His laugh was soft. “It’s yours, Ajan. Along with the rest of me.” A little smile as he closed his eyes. “I trust you.”

I brushed my nose against the rent and then cuddled onto him, resting with him. Usually when one decides to become family, there is a formal discussion… and we had it, eventually, we two. But I had been his Guardian for ten years, had worked intimately with him for all that time. I knew how he thought well enough to understand what he’d done. He would never have asked me to call him by name had he not made the decision to make me his family, as well as his lover.

There was more after that. But slower. More of an exploration than exercise, urgency, want. He has this thing with his hands, aunera. He can sit forever, it seems, and let me kiss and touch and rub them, and I can make him relax by massaging his fingers and palms and bring him by biting and sucking them, and over the years I admit it’s made me hyper-sensitive to the sight of people’s hands; I see erotic possibilities wherever I go, which is hell for a Guardian… Vekken tells me (dryly) that it’s an opportunity to practice self-discipline. Do you know how many hands I see a day? Vekken has a twisted sense of humor.

Me, I like biting. Nibbling, teeth-scratching (do you have a word for that? We say gafen, and that’s scraping only with the teeth, not with nails or objects). Biting, yes. Hard enough to draw blood? That’s fine too. When he learned about that, he started this… habit… of just putting his teeth around my throat. Never biting or crushing, just… holding me in place, and that was… well, that for me was like me sucking fingers was for him. And now and then, he does it to the back of my neck, framing but never touching that sacred place on the nape that is only for our lords and masters and that… that wrecks me for weeks, aunera, and it is the most wonderful ruination I can describe.

But all we did after the name-trading was gentle versions of all the things we’d learn to do in the future. And… there was poetry.

Right? You do that too, don’t you? Maybe with music? I sang a little, also, under my breath, into his ear. Ereseya’s not the only erotic poet in the Ai-Naidari library, but she’s a favorite of ours, so I chose several of hers. She also wrote a book of erotic exercises for lovers (there’s a matching volume for ajzelin, I bought a copy of it later for Farren to share with him, and let me tell you it’s crazy how hard it is to commission a book without a calligrapher finding out!). I hadn’t memorized the erotic exercise one, but he remembered some of it, so we did those too… the breathing together entwined. Sharing breath. That’s sacred for us, aunera. Farren said something about it maybe: about the space between two people. We honor that space, and we honor the breath we can share because of the separation.

To this day, he likes me to sing to him in bed. Breathy-soft, in his ear, for him alone.

The fire of your sun

is the fire in my body

you burn me away

you burn me away

you burn me away

you burn me away

you are the star

too close to my skin

you are the light

too close to my eyes

you burn me away

until all that’s left of me

      is you

At some point, though, it grew late enough that I sighed. “I should get back to my duty.”

“Probably,” he agreed, brushing his thumb over my cheek. We were lying on our sides, facing one another, mostly dry by that point. Messy, but dry. The sheets were mostly dry too, but not at all clean. “Will you want to sleep in our bed? Shall I ask?”

“Maybe sometimes,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t like sharing a bed. I don’t sleep well.” I chuckled. “Neither do any of my partners, from what little I’ve heard. I kick.”

“Gods save us from kicking,” Kor said with a quiet laugh. “Farren has a hatred for it.”

The idea of accidentally kicking Farren, whom I was not only fond of but a little concerned for—even for one of us he’s rather thin-boned—was enough to make me flinch. “No,” I said. “I’d rather sleep in a different bed. As long as it’s not far from yours.”

“No,” he promised, meeting my eyes. “Never again.” And then, smiling. “I hope you’ll visit our bed often, though.”

“I’d like that,” I said. And then, hesitant. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind… if you don’t…”

He lifted a brow.

“Well, I’ve never had a lover who also had an ajzelin before,” I said, which was close enough to the truth; most of the people I’d shared my body with had been casual lovers, and I’d never known them well enough to have some sense of their other relationships. “It would be… new to me. If Farren was there. I think… that would be an honor. I have never… ah… never had the chance. To make the sacrament. I would like to try.”

He met my eyes for much longer, and this time I let him without blinking or flushing. Because it was true. I couldn’t imagine anything more… whole… than to be with the two of them as a family, because that’s what we were now, family. I let him see it in my eyes and he drew in a sharp breath.

“I’ll tell him so,” Kor said, when he could speak.

“I hope he likes the idea,” I said.

“Me too,” he said, and kissed me lightly on the brow, then more lingering on the lips. “Go on, then.”

So we went our separate ways, me to guard the lord of Qenain in his confinement, him to gather up his ajzelin, who’d fallen asleep on the couch in the common room, and take him back to bed.

You all know what happened afterwards, aunera… you’ve read the book. There is, though, something you don’t know.

You’ve heard about the Winter Tryst, of course. And its anonymity. And you know that some of us take contraceptives because we don’t want to make or bear children. But some women do want Winter’s children for various reasons, everything from their loved ones being incapable of giving them children to just wanting their offspring to have a little variety in their siblings. Most of those women don’t share their intentions with the men who do the begetting… that’s understood. Sometimes a woman wants something of her own, and the point for us, as men, is to give the gift, not to receive it, or to know it was appreciated.

But there are women who go to the Tryst to reciprocate that anonymous gift. They wear little red flames on their costumes somewhere, and that’s their way of telling us they’re willing to bear one of Winter’s children for us. You lie with one of these women and give them a name—a false one of course—and then, if you have hopes, you go to the temple of Ganaeda the following day and tell them that same false name, and where you can be found. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the Mothers come to you and give you a child born of the Tryst. Your child.

This is the only way men can have Winter’s children of their own bodies. So there’s balance there. We give women their anonymous children, and they return the favor, as they can.

And I… I decided I wanted a Winter’s child, and you are probably wondering why.

See, Kor… Kor was one of Winter’s sons. But unlike almost all the children of the Tryst, he was given up at the Mother’s temple. Really given up, not offered by a woman making a gift to a man who’d told her his name. Maybe his mother changed her mind, or maybe her circumstances changed… or maybe she died, or it was an accident… we’ll never know. But it’s rare, very rare, for a Winter’s child to end up orphaned, and he was. So that was on my mind (and the story of how he told it to me… I won’t share that. He can, if he wants).

But also… he was my lover, and I was his family. And I didn’t want anyone else. And he never seemed to want anyone else either, and I thought that unless someone did something, there would be no children for him to raise. So I went to the Tryst and found someone willing to make the gift, and the third year in I got lucky. The Mothers brought me a child, a bronze-haired, silver-pale-pelted child with eyes… gray and rose with flecks of red…

My Winter’s son. I underestimated how much I would love him. How much Kor would love him.

How much he would love Kor.

So many of you thought Kor was training me to be his successor, and it wasn’t really that; he just couldn’t stop himself from teaching someone smart enough to learn. I never wanted to be Shame. Love him, sure. Be him? Never.

But my son had different ideas.