“What is a man like you even doing here?” she muses as they lie together, brushing her fingers across skin too pale for the desert of Calormen, through curls never touched by shine and pomade, over a beard never scented with perfumed oils.

He shrugs, the thick rugs of her tent protecting them from the sands, his dark eyes unfathomable as he watches her every movement as closely as the white falcon he calls Ghost, until she feels the depths of the desolate desert night in them, something otherworldly, tinged with a magic foreign to her homeland, and shivers, knowing this man will never be Narnian; knowing that she will nevertheless always want more, and more.

“Someone must keep the world safe from that which dwells in the high desert,” he murmurs, watching every shudder that passes through her as he draws his fingers, achingly light, up her arm, over her shoulder, down to the hollows of her collarbones, leaving her lightheaded in his wake, open to his kiss, open to the promise in those bottomless eyes, for as long as her sojourn in the desert lasts.