Redana has been Not Staring so loudly that it’s nearly drowned out the water. Nearly. But the water is loud, joyful, and there is soft conversation in whispers all about, and they keep bringing her cups. The cups are good. They’re brought to her lips, and the liquid (thick, rich, syruped, like pulped appleskins) trickles down her throat, and the fires of her inner furnace die down to a dull roar. And between the tilt of the cups’ lips and the soft, gentle hands helping massage her mending bones into place and the rushroar of the water striking the pool, she stops thinking. Her world is the suckling, the comb brushed through her hair, the feeling of her bones settling as her body’s hundred thousand mouths are sated.

Then Bella asks her about [i]that.[/i]

Apples flood her nose, splatter on her thighs, sympathetic squeaks and noises as her attendants scatter into a loose cordon, as she bends over at the waist and tries to get her breath back under her command, as the implication rattles around her head. [i]Something else? Are we?[/i]

“I?” The voice is wrong. Sugar up her nose, dribbling down, rub the back of her hand on it, gross, and she keeps trying to talk anyway. “Here, I mean, if you’d like, because— because—“

She looks helplessly over to Jil, who smiles just as helplessly back and nods at the pool, nods to Bella, and that’s what Dany needs. The encouragement. The reminder. The example. Her smile in return is all apples and tears.

Then she slides into the water, down onto her knees, beneath the warmth, beneath the waves, and she can almost imagine that her uncle is here, too, that this is what it looks like when he is kind, or when he slumbers, and then she stands, and breaches the water, and tosses her head back, and her gold slaps against her shoulders with a wet slap, and she rubs her face clean with her hands, breathing more easily, and that turns into running her palms over her hair, elbows out, hiding nothing. Hiding nothing at all. And this isn’t anything new, and it’s a newborn chick struggling out of the egg, because Bella has seen everything before, but not like this, not here, not after asking, not after cracking open the world’s shell, and Bella’s eyes on her [i]burn.[/i]

Bella doesn’t move. But that’s okay. Redana knows how to move. It’s what she’s best at. She doesn’t run, but she pushes her way through the pool, forcing her hips and her thighs through water inexorably, relentlessly, each step feeling it trying to push her away, push them away. And the push is something she can understand. Ahead of her, Bella looms, titanic, dangerous, unexplored, a continent, a nebula, still, allowing her to approach, a knife, a nymph, a fire, a thunderbolt.

A thunderbolt.

She knows without words that she is destructive, that she is a plummeting doom, that Bella can be destroyed in this moment. And her words can’t fix it. Her heart is going to burn its way out of her chest. But all of the other ways she has learned to move, under different names, they know better than her words do. All she needs to do is trust her body.

She presses herself against Bella, her hands going up that uncharted expanse of spine, breaking the water, pulling her close, with no fear of breaking her maid, with no fear of being too much, her skin creating new territories wherever they touch. And she stares, and when she finally meets Bella’s eyes, it is with her father’s hunger in her mismatched eyes.

They tumble into each other like a planet crossing the event horizon of a black hole. By the time that Bella has lowered her head in willingness, by the time that Redana has pushed herself up onto her toes, by the time that the imperial maid’s hand has slipped under the water to help her princess up, by the time that the runaway has hidden her fingers in her huntress’s hair, it is inevitable. But it still surprises Redana, silly little Redana, how hungry she is, and how much that hunger is returned.

Words could never. Only kisses will do for explanation. [i]I need you to stay,[/i] they explain. [i]I was so afraid of breaking you,[/i] they say in the way that Redana refuses to hold back this time, the way her fingers knot in the luscious curls, the way her body pins Bella against the side of the pool. [i]I have wanted you the whole time,[/i] her soft breath says, her refusal to respond to Beautiful’s wolf-whistle, the way her heel hooks around the back of Bella’s leg.

And love is the passing of the thunderbolt from one heart to the other.

And if she is to die today, she will have died kissing her Bella, and she will sink down among the breathless dead in the bliss of this moment.