Page 56 of Beds and Blades

I sat with this.

“The empathic bond,” I said. “Tell me what it actually feels like. The reality.”

Caen was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed—less the mage delivering information, more the woman speaking from evidence.

“During ordinary life, you feel him the way you feel a fire from across a room. The warmth and the direction of it. You know when he is content. You know when something is wrong before he has said a word. You know when he wants you before he has moved.”

Her voice softened, but the warning in it sharpened.

“You cannot perform. Nothing is hidden. Nothing can be managed between you. Whatever is true is felt. The bond does not transmit thoughts—it is not telepathy. It transmits emotion. Everything he feels, you feel. Everything you feel, he feels. Always.”

“And during intimacy…”

She stopped.

“I have been claimed for twenty-three years,” she said. “So I will not pretend to academic distance.”

Her gaze dropped briefly to the warm glow of her ring.

“My claimed man does not live at Ely,” she said. “We keep separate homes while I serve the outpost line. He believes this work matters as deeply as I do, which is the only reason the arrangement is bearable.” Her thumb moved once over the ring. “The bond does not soften distance. It makes it exact. I feel the place in him that aches for me, and he feels the same ache in me. We endure it because this line needs a mage. Love is not made less true by the work it asks us to do apart.”

Her thumb stilled against the ring. For a moment, the ache remained visible in her face. Then she gathered it back into herself and returned her attention to me.

“Distance is one expression of the bond,” she said. “Intimacy is another. During intimacy, the bond intensifies. It does not remain only emotional. You feel what he feels in the body. He feels what you feel. Pleasure crosses the bond and returns changed by the crossing. The bond heightens to another level.”

She paused, choosing her words with care.

“It becomes recursive. Your pleasure heightens his. His heightens yours. Each returns to the other amplified.”

I understood the theory immediately. Unfortunately, so did my body. My breath caught first. Then my pulse changed, and my stomach went tight with an answering pull that was entirely unhelpful to the serious nature of the conversation.

She gave me a moment to absorb that before continuing.

“What you have experienced with him already will seem like a preliminary study. The claiming is the complete version. And it does not diminish. It deepens over time.”

I sat with everything Caen had just told me for a moment.

Then I said, “Can I ask you something that is going to sound either very shallow or very perceptive, depending on how you receive it?”

“Ask. I will answer what is mine to answer,” Caen said.

“He is exactly my type,” I said. “Exactly. The specific physical configuration that I have been…”

I paused, selecting my vocabulary.

“… researching. Large. Dark-haired. The jaw. The forearms. The size differential between a very large man and a very small woman. I will leave it at that.”

I left it at that.

What I did not leave at that, entirely against my will, was my body’s response to having said those words out loud in a room with another person for the first time in my life.

I pressed my thighs together. I was managing an unauthorized physiological response and hoped that Caen’s empathic perception did not notice.

The expression on Caen’s face suggested that she did notice.

“And there is another dimension of the physical configuration that I had also researched. Extensively. A dimension that is specific to the male form. A dimension that, after categorizing and cross-referencing it, I had ultimately concluded was probably aspirational rather than achievable in practice.”

I looked at Caen directly.