, their talk flowed more easily than he had expected. In truth, at the start it was less a conversation than a stretch of time in which he explained and Laniakea wrote it down. Even so, the distance between them closed little by little. It was only so the papers might pass more conveniently from hand to hand, and yet Laniakea, who had begun by sitting across from him, was before long seated at his side. That alone set Hyperion's heart pounding.
He was happier still when they came to share a meal in the office. Back when he had been a prince, a visit to the Imperial Palace afforded him scarcely more time than it took to eat once, and that brief span had been far too short for looking upon a wife seated a long way off. Compared with then, they were impossibly close now. Perhaps because he had asked that something simple be brought, Laniakea—unlike those stiff, awkward meals of old—bit generously into her sandwich, as if she were truly hungry.
The sight of her eating at ease before him satisfied him all the more, and then came what followed: an introduction to the spirits. The water spirit pestering him to produce sugar was astonishing enough; Laniakea conversing with it was more wondrous still. Which was why her falling asleep like this had caught him entirely off guard.
Looking at her sleeping face, he felt a pang of regret. He had wanted to talk a little longer—about the spirits, or more precisely, he had wanted to hear when she had grown close enough to call them friends without a shred of reserve. He wanted her story.
That did not mean he disliked her this way. Even with him right there, Laniakea had closed her eyes without a trace of wariness. Had she not, just before sleep took her, offered him her hand as if it were nothing at all?
Hyperion looked down at their joined hands, fingers laced together.
He had held her like this on that night as well. Just before he sank deep inside her, their hands had locked tight—sooner, even, than their bodies. Keeping one hand clasped so it could not possibly slip free, he took Laniakea's other hand as well. Still she showed no sign of waking.
Summoning spirits must drain more of her strength than I thought.
He was curious, and the sight had been marvelous, but if that was the cost, he had no intention of asking her to show him the spirits again. Should anyone else happen to see them, nothing good would come of it. And yet—though he was the one who had caught her—the fact that she had revealed without hesitation the beings she had kept hidden all this time, simply because he asked, kept stirring something bright and restless in his chest.
Lost in one thought and another, Hyperion came back to himself at a small fidgeting within his grasp. Finding it stifling, perhaps, that he would not let go, Laniakea was trying in her sleep to pull her hand free. He settled properly into the seat beside her and tightened his hold.
"Mm……."
When her hand grew no easier, contrary to whatever she seemed to expect, she frowned faintly, tugged a few times more, and at last went still, as if she had given up. Still clasping that quieted hand, Hyperion gave it a gentle squeeze, then loosened his grip the moment the pressure seemed too strong. He repeated it again and again, until she understood that her hand was caught in his—and only then did Laniakea stop trying to pull away.
A satisfied smile rose to his face.
Before his return to the Imperial Palace, he had held his wife's hand exactly once: on their wedding day, standing before the bishop. It had not even lasted a few minutes, yet the feel of it still lingered in his palm. Even that, though, had been nothing more than a sensation felt through gloves. Whenever he came to the palace, he would look at Laniakea's distant hands and swallow against a dry throat.
If only I could hold her hand just once.
He would startle at himself for thinking it. A deviant? Why was he carrying on like a man driven half mad for want of holding someone's hand? He tried to put the thought away, and still it bobbed up into his mind at the most impossible moments—when he cut an enemy down, when his senses went a little hazy in the dead of a midwinter freeze, when he chewed and swallowed some wretched meal without a thought.
And so, on their first night, when he finally took her hand, Hyperion had stopped breathing for a moment. It was smaller and softer than he had imagined, and that had been maddeningly good. But the night had ended in a mess after all, and as he worried over Laniakea's body, a thought struck him cold.
Will I never be allowed to hold her hand again……?
He had worried so fiercely, and yet Laniakea, as if there were nothing difficult about giving him her hand at all, had simply entrusted it to him.
The hand callused from long years on a sword slid between her slender fingers. When his thick knuckles worked their way between those closed fingers and grazed the tender skin within, a shallow moan slipped through the sleeping Laniakea's teeth. Ticklish, then. And a nuisance. Slowly, Hyperion tightened his grip once more, loosened it, and did it again.
Gemma and Tamil had told him: never try to force a thing. Touch her often, until contact itself came to feel like a matter of course. At first he had thought, what could possibly be difficult about that? To be told merely to hold her hand was, for him, as good as a gift. But now that he was holding it, he began to understand what the Ensi couple had been worried about.
He was human, after all. Gain one thing, and he could not help wanting another. The proof was this very hand—clasped around the hand he had longed for so desperately, and already reaching past it. Hyperion looked at the pale fingers caught in his own.
I want to swallow them.
Swallowed just like this, he thought they would taste sweet. At the same time a dizziness close to rapture would take him. And what new world would that be? Slowly, he drew her hand toward his mouth. She slept on, quiet, with no idea where it was being led, and the sight of her was almost pitiable. When her hand drew near his face, Hyperion shuddered.
He must have gone mad. How else could a single finger of his wife's roughen his breath like this? He did not understand it himself. In all his life he had scarcely felt anything so fierce. As a child, perhaps, he had been angry, and he had grieved. Once he entered the monastery he stopped raising his voice, and once he went to the border he stopped shedding tears. It had been for the best. Emotion was nothing but a hazard to survival.
Nor was the reason he had clung so savagely to life anything grand. He was a prince—abandoned, cast out—and that had been the only worth left to him. When he was young and still living in the palace, the tutors who taught him had worn their mouths thin repeating the same words: he was a prince, and to exist was both his duty and his right. He was not certain about the right. The duty, he had to fulfill. The thought that he must survive because he was a prince was the only thing that kept him standing.
And so, once another of his siblings took the throne and he was a prince no longer—once even his right of succession had been extinguished—then, he had thought, it would be all right to die some suitable death on the border. He had been thinking exactly that when the empress summoned him, and bound to his side an existence called a wife.
That day, Hyperion received one more duty by which he was obliged to live. It was also the day another reason he had to go on living came into being.
"Laniakea."
The lips that had been about to swallow the slender finger placed in his keeping went still, and called the name of the woman to whom this rapture belonged. Unlike a little while ago, when he had regretted her sleep, he was glad of it now. Had she been awake, she might have taken fright again and tried to flee.
Swallowing a breath that had risen too high, Hyperion pressed a slow kiss to the back of the hand he held. One failure, born of his own inexperience, was enough. This time he would prepare with exquisite slowness, and with absolute certainty, and he would lead it through to success—so that she might come to share the feeling that moved him.
This week, her hand.
Kissing the rest of her fingers in turn, Hyperion recalled the next stage the Ensi couple had spoken of.
And next week…….
His gaze found her cheek, soft and yielding. After her hand, that was what he wanted to devour.