10. Practical Concerns
Chapter ten
Practical Concerns
Skip dressed like a man with a great deal to do. He had begun doing most of it in his mind before he fastened the last buckle.
There was a fortress to prepare and a vampire below us.
When he reached the door, he turned back.
“Be in your quarters before nightfall,” he said. His voice was even. “Preferably well before.”
“I will.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. His gaze stayed on mine, steady and assessing, the line of his jaw going hard in a way that suggested he was deciding whether my promise would survive contact with reality.
“I will,” I said again.
His gaze held mine a moment longer. Then he crossed back to me, kissed me once, and left.
I stood alone in his quarters after the door closed, the morning light warm across the stone floor.
I had a decision to make. To make this decision, I needed information. I needed Caen.
***
I went back to my quarters first.
The nightgown had served its purpose, but it was too translucent for walking through a courtyard.
The clothes Skip’s soldiers had delivered earlier were still waiting. I chose the least practical option, which was not to say it lacked purpose.
Deep brown leather corset. Cream linen chemise. Split leather skirt. Bracers. A wide belt meant to sit low at my hips.
The corset cinched my waist. The chemise made an emphatic argument above it. The skirt opened when I moved, revealing my leg.
I went to find Caen.
***
I knocked on Caen’s door. She invited me in.
“Look at you,” she said.
Her eyes moved over the corset, the skirt, the bracers, then returned to my face. Her expression warmed with unmistakable approval.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat. She poured some deeproot.
The effects arrived in the usual sequence—the sharpening first, the warmth second, the combination of being alert and at ease that I had decided was deeproot’s defining characteristic and that I had been unable to locate an adequate Earth equivalent for.
“I suspect you have questions,” Caen said.
I had fifteen hundred questions. Most could wait.
The claiming could not.
I told her about Skip’s offer of claiming. The ring. The permanent empathic bond. The fact that I had said I needed to think about it, had meant that, and was still thinking about it.
Caen listened without interrupting, her expression composed in a way that suggested none of this surprised her.
“It is the most serious commitment available to a living person in this world,” she said when I finished.
“I will not tell you otherwise. The bond does not end while both of you live. The ring is not removed until death breaks it. What you feel, he feels. This is the reality from the moment the claiming is complete until one of you is no longer alive.”
She paused and looked down at her own ring. Its warm light softened the lines of her face, and for a moment she seemed less like a mage and more like a woman remembering the life bound to hers.
“I do not say this to frighten you. I say it because you are a woman who values accurate information, and I will not give you anything less.”
“I know,” I said.
She looked at me like she already knew this and was waiting for me to say it out loud.
“He gave you pleasure you had never felt before,” she said.
I considered the diplomatic response. I considered the empirical response. I arrived at the honest one.
“Yes,” I said. “Comprehensively.”
“That is not an accident.”
She set down her cup.
“I should clarify something first,” she said.
“The claiming’s restriction on penetration is theology, not law.
There is no enforcement. People make their own choices and always have.
Plenty of people in this world have penetrative sex before any claiming occurs and consider it nobody’s business but their own. ”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“What they miss is the bond forming at the moment of maximum intimacy. The empathic connection heightens the pleasure. The difference between the physical act and the physical act combined with an empathic connection is…”
She stopped. Appeared to consider her vocabulary.
“Significant.”
She picked up her cup again.
“Skip is devout,” she said. “More than most. He understands the claiming at a deep level. He did not offer it to you casually, and he was not going to proceed without it. That is who he is.”
Her gaze held mine for a moment.
“I thought you should know that. It explains certain things about how he conducts himself.”
It did explain certain things.
“I have been watching people approach the claiming for most of my professional life,” Caen continued. “I have a developed sensitivity to the quality of the bond before it forms. There is a resonance to two people whose flames were built to burn together. What is between you and that man…”
She stopped. Started again, more carefully. “I am not going to tell you it is fate. The claiming cannot be fated. It must be chosen, freely and completely, or it is nothing. But I will tell you what I believe.”
She met my eyes directly.
“I believe you were brought to this world at this moment to this outpost, and he has been here for six years because the world needed both of you in the same place at the same time. Whether you call that fate or coincidence, the result is the same. You are here. He is here. The resonance between you is the strongest I have felt in twenty-three years of practice.”
I sat with this.
“The empathic bond,” I said. “Tell me what it actually feels like. The reality.”
Caen was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed—less the mage delivering information, more the woman speaking from evidence.
“During ordinary life, you feel him the way you feel a fire from across a room. The warmth and the direction of it. You know when he is content. You know when something is wrong before he has said a word. You know when he wants you before he has moved.”
Her voice softened, but the warning in it sharpened.
“You cannot perform. Nothing is hidden. Nothing can be managed between you. Whatever is true is felt. The bond does not transmit thoughts—it is not telepathy. It transmits emotion. Everything he feels, you feel. Everything you feel, he feels. Always.”
“And during intimacy…”
She stopped.
“I have been claimed for twenty-three years,” she said. “So I will not pretend to academic distance.”
Her gaze dropped briefly to the warm glow of her ring.
“My claimed man does not live at Ely,” she said.
“We keep separate homes while I serve the outpost line. He believes this work matters as deeply as I do, which is the only reason the arrangement is bearable.” Her thumb moved once over the ring.
“The bond does not soften distance. It makes it exact. I feel the place in him that aches for me, and he feels the same ache in me. We endure it because this line needs a mage. Love is not made less true by the work it asks us to do apart.”
Her thumb stilled against the ring. For a moment, the ache remained visible in her face. Then she gathered it back into herself and returned her attention to me.
“Distance is one expression of the bond,” she said.
“Intimacy is another. During intimacy, the bond intensifies. It does not remain only emotional. You feel what he feels in the body. He feels what you feel. Pleasure crosses the bond and returns changed by the crossing. The bond heightens to another level.”
She paused, choosing her words with care.
“It becomes recursive. Your pleasure heightens his. His heightens yours. Each returns to the other amplified.”
I understood the theory immediately. Unfortunately, so did my body. My breath caught first. Then my pulse changed, and my stomach went tight with an answering pull that was entirely unhelpful to the serious nature of the conversation.
She gave me a moment to absorb that before continuing.
“What you have experienced with him already will seem like a preliminary study. The claiming is the complete version. And it does not diminish. It deepens over time.”
I sat with everything Caen had just told me for a moment.
Then I said, “Can I ask you something that is going to sound either very shallow or very perceptive, depending on how you receive it?”
“Ask. I will answer what is mine to answer,” Caen said.
“He is exactly my type,” I said. “Exactly. The specific physical configuration that I have been…”
I paused, selecting my vocabulary.
“… researching. Large. Dark-haired. The jaw. The forearms. The size differential between a very large man and a very small woman. I will leave it at that.”
I left it at that.
What I did not leave at that, entirely against my will, was my body’s response to having said those words out loud in a room with another person for the first time in my life.
I pressed my thighs together. I was managing an unauthorized physiological response and hoped that Caen’s empathic perception did not notice.
The expression on Caen’s face suggested that she did notice.
“And there is another dimension of the physical configuration that I had also researched. Extensively. A dimension that is specific to the male form. A dimension that, after categorizing and cross-referencing it, I had ultimately concluded was probably aspirational rather than achievable in practice.”
I looked at Caen directly.
“Last night,” I said, “I realized that the dimension I had categorized as aspirational turned out to be…”
I composed myself.
“Not aspirational.”
Caen was quiet for a moment.
The pendant pulsed red. Not blue. Red. A single warm pulse of deep crimson that traveled through the spiral and faded.
Caen did not comment on it. Neither did I.
Caen picked up her deeproot and took a long sip. She cleared her throat.
“The bridge,” she said, her voice composed and only fractionally lower than it had been a moment ago, “is thorough.”
She set down her cup.
I set down mine.
There was a beat of silence in which both of us were, I suspected, thinking about something slightly different.
Then I said, “I have a practical question.”
“Of course you do,” Caen said.