Archive of Our Own

On the day of Vex’s wedding, there is no keeper to say the right words before the ceremony, there is no music, and no family to bear witness. Her brother, as best she knows, is still in the woods, keeping watch over her bear, with the druid they met the previous year in preparation for this day. She imagines, by this hour, they’ll have had dinner, and would be preparing for the night, bringing in Keyleth’s sheep from where she let them graze in the hills.

Meanwhile, here she is, standing before the threshold of the castle’s largest bedroom, which was vacated in preparation for her wedding night with the prince. Cassandra, apologetically, but not too apologetically, made her leave her bow and quiver at the entryway, not trusting any outsiders with weaponry beyond the gate, but Vex managed to keep hidden the little hunting knife she has in the leg of her boot.

She should, by all means, be terrified of what is to come, but, perhaps in self-defense, she can’t think of that at all. But really, she’s mostly agitated with the number of shifts she’s wearing, stifling as they are.

Facing the heavy double doors leading to her marital bed, Vex’ahlia takes a deep breath and opens them slowly, drumming up the nerve to meet her husband.

. . .

She met Keyleth a year and a day before her wedding day, having already promised herself in marriage to the prince, and having gone deep into the wood in preparation for her engagement, in search of a witch. She found her desired witch at the intersection of a glen, helping her sheep cross the stream, one at a time.

“Witch,” she said, “in one year hence, I am to marry the Prince of Whitestone. Can I buy your assistance?”

Keyleth said, “Oh, uh, um, yes, but. Can you wait just a second?” her voice breaking on the last word. She had both her arms wrapped around the midsection of a particularly troublesome ewe, and clumsily put her over her own shoulders to cross, the animal kicking and bleating. “Oh gods. Oh fuck.”

Vex watched as the Witch of the Woods tried to ford the stream with a big sheep over her shoulders, water coming up to her chest, her foothold sliding on every rock she swore at. “Witch,” she offered, “do you need a hand, darling?”

“Please?”

She helped the Witch of the Woods lead her sheep across the stream, and then took them, herding them with shouts and waving hands, to the Witch’s cottage, where the Witch made them both very strong drinks, and listened to Vex’s story, about her brother, who was sick at home with her bear, and their father, who would not lend a penny to help him, and a dowry promised to anyone who could survive a night with the dreaded prince, that, the town being short any more princesses willing to try, she signed herself up for.

After a time of processing, Keyleth sighed, and put her empty cup down. “Well, first,” she said, “you should probably bring your brother here, you know, fresh clean air does wonders for your health, he should really consider getting out of town. Second,” Keyleth raised her hands, making a little wriggling motion with her hands. “How good are you at sewing?”

. . .

The thing she first notices about the Prince’s room is that there’s a shortage of bones on the floor, despite what she’d been told in advance. There’s some spotting of old rust on the tiles, but not nearly enough to be a murder scene. The second thing she notices is the long, silvery stripe of shed skin, pushed off to the side of the wide chamber. She examines it, and finds it unfinished, only a portion of sloughed-off scales. There’s a second set of doors, leaving into the actual bedroom, but these doors are open, and she watches, from a very unsafe distance, as her husband comes out to meet her.

The scuff of scales against the marble tiles produces a dry hiss, and she hears that long before she sees the narrow, white head come peering out from the doorway, a split tongue leering out of its mouth to taste the air.

Contrary to popular belief, the Prince of Whitestone is not an immense, grey serpent, but does, in fact, appear to be some sort of dragon, with only two vaguely catlike legs at the front of his torso, dragging him forward. His lower half is all snake, with a coiling tail that slithers. He measures, she estimates, about the size of two horse carts, put together end to end, with the horses included, which is smaller than she imagined. As he approaches, he moves around her in two concentric circles, trapping her in a perimeter of ironhard scales, and only once he has her encircled, he lifts himself up on his front paws, his head coming up to her height to examine her.

“Well, darling,” she says. “You must be Percival.”

The lindworm flares his head, showing bright little teeth at the curl of his lips into a snarl. It makes up for its less-than-storybook size by a blatant implication of venom.

“I am he,” he says, not with words, but with a direct, soundless projection, from mind to mind, that almost manages to startles her. Vex holds steady, unwilling to offer up an ounce of fear. “Lord Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, Prince of Whitestone.”

Vex pauses to think. “Are you a lord, or are you a prince?”

“I believe,” the dragon says, breathing in with a rasp, “the titles stack.”

“Very handy. Shall we away to the wedding bed, then?”

The lindworm looks, for a moment, caught off guard, and he takes a moment to respond. “There is nothing amiss with you. I see no ill-intent for my kingdom or my sister. I unfortunately can’t help but conclude you’re here with pure intentions.”

Vex steps over the first circle the prince has made around her, and then skips over the broader second one. “Well, I don’t know about pure, Princeling. We are married now.”

She beats him to the room. Partially, she does this to check that the two basins she requested are there (and they are, one full of lye solution, and the second of cold milk), but also, implicity, to give Percival a sense of who he’s playing against tonight.

. . .

The first month of the year, after they moved a bed-ridden Vax to Keyleth’s second bed, the Witch Herself pointed over her shoulder to the sheep grazing in their large pen, and told Vex, “They need shearing. Take the wool, and sell it in the market for a spinning wheel.”

Vex did so, making sure not to draw up a drop of blood while shearing the sheep, because you don’t do injury to a Witch’s livestock without coming out of it cursed. When she took it to market, she reminded the townsfolk just how good of a haggler she was, and returned with the spinning wheel and a sewing kit, but also shelf-stable food and grain for the animals, what medicine she could afford, and supplies, to mend the gap in the Witch’s roof.

At the end of the month, Keyleth said, “The sheep are going to give birth soon, I think.” And lo and behold, by the start of the second, they had lambs, in quite a prodigious amount.

“Will you sell them to the butcher?” Vex asked, and Keyleth shook her head no.

“Maybe a couple,” she said, “but not yet. We still have ten months to go, and it’ll be seven months before we get wool from them. For now, guard them from the fox - the more that live to be sheared, the more likely you are to survive.”

Needless to say, Vex spent most of her nights after that sleeping next to the sheep’s pen, guarding them first from the fox, which snatched one lamb of fifteen, then, when the lambs got bigger, from the wolf, which wrestled one into its jaws, and then the cold of winter, which came down hard and late in the year, making away with a third.

But mostly, the twelve remaining lambs slept comfortably, and got big on grain and spring leaf, under the protection of a bear and his ranger. When the snow became formidable, she watched Trinket climb into the barn, and didn’t stop him when he bedded down among the sheep, and they leaned against him for warmth.

And when seven months passed, they sheared the lambs, and got twelve lengths of lambswool. Passing them from hand to hand, Vex looked at the spinning wheel, which Keyleth stood by, and said, “I don’t know how to spin wool. I only know how to stitch and sew.”

Vax, who could now rise from the bed for short lengths of time before growing tired, said, “I know how to spin wool, Stubby.”

. . .

As soon as Percival slithers back into the bedroom, Vex is already tugging out the laces of her dress and letting it drop to the floor, undressing quickly. “Strip,” she orders him.

Percival looks down at himself, and finding only scales as always, looks back up at her, baffled.

“Well?” she urges, working on the stays of her bodice. “I don’t intend to the only one naked on my wedding night, you know. Layer for layer, let’s go.”

The trick to haggling is to pretend you’re always more certain of yourself than you actually are, more certain that yes, this is what you’re owed, and no, you will not give a penny more than absolutely required, than you actually believe. And looking at her husband, Vex brooks no surrender, staring at him pointedly until he balks with the sheepish glance of a conquered clothier, unsure of what exactly the fixed price was originally.

His eyes are startlingly human, she finds, even with the slitted pupils.

He retreats to the corner of the room, stewing there for a time, before curling around himself, head over tail, and bringing up his clawed hands to begin removing the top layer of his skin, like a snake shedding scales.

The first layer of scales comes off like a man shrugging off a winter coat, without much fuss or pain, through Vex breaks and looks at the far wall once he gets to his face, not wanting to see him peel that away. When she looks again, he is plucking at the scales on his legs with his teeth, cleaning himself as though an oversized cat, and, for all his efforts of removal, he only seems a degree more shimmery, the white scales now a slightly more translucent silver, and him seemingly unaffected.

Trying not to get deterred, Vex removes her first shift and lets it drop to the floor, joining the disparate shed.

. . .

The first length of lambswool Vax spun, which had been sheared and treated carefully so as to not be contaminated with blood, was a fine, springy string of yarn, and they passed it along from person to person, marveling at its softness. “Our mother was a seamstress,” Vax told keyleth, feeling the cord with an absent smile, as though it explained everything, “but I’ve never seen wool this fine before in my life.”

When it was handed to Vex, she was in awe all the same, but allowed herself more judgment. It would make beautiful textile, she was certain, but if she was ever taught by their mother how to knit, she’d long forgotten, having more use for sewing. 

As though she could sense her apprehension, Keyleth took the ball of yarn in one hand, closing her fist around it. Through the gaps of her fingers, she grasped the end of the string, and passed it through her closed fist in one long line, much shorter than it ought to be. Having come to the end of it, she turned her hands out, the line taught between her hands, and the yarn unfurled out into a short square of delicate fabric, with no seam or needle work.

Vex took the fabric, and worked through the night, finding the wool from one lamb just enough to make one shift. When she held it out to the window in the morning, despite how thin it was, no light passed through it at all.

And that was how they worked, for the remainder of the year. In the morning, Keyleth would milk the sheep, and Vex and Trinket would herd them out to pasture, and Vax would keep the house. He would spin the wool into yarn, and Keyleth would turn the yarn to fabric, and Vex would sew one shift after the other, until her fingers split and bled, and she would blot them on a towel, not wanting to spoil the cloth, until, at the turn of the year, she had twelve shifts, white as the sun.

One week before the day, Vax was well enough to walk out of the forest and to Gilmore’s, and bought a pair of boots made of square black leather, which could travel seven leagues in a single step, or so he’d been told, and would take her to the castle safely without him. How he managed to convince Gilmore to part with them, she’d never guess, but he seemed sure, even with the anxiety he carried heavy on his brow. He kissed her on the forehead, and made her promise to give the boots back when she returned.

. . .

Vex is just done taking off her third shift when Percival’s skin first splits and bleeds.

It’s only in a little spot on his paw, when he has to scratch the last of the skin off, and though he’s lost stature by now, and the shed scales are piling high, this is the first sign she’s seen that he’s capable of being cut. As the skins have come off, he’s gone more gaunt and pale, his scales losing their luster and turning an unfinished translucent pearl.

On impulse, she leans a bit closer to look at the wound, to see if it needs attention, but the Prince curls his lips back at her in a snarl when she draws near, crossing his legs under him like a big cat. She keeps her distance after that, but can’t seem to find it within herself to be afraid of him.

“Tell you what,” she starts, and he lifts his head back up to look at her, “who knows how many layers we have left. How about you ask me a question, and I’ll ask you one in return?”

He lays curled on the ground before a table, and is close enough to rest his chin on the edge of it, giving a long huff of contemplation. “And why would I have reason to tell you anything?”

“Is that your question?” Vex asks.

Percival closes his mouth with a click. He says, “No,” too hastily.

He takes a little longer to think after that, opening and closing his mouth several times, chewing on his thoughts. It occurs to her, as she’s watching him, that he doesn’t need to that, having spoken without uttering words every time before. She wonders if it’s something he’s picked up from being around humans, or if it’s an old habit, from a time before, and settles on her question.

Eventually, he shifts a little awkwardly, and asks, “What is your name?”

She actually has the presence of mind, stripping in front of a lindworm, to feel both insulted, and embarrassed for him. “I know your name,” she says.

“ Everybody knows my name,” Percival says, and she supposes he’s not trying to sound condescending. Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, if you were anywhere within access to the kingdom, by land or by sea, you knew the name of the wyrm prince of Whitestone, who’d settled in only a few years before, after the Briarwoods had been summarily deposed, and his sister returned to the throne. If you weren’t a citizen of Whitestone yourself, you at the very least knew about Princess Cassandra looking for a bride of her own, and the curse keeping her from marrying until her older brother did, and the amount of families eaten alive at the threshold to the castle when the given prince or princess failed to measure up.

“You really should have thought to ask earlier, darling, but I’ll take it. My name is Vex’ahlia - you can call me Vex.”

“Vex,” Percival repeats. “I suppose you can call me Percy, then.”

“Percy,” Vex says, laughing a little helplessly. She can’t help it, looking at a wyrm coiled up on the floor, taking up a big portion of the room, with his legs crossed under him and his head propped on the table, proper as anything, named Percy. “Alright, then, Percy. I have to ask, did you really eat everyone betrothed to you?”

He makes an unhappy, guttural noise, and says, “No, I did not eat all of them. Some, I killed. Some, I sent away, and had their families sent to exile. There are many reasons for families to send their eldest to marry a dragon, and you’ll find that most of them aren’t innocuous. But some of them, yes. Not many who entered this castle stayed very long, and none as long as you have.”

Quickly, Vex takes off another layer.

“Another question, then,” Percy says, after taking off his fourth skin, stepping up and uncoiling to walk the length of the room and tasting the air with his forked tongue. She can’t tell if he’s agitated or intrigued, but he is moving slower, the cut along his leg more pronounced, a second welt forming on his back. “Why did you agree to marry me?”

“I have a brother,” she says. “Two years ago, he got sick. It’s an incurable illness, but it is manageable, if given proper treatment, and he may live a long life with it, but he can’t work anymore, and I can’t afford to keep him healthy on my own. Our father lives in Syngorn wouldn’t help pay, and you have a handsome dowry on your name.”

“I do. A rather altruistic reason to risk your life, then.”

Vex scoffs. “I’m not my brother. I wouldn’t throw myself at danger unless I thought I had good odds to benefit, which I do.”

“And what,” he says, flaring like a snake, “makes you think that?”

“One question at a time, darling,” she chides, sing-songy. “I have my reasons. As for you, now: were you always a lindworm?”

Percy sighs, and finds a place to sit down dramatically, seemingly unable to find a comfortable way to lie with his skin so raw. “No. Once I was a human, and I had a decision to make. I chose the one that kept us alive, for what it counts, and that’s all you need to know.”

. . .

On the morning she was to go to Castle Whitestone, Vex found Keyleth out in front of the barn, putting one glass bottle of milk after another into a bag with no visible bottom. She’d seen her use the bag before, to transport things too big to carry by hand, though she had no idea why she needed to pack so much sheep’s milk at once. After she was satisfied with the amount packed, she gave Vex a jar full of wood-ashes, and said, “You should probably hold this last one, it would be pretty bad if it mixed in with the rest.”

“Keyleth,” Vex said, “what on earth do you need 80 gallons of milk for?”

“Oh, I don’t,” she said. “You do. You’re going to need to draw the prince a bath, as soon as you think he’ll let you.”

“And the lye?”

“See, that’s where the first bath comes in.”

. . .

After the eighth skin shed, Percy lays down on the floor of the floor of the bedroom and roars, the wound from his leg to his back splitting open into one gash and bleeding tremendously. Several other cuts have opened up on his sides and tail, and a slick, clear oil runs freely from between the gaps of his scales. Immediately after roaring, a dark smoke rises from his mouth and nostrils, and he coughs and hisses.

Before she can overthink it, Vex takes the shift she just removed and presses it to the weeping gash, stemming the flow. The garment is ruined instantly, but after a minute of pressure, the bleeding is not nearly as severe. Percy shivers once, and lowers his head back to the tiles and closes his eyes, panting.

“Come on, Percy,” she coaxes, “you owe me a question.”

“Ask me first,” he says. “Please.”

When she takes her hand off of his side, which is no longer keeled but smooth and featureless, it’s wet with oil. She can’t imagine he’ll stomach a difficult question right now. She asks, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” he says. She has a hard time imagining she’s close to four years older than him.

“There. Now you ask me.”

It takes another full minute for him to gather the will to speak, and the seconds stretch longer than they normally feel, heavy with purpose. He asks, “Are you afraid of me?”

It’s an easy answer. He’s sprawled on the floor, producing a feverish heat, with his eyes opening only for little moments before closing again, and when he breathes out, she can feel it on her knuckles. “No, darling. Not at all.”

She gives him a longer length of time between shifts than before, letting him catch his breath and regain clarity of vision before stepping away to take off her ninth shift, keeping it in hand. Percy groans, and sheds another skin, trembling as the wounds, which had begun to soothe, tear open and bleed freely. The shedding process, which at first took only a short length of time, is now prolonged and agonizing, producing more blood and more oil every time. Now, when he is finished, his eyes have an opaque blue film obscuring them, and his scales are more a fleshy pink than white.

He coughs, hard and repetitive, forcing his head to lie on the tile floor. When he whines, it comes not through his mind, but from deep in his chest, like spirits from a drum. “Water,” he begs.

Vex finds a jug of water on a table outside of the bedroom, presumably left by a servant, and takes it back inside. It occurs to her, briefly, that she could run now, and he would not be able to pursue. She is not so self-sacrificing to force herself to stay unless she wants to, even if she suspects he wouldn’t survive without going through until the end. She takes the jug of water and returns, closing the door behind her.

She has to hold the jug up to Percy’s mouth for him to drink, his eyes too clouded over for him to take it in his clawed hands. He drinks it in one shakey swallow, his head falling to Vex’s lap as soon as he finishes, and she casts the jug aside, letting it shatter off to the side of the room. As soon as he rests his head on her thigh, whimpering, her tenth shift is instantaneously soaked in his blood, spoiling.

“What are you doing to me?” Percy asks, shifting his head here and there as though trying to hide his face, until she cradles it, and he relaxes momentarily.

“Believe it or not, darling, I’m helping.” She strokes his head and neck, and she can almost imagine she’s only rubbing a sick man’s back. There are no more scales, and she doesn’t dare to look too closely at the state of him.

“Tell me,” she asks, half-sardonically, “are you still planning on eating me?”

Percy laughs, terribly, in between coughs and shakes. “You’re skinning me alive,” he says, not like an accusation, but like a joke that just clicked for him.

“That’s not an answer, Percival.”

He keeps laughing, and she imagines the man he once was, tearing at his own hair, laughing himself sick. “No, no, no,” he says. “I wouldn’t hurt you, not for the curse and not for this. This is not as bad as it was before, not nearly. You’re not half as cruel as she was.”

This, Vex did not anticipate. “She?”

Percy somehow presses closer without knocking her down, like he’s trying to curl into her lap. “You asked your question. I answered. Take off another shift.”

She takes off her ruined shift, and it sticks to her hands as she does. She doesn’t know what good it’ll do, but she waits for him to finish taking off his tenth layer of skin to pull him into her arms again and blot at his face with it. 

In a trembling voice, he asks, “If you’re here to kill me, will you do it now?”

She says, “No.”

He says, “Please.”

Absently, Vex is aware that he should’ve hit bone at some point, but it’s not happened, no matter how many layers have come off. The skins come unstuck like the pages of a book, if a bit more messily. Her hands find the crown of his head and she rubs her knuckles against it gently until she feels Percy unwind and sigh.

“Ask your question.”

“Who was the woman you mentioned before?”

Vex watches him click his jaws, going from moving restlessly to hardly moving at all. She suspects he didn’t want her to ask that question, but she wouldn’t be herself, if she didn’t grab at any secret she sniffs out and stuff it into her pockets for safekeeping. “When the Briarwoods came, they brought with them a cadre of confidants. Some that they bribed of our own people, some that they brought with them. She was one of theirs. Dr. Anna Ripley. When they killed my parents, when they tortured my siblings to death, and strung them by the neck, I could still stand it and be human. After what she did to me, I could not.”

Unthinking, Vex asks, “What happened to her?”

She imagines Percy must be in a great deal of pain, because he doesn’t notice her asking a follow-up question when it isn’t her turn. “I ate her alive,” he says, without remorse. His face is red and pained, but his teeth are still sharp in his mouth.

She takes off her eleventh shift, and him likewise. She looks at the wall, and listens to him cough and moan and writhe. When she touches him, he hisses at her, but the sound has no energy, and no intent behind it. She can hardly recognize a wyrmlike shape.

“I can’t,” he says, “I can’t do this again. Kill me, leave me, do what you’d like, but do not ask me again.”

“Yes, you can,” she says. “Only one more, dear, only one.”

He looks at her with blue, accusatory eyes, afraid. “How do you know? How do you know?”

She sits down near him, only one shift left, and pulls him to rest the weight of his ragged form against her as he heaves and pants. “Once, there was a witch,” she begins, “in your family’s employ. And when the time came, she had to leave and go her own way, but she felt that there was a danger coming to your house, and left in it the means to your survival, at a cost.”

There is a faint rumble coming from his throat when she pets from his head to his shoulders and back up, so she does so, keeping him sedate. “When she left your family, the de Rolos, she also left her daughter to take her place. Which, while a nice concept, did not fit my good friend, who helped me find my way here. But she did tell me how to help undo the curse her mother let in.”

“Why would she help?” he asks. “Why would you?”

“Because she’s good, and she has burdens of family too. You might have a lot in common, you know, if you met her. And, because you’re mine,” Vex says. “You married me now, there’s no escape for you. Your house is mine, and your curses mine, too.”

He’s quiet.

“Will you trust me?” she asks.

He nods, then, to make sure, he says, “I trust you.”

The last skin comes off more as relief than torment. By now, the last shift was heavy on her, wet with oil and blood, and being free of it is a weight off. Percy, for all the bleeding and agony, seems to agree, taking off the twelfth and final skin with a sigh, before he is caught off guard by a sudden, rattling cough.

He coughs again, and again - a wet, productive cough, smoke and wet ichor coming from his mouth, until, with a hack and a gasp, something breaks free and comes skittering onto the floor.

It’s a little black shape, the length of a small bird. For a moment, Vex thinks it’s a piece of bone, or an old shred of armor, but it rises on small legs and begins to scuttle away, making towards the door. Having kept her boots on for exactly this purpose, she takes the hunting knife out from her bootleg and jumps on it, cutting down once, the dark form turning to smoke in her grip, though pinned to the floor with her knife’s blade. She hears a faint screech as it does.

“Well,” she says. “That was a nuisance.”

“Is it over?” Percy says, still on his side on the floor. “Can I sleep now?”

“Oh, poor thing,” she says. “No, we are far from done.”

. . .

After she had said her goodbyes to Vax and Keyleth, tears in their eyes, Vex made to leave, but was stopped by Keyleth, who slapped a palm to her own forehead and said, “Shit! I knew I forgot something.”

“What is it?” Vax asked.

“The whip. I was supposed to get a leather whip, for the last part of the thing.”

Vex said, “Just a whip? Does it need to be enchanted?”

“No, no,” Keyleth said, “just a whip.”

“Any old whip?”

“Yes, any old whip. But I don’t know where we’d get one now, I don’t have time to -”

Vex, ever the pragmatist, knelt down on the ground and started rummaging in her bag, procuring, after a moment, a simple brown leather whip, which, the clever observer might chance to tell, was certainly never used on any livestock in its existence.

“Well, that’s handy!” Keyleth said, at the same time Vax made a disgusted noise and went back into the house, already regretting all the efforts he’d gone through to keep his sister alive.

. . .

When the whip comes down on his shoulders, Percy roars, first like an animal, and then like a screaming man, but the pain of it doesn’t last long. With the demon already cast out, the form is already sloughing off, and, by the later sighs and gasps, Vex can tell that, under the dulled pain, there’s relief, in having the binds undone. It only takes, relative to the whole ordeal, a very short portion of time, and by the end of it, he’s trembling and breathing short little breaths from high up in his stomach, when she comes to lift him up and drag him to the lye bath.

It takes some doing. Her arms ache, and he is much lighter as he is, but still heavier than she’s used to carrying. Carefully, she guides him up onto the lip of the clawfoot tub, the alkaline mixture swirling within, and then lowers him into it.

He hisses and whimpers, but he doesn’t beg and he doesn’t plead, even when she cups a hand over his eyes and helps him dip his head beneath the surface, the water solution turning a deep, unsettling brown. When he surfaces, she sees the hints of a human face, lips and mouth and nostrils flaring for air. With one single, decisive motion, she pulls him out of the lye bath and into the fresh sheep’s milk, some spilling over the lip of the tub.

Lying in the bath is a strange, ungainly man, tall and long of limb, with rubbed-raw pale skin, new in places, and old in some, based on the long, precise markings on his chest and stomach. He sighs and lies back, content to drown here, if she’ll let him.

She leaves him there, letting him luxuriate for a time while she leaves the boots beside the whip and knife near the wall, trying to keep them separate from the carnage of the room. Taking the top blanket off the bed to use for drying, she returns to the bath and reaches in with both hands, startling Percy when she pulls him to sit up in the bath, then stand on wobbling knees, leaning against her. The bath is a delicate shade of pink when she pulls him out, and gets to toweling him dry.

His hair, which she first thought was simply dyed by the milk, really is as white as his scales were, and his face handsome, if as gaunt as though he hadn’t been fed in weeks. She gets to trying his stomach and legs before he, staring vacantly at her working, seems to remember that he’s naked.

Blushing from his ears to his chest, his hands twitch as though meaning to cover himself, and she laughs at him, leaving him to hold the towel as she cups both sides of his face in her hands and kisses him on the mouth. It’s a chaste kiss, him being too tall to do so otherwise without him bending down, and when he tries to follow her, he nearly falls over again, not used to having legs.

“Vex,” he says, from a parched, ruined throat that hasn’t been used in years. “Should we -?”

“Tomorrow, maybe,” she says, “but not tonight. I’m very tired.”

“So very tired,” he echoes.

She leads him to the bed by both hands, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She intended to sit to help fold him in under the covers, but he kneels down on the ground in front of her and puts his head on her lap, his arms wrapping around her waist. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”

She runs her fingers through his wet hair, putting her other hand under his chin and directing his face up to look at her. “Answer me: are you my husband?”

Percy says, “Yes. Yes, I’m yours. Are you my my wife?”

Vex grins, without mercy. “I am. Now that that’s decided, come to bed before you soak the blankets.”

He smiles, a little tentative, and comes up to kiss her, before following orders and tucking under the covers, curling in the hold of her arms when she joins him.

. . .

Her prince husband, Vex finds, is a very heavy sleeper.

Even after everything last night, she still wakes up at first light only a little bit groggy, and tries to be alive and awake before the servants come looking for her bones. The room is still a massacre, with broken pottery to one end, and dirty baths on the other, but to her surprise, both the shifts and the skins are gone, as though they never were. Percy, under the covers, is still a human man, still naked, and still thoroughly asleep.

Not wanting to put on her wedding dress from the night before, and not having clothing to switch into, she finds some of Percy’s clothes, which are ill-fitting, but not terribly so, if she tucks her shirt into her trousers, and her trousers into her boots. While her eyes are still red-rimmed and her hair in a terrible mess, she manages to be mostly presentable when she hears the knock on the door.

It’s the Princess of Whitestone. Her sister-in-law, Vex supposes, which is a thrilling thought. “Good morning,” she says.

Cassandra looks at her, still alive, and grows solemn. “I’m happy to see you alive and well,” she says, “remarkably not eaten.”

Vex says, “Not yet.”

“Well. I have to assume that, if you’re alive, then my brother is…”

At that point, Percy finally rustles awake, adorably confused. His hair is plastered all to one side, and he has the covers drawn up to cover his chest. “Cass?” he asks.

Cassandra shifts her weight to one foot to peer over Vex’s shoulder. “Oh, he’s fine,” she says, matter of factly. She nods at Vex, in thanks for not killing her brother, and turns on her heel to leave.

After that, Percy continues to doze the rest of the morning, undisturbed when the servants come into the room, shocked to see both of them alive, and then tittering when they notice the Prince of Whitestone is still naked in his wedding bed, as they replace the milk with hot water and take the unneeded one away, sweeping the broken pottery and leaving breakfast for both of them on the table. It’s only the smell of food, after they leave, that finally wakes him up, looking all sorts of disoriented.

He looks at the bath longingly, then at the food, then at her.

“Food first,” she concludes, though they’re both disgusting.

Percy, while hungry, eats like a bird, one little morsel at a time, though he makes his way through his first portion, then the second, and half of a third. She can count most of the ribs down his front, and some of his vertebrae, down his back, so she lets him eat, as slow and steadily as he’d like. Though the bath water must be getting cold, he waits until he’s down to go to it, sighing as he sinks in.

“I have a lot of catching up to you, after all of that,” he says, his eyes closed. “I didn’t expect a heroic savior to come for me, of all things. It’s going to take some doing, keeping pace with you.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Vex says, enjoying his squawk of indignant surprise when she hops along into the bath with him.