The old straw mattress was uneven, hard, and lumpy, but Erwin barely felt it digging up against his back as he lay there with Olive straddling him. As she pinned down his wrists and feigned deviousness with her humor, he opened his mouth to respond in kind, but she closed that distance too quickly for him to get even a word out. Not that that was an issue. He hungrily returned her kiss as his hands ran up her lean thighs and backside and then grasped her roughly by the hips to draw her to him, the muscles of his back taut as he arched up to meet her body. There was a lingering warmth in his chest from the spirits, but that paled in comparison to the intoxication from feeling her flush skin, the heat between her legs against his own throbbing groin, the urgency of their shared breaths against each other's mouths.
Then, he sensed Olive hesitating even with their bodies pressed up against one another. He gazed up at her as their rhythmic movements slowed and, suddenly, she stopped still. For a brief moment Erwin, chest pounding, wondered if she was beginning to have second thoughts about all of this, the same doubts that they'd somehow managed to push to the wayside up here in the isolation of the attic, that he was loath to let come back between them. But there was something else about her expression that he could only half discern in the semi-darkness, that made her seem... troubled. As she extracted herself from his lap and stepped over to the window, Erwin pushed himself up against his elbows, his blue eyes following her silhouette, a small, confused frown creasing his brow. "What..." he started to say, but the words died on his lips.
As she pulled open the small glass window, the distant, muffled echoes of laughter and merriment filtered in. But he, too, suddenly had only eyes for the small bird that seemed to be the focus of Olive's attention. And though the small bead of light might have been little more than a white dot in the shadows, it was so out-of-place in the darkness that it might as well have been fireball the way his eyes immediately locked on it, his breath hitching in his throat. His unblinking gaze followed Olive's naked form all the way from the window, and he sat up now as she knelt back beside him and pressed her cupped hand to his ear, anticipating what he might hear in that small pocket of air, and dreading that he might be right.
That voice. Hearing it now was almost an out-of-body experience, as though his mind could not process how he could physically be sitting on this lumpy mattress when clearly he should be out in the wild somewhere, conversing with Silas Greene, the renegade mage. "It's your friend Silas," he mumbled at some point, though he barely heard his own voice as he listened. His gaze had fallen when the voice first started speaking, but slowly Erwin's eyes rose until they were staring right at Olive, the expression on his face morphing from confusion to stunned silence, his brows raising and his mouth sliding slightly agape. By the time the report was finished, whatever exhilaration they'd wrapped themselves in with their intimate ministrations had all but evaporated, replaced by a curdling sensation in the pit of his belly.
"Angsar's balls..." he managed to say, before a second later the gravity of Silas' words truly hit him. Then, suddenly, he was scrambling to his feet, the news having sobered him better than any bucket of cold water ever could have. "Angsar's fucking BALLS!" Quickly, his eyes scanned the corner for where he'd kicked his trousers when she first removed them from him. "Kenins has mobilized his men westward to the Aeling, burning the countryside as they go," he explained hastily, "He's declaring war."
He looked pointedly at Olive, an almost apologetic look in his eyes, a part of him wishing that they could just forget all of this and get back on the mattress. But that look was quickly overtaken by a more familiar, harder expression. "We need to get back downstairs."