Legea: The Extras

One-Shot: The Years Between | Married Life

This was a fun little idea I had to detail the first year of married life between Mordred and Lethira. Mordred was his adorbs self and made this sooo enjoyable to write.

The next one-shot I have an idea for is something with the young Segelas family, before their parents left. Little Fiona, anybody?

Miaw.

The cat side-stepped a pile of dusty hay, and slunk casually past the swishing tail of the grey horse that was standing in its stall. She did not belong here; she had wandered from the Earles. There were always too many cats at the Earles, and this one was a ten-week-old kitten, old enough to be sure of herself and walk with a disdainful air, old enough to strike out confidently on her own. She liked the smell and the feel of this barn; already she was establishing its boundaries in her mind as her territory.

Crossing paths with a chicken, she slouched back on her haunches and hissed, and the creature retreated with requisite flapping and squawks. The cat's walk grew a little straighter, a little bolder. No other cats dwelt in the barn: no other sly shadows crept around her, nothing leaped out to bare its claws and trounce the guilty intruder. Yes, this barn was hers.

Perhaps she sensed the need for a benediction – a solitary, unnoticed, useful benediction – on the house of a newly married couple.

~

Mordred drifted out of dark, encircling sleep into the sublime stillness of morning. He lay there for awhile, perfectly happy to be in that intermediary state, neither awake nor asleep, and listened to what might have been a cat's whine coming from some distant place outside. He did not know why he felt so happy.

Gradually, as sleep's hold retreated, he became aware of a gentle pressure on his shoulder, limiting his movement there, and something soft coiled over his face that tickled with every breath that left his nose. He brushed it away with a quick movement that woke him fully, and groping for the object of discomfort, he brought it to his eye and studied with interest a lock of flame-red hair. A wondering smile broke across his face, passionate tenderness brimmed in his eyes. He rolled over onto one elbow and gazed down at his wife.

Her eyelashes, such a queer, lovely, bronze colour, fanned across her pale, slender cheeks, flickering as his shadow fell across her. She stirred and looked up at him with the dreaminess of someone half-aware. "What are you thinking of?" she murmured.

He could not help but bend down and brush his lips lightly across those witching, uncertain lashes. Lethira's nose twitched; she sneezed, laughed, and pushed him away. "What were you thinking of, Mordred?"

"I never..." He hesitated, searching. "I never thought I would be so happy."

She got up, slipping her old green homespun dress on over her light shift. In the midst of knotting the belt, she checked suddenly and looked at him, a candid, vivacious picture with the sun firing her riot of soft, tumbled flame-locks around her face. "I wish I had been with you in some of the things you endured. I came after all your trials; I was never a part of them with you."

Mordred swung his legs over the bed, stood, and put an arm around her. "You have all the rest of your life to endure with me," he said, stroking back her hair. Then he tilted her head back and grinned cheekily down at her. "And as Laufeia will doubtless tell you at breakfast, and many times hereafter, that is something of an ordeal."

"I feel as if I'm eating by myself," Laufeia declared in the middle of breakfast.

"Oh, hush," Mordred told her, glancing away from Lethira for a moment; "you'll be doing the same thing with Daren shortly, only you'll have your own house to do it in, so don't pass yourself off as better than me here."