8.2 -- She Smells Good, She Feels Good

The Witch of Infinite Time did not so much occupy space as colonize it.

She had arrived, as she always arrived, without warning and without apology -- simply appearing in one of the castle's smaller sitting chambers, a room of pale rose-gold crystal that caught the Fragment's soft, sourceless light and scattered it in slow-moving fractals across the floor. Ilyrisse had been reading -- or trying to; she had reached the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word of it, which she would later blame entirely on the woman currently invading her lap.

Vaelira had climbed into the chair beside her first, the way she always did, with the deceptive laziness of someone for whom every motion looked accidental and was in fact perfectly deliberate. Then she had simply continued. A shift of weight here, a slow unfolding of limbs there, until somehow -- Ilyrisse could never quite pinpoint the exact moment it happened, which she suspected was the entire point -- she found herself with an armful of witch, Vaelira's legs draped over her own, her weight settled fully into Ilyrisse's lap like a cat claiming a sunbeam that had, until recently, belonged to someone else.

Vaelira's arms had wound around her, unhurried, and her face had pressed into the curve of Ilyrisse's neck, breathing in slow and deliberate, the way she did everything -- as though she had all the time that existed, because in some very real sense, she did.

"You smell like something I want to fall asleep in," Vaelira murmured, her breath warm against Ilyrisse's collarbone. "I understand him now. I didn't, before. I thought he simply liked variety. But no -- it's this. It's exactly this."

"That's an appalling thing to say about your husband's mother," Ilyrisse said dryly, though she made no immediate move to dislodge her.

"I've said worse about you directly to your face," Vaelira said, unbothered, nuzzling closer. "This is practically a compliment."

Ilyrisse allowed it for a moment longer -- the warmth of another body pressed against her own was not a thing she indulged in often, and there was no use pretending, even to herself, that she disliked it -- before she finally set her hands against Vaelira's shoulders and pushed, firm but unhurried, putting a careful hand's width of distance between their faces.

Vaelira did not go far. She simply reorganized herself with the fluid indifference of water finding a new shape for the same container: her legs stayed exactly where they were, draped across Ilyrisse's thighs; her hips settled more fully into her lap, unbothered by the newly enforced distance between their faces, as though the face had never been the important part to begin with. She reclined back, gold eyes half-lidded, entirely pleased with herself, watching Ilyrisse with the specific, unhurried amusement of someone who has never once in her existence worried about overstaying a welcome.

Ilyrisse exhaled through her nose -- not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh, something that lived in the narrow space between the two, a sound she reserved, whether she admitted it or not, almost exclusively for this woman.

"You are impossible," she said.

"I am comfortable," Vaelira corrected, stretching like something feline and entirely too satisfied with the stretch. "There's a difference. One of them is a character flaw. The other is simply correct."

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Ilyrisse let her stay. She always let her stay, in the end. But there was a debt to be repaid regardless, an echo she couldn't resist reaching for, and so, with the same unbothered precision Vaelira herself so often deployed, Ilyrisse brought one hand down in a single sharp swat against the curve of Vaelira's hip -- exactly the gesture Eremos had used on her, that night at the dinner all those months ago, the one that had started a small chain reaction of affectionate imitation around the table.

Vaelira's eyes flew open. A flush crept up her throat that she immediately, and unsuccessfully, tried to look bored through.

"That," she said, with as much dignity as she could muster from a position that afforded her none, "was uncalled for."

"You started it," Ilyrisse said, entirely unrepentant, resuming her book as if nothing at all had happened.

Vaelira huffed -- an actual huff, undignified and real, the kind of sound that only ever escaped her around people she'd stopped performing for -- and buried the evidence of her embarrassment against Ilyrisse's shoulder instead, refusing to move, refusing to acknowledge that the swat had landed exactly as intended.

They stayed like that for a while, the crystal room quiet except for the soft, irregular sound of pages that weren't really being read. Vaelira's hair had come loose from whatever half-hearted arrangement she'd tied it in, and a few strands of it, deep indigo shading to near-silver at the ends, lay fanned across Ilyrisse's collarbone. Without quite deciding to, Ilyrisse lifted one hand from the book and began, absently, to sort it -- separating strand from strand, smoothing it flat, the same unthinking motion she used to give Eremos when his head was in her lap and there was nothing else that needed doing with her hands. She only noticed she was doing it when Vaelira made a small, low sound against her shoulder, something closer to a purr than she would ever have admitted to.

"You do this to him too," Vaelira said, muffled, not lifting her head. "The hair. I've seen you do it a hundred times. I didn't know you had it in you to do it to anyone else."

"I didn't either," Ilyrisse admitted, and did not stop.

It occurred to her, with the mild, distant surprise of noticing something that had been true for a long time without her ever naming it, that this had become a fixture of her evenings in a way she'd never consciously agreed to. Vaelira did not visit the way the others visited -- careful, grateful, faintly formal, women warming themselves at a hearth that belonged to someone else. Vaelira simply arrived and took up residence, the way weather arrives, unbothered by whether it was invited. And somewhere in the accumulated weight of however many of these evenings there had been by now, Ilyrisse had stopped experiencing it as an intrusion at all. She had started, if she was honest with herself, to listen for the particular quality of silence that meant Vaelira was about to appear -- a kind of held breath in the crystal air, half a second before she stepped through.

She remembered, with the sudden vividness memory sometimes has when it surfaces uninvited, the very first time this had happened: not long after Vaelira's punishments from Nothing had finally lifted, back when she was still furious in the low-grade, simmering way of someone who has decided being alive again is an imposition she intends to resent thoroughly. She had appeared in this same castle uninvited, curled herself into the same kind of insolent, entitled sprawl across whatever surface was nearest, and announced, apropos of nothing, that Eremos's endgame heroine had better be interesting, because she had wasted an entire death sulking about him and did not intend to waste her second life being bored by his taste in women as well.

Ilyrisse, at the time, had found her insufferable. She still, on her more honest days, found her insufferable. It had simply, somewhere along the way, become an insufferableness she had grown thoroughly, helplessly fond of.

It was Vaelira, eventually, who broke the silence -- and when she did, all the laziness had drained out of her voice, replaced by something much older, much heavier, the tone she used perhaps once in every hundred years, when the cat-like indifference finally, deliberately, set itself aside.

"Can I ask you something," she said. Not quite a question. More like the opening of a door she'd been standing in front of for a very long time.

Ilyrisse closed the book.