Page 8 of Beds and Blades

My pulse did something it had no business doing given the circumstances.

He looked away. When he looked back, his expression had reassembled itself into something more professional.

“I am looking for fang marks,” he said.

“And?”

“You do not have any.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Fang marks. I filed that alongside undead, and the word vampire came to mind, which my brain flagged as obviously ridiculous and my nervous system quietly declined to dismiss.

I was being examined by a knight next to a medieval military installation with charcoal-colored mountains behind it. This was not the context in which one typically deployed the word ridiculous with confidence.

“You are safe,” he said. “I will take you inside. The outpost will shelter you until we can determine where you’ve come from and what to do about it.”

This was, I recognized, the most practical offer I had received since waking up in a field in what appeared to be a different world. I looked at the mountains. I looked at the fortification. I looked at him, at the quiet authority of him, the absence of performance in how he stood or spoke. His competence did not require an audience.

“All right,” I said.

I folded the presentation notes as small as they would go and shoved them into my back pocket.

He turned to me.

“There,” he said, indicating the stirrup on the horse.

I attempted to use it. Incorrectly, apparently. My foot slipped sideways, accomplishing nothing except briefly convincing me I was about to die beneath several hundred pounds of muscle and irritation.

He steadied the horse with one hand and waited. To his credit, he did not laugh. His expression remained composed enough that I could interpret the silence as patience instead of restraint.

The second attempt worked. By “worked,” I mean that I was now on the horse rather than beside it. By the time I was seated, I felt less like someone who had mounted a horse and more like someone who had just failed the Presidential Fitness Test in high school gym class.

He climbed up behind me afterward with disorienting ease, the movement so efficient it made my own effort seem theoretical by comparison. One arm came around briefly to gather the reins.

He smelled like woodsmoke, metal, leather, and exertion. Not unpleasant. Just unmistakably physical in a way modern life rarely allowed people to be. The honest smell of someone accustomed to difficult work and uninterested in apologizing for it.

“Hold on,” he said.

I gripped the pommel in front of me.

I could feel his breathing. He was behind me, his chest against my back, his arms coming around me on both sides for the reins, his thighs bracketing mine, his body folded around me. Every breath he took moved through both of us.

I enjoyed being pressed against him while on horseback. I had spent substantial private time constructing detailed hypotheticals about what it would feel like to be pressed against a man built like this, and the reality of it—his chest solid against my back, the shift and bunch of muscle through his armor as the horse moved, the warmth radiating off him even through the steel—was producing data that my analytical framework was not equipped to process neutrally.

He had it. Gravitas. He had that easy, un-self-conscious authority that announces itself before a man even opens his mouth.

There was a cruder phrase for exactly what he had.

Big dick energy.

This sounds reductive until you understand that it was never really about the physical—or only about the physical—but about the un-self-conscious authority of a man who moved through the world without the low-grade performance anxiety that characterized men who had less to be confident about.

The ease of it.

The absence of anything to prove.

I had been in his presence for approximately twenty minutes, and he had not once adjusted his posture, raised his voice, or done anything that suggested he had ever in his life needed anyone’s approval for anything. This was vanishingly rare in my experience.