CHAPTER ELEVEN #2
When I looked up at Corvin, he was staring down at me with a grin.
“Stop it,” I said, in the boy’s voice, which was higher than mine and flat.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you?”
I didn’t answer but shook my head and then reached up and took Wraith’s reins.
“He’s not going to let you attempt your water magic on him,” Corvin warned.
“Alright then, you do the honors. But do so before you fall over.”
Corvin led Wraith into the darkness underneath the nearest tree, darkness that was still managing to fight off the light of the encroaching morning.
He looked up at the dawning blue sky which was fighting to make it through the leafy canopy and shook his head, as if he was worried his shadows wouldn’t come at all.
But then he pressed two fingers to the base of Wraith’s neck, just where the horse’s mane thickened.
Wraith stood perfectly still for him, even as Corvin’s shadows rose up and out of him.
They came much slower than I’d seen them in the past, and I could see the effort it cost him.
It was in the slight tightening around Corvin’s eyes, the way his jaw set a fraction harder.
What should have taken a breath took three.
The darkness that usually moved immediately for him came in thin, reluctant threads instead, weaving through Wraith’s gleaming black coat in slow passes.
It worked, but barely. The black drained out of Wraith, fading through to the dull, patchy gray of an old farm animal well past its useful years. Wraith’s strong, proud neck drooped as his flanks hollowed.
Wraith turned his head and looked back at Corvin with one dark eye.
“He’s annoyed,” I said.
“He’ll live.” Corvin straightened, but not all the way. “Let’s go.”
The tavern crouched at the end of the lane like something that had given up trying a long time ago: sagging eaves, shutters hanging at wrong angles, a painted sign so weathered that the goat on it had been reduced to a vague suggestion of horns and spite.
Corvin led Wraith around the back of the tavern to the stable. Then he rejoined me, and we walked up the old cobble walkway to the front of The Old Goat Inn.
He didn’t touch me again, but he stayed close. Close enough that his arm brushed mine on the narrow walkway up to the tavern, once, and then again, and neither of us moved away.
The keeper of the Old Goat Inn was a small, suspicious woman with red hands and no interest in conversation, which suited us perfectly.
Corvin paid in coin. The farmer’s voice he tried was passable, but I did most of the talking, the boy’s vowels coming fairly easily.
The woman looked at us once, decided we were nobody worth remembering, and handed over a key.
The room waited at the top of a narrow staircase that creaked under every step we took, each board announcing us in a different pitch.
The ceiling was so low, Corvin had to angle his head slightly when he crossed the threshold.
There was only one window with a wooden shutter that didn’t close all the way, leaving a blade of cold air cutting through the gap.
The bed was pushed hard against the far wall and was nothing more than a thin mattress over a wooden frame.
It looked like it had survived two wars and one flood.
Someone had swept the floor recently enough that the dirt was piled only in the corners.
Not clean, exactly, but close enough to be honest about it.
I took a seat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap, listening to the sounds of the tavern below: voices, the knock of a cup on wood, someone laughing at something.
Corvin latched the door behind him and then stood with his back against it for a moment. He just stood there like he was remembering how to be still. I could read the tension between us, the anxiety.
I looked at him, and he looked at me, and neither of us said anything.
But looking at him in his current state, as an old man, didn’t appeal to me, so I released the glamour of my magic.
The farmer dissolved, and Corvin came back through him, the real angles of his face reassembling themselves, including the line of his jaw and the proud cut of his nose.
The amber of his eyes caught the dim light and made me swallow hard.
Then I let the boy go too. The magic moved through me in that particular way it always did, as a cool rush starting at the crown of my head and flowing downward, like water finding its own level.
My hair lightened, the dirty brown leaching out strand by strand until the silver-white reasserted itself, falling in waves past my shoulders.
I could feel my face unknotting itself from the boy’s blunt features, my cheekbones rising, my jaw narrowing, my own planes and angles returning to me.
Corvin’s gaze moved over me briefly, then away as if he couldn’t look at me. I didn’t understand why.
“An hour,” he said, shrugging off his riding coat and draping it over the chair. “No more.”
“That’s not enough sleep.”
“I know what I need.”
“Clearly you don’t.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and pulled off one boot. Then the other. He set them side by side with the automatic neatness of a man who’d been a soldier for a long time.
“Arthur will have riders out by the afternoon,” he said, facing forward. “They’ll be looking for you, and you’re hard to miss.”
“They’ll be looking for a woman,” I said. “Not a farmer and his son.”
Corvin looked over at me finally, and he swallowed hard. There was something in his eyes I’d seen before: whenever he’d come to me in the middle of the night, after I’d awakened from a nightmare, he’d worn this same expression.
“We’re safer if we keep moving,” he said.
“We’re safer if you can stay in the saddle.”
He didn’t answer that but just looked down at his hands instead, turning them over once, and I watched the exhaustion move through him like a tide coming in. The set of his shoulders changed. Not much, but it was enough. I reached over and touched his shoulder, and he looked over at me.
“An hour,” he said again. But the words came out quieter this time.
“Fine.” I stood. “Take the bed.”
He didn’t argue, which told me everything about how tired he really was. He stretched out on top of the blanket, still dressed, one arm folded beneath his head. His eyes were already half-closed, but they still remained fixed on me.
I moved to the chair by the window.
“Guin.”
I stopped and turned to face him. He was looking directly at me, and a muscle moved in his jaw.
“Lay next to me.”
It wasn’t a command, but it wasn’t quite a question either. It landed somewhere between the two, and I stood there a moment with my hand on the back of the chair, deciding. Deciding what? I wasn’t sure. There was so much between us that needed to still be said, but now wasn’t the time.
Regardless, I crossed the room and lay down beside him.
The bed was narrow, so there wasn’t really a choice about proximity. My shoulder pressed against his arm, and I stared up at the low ceiling, at the water stain spreading from the corner like a reaching hand, and listened to the sounds of the tavern below.
His arm moved.
He pulled me into him in one slow motion until my back was against his chest.
Then his arm was across me, heavy, warm, and anchoring.
I felt him exhale against the top of my head, long and slow, like he’d been holding his breath for hours.
I couldn’t remember feeling this safe. Actually, yes, I could: the last time he’d held me.
Then he pressed his face into my hair and breathed in.
My chest did that complicated thing again, but I didn’t say a word about it.
I didn’t want to because he needed to sleep more than we needed to talk about whatever this was between us, whatever this had always been.
And somewhere beneath it all, the pain I’d never gotten over after Lance’s visit still weighed against me.
Downstairs, someone laughed again, and the shutter in our room shifted in a small wind.
Corvin was asleep within three minutes. I could tell by the change in his breathing, the full weight of his arm, and the way the tension left his body all at once.
I lay there and stared at the water stain and didn’t sleep.
Not even close. My mind was too loud, the warmth of him too unfamiliar, and too good to waste on unconsciousness.
I pressed myself back against him instead, closing what small distance remained between us, and tilted my face up just enough that his slow, even breath grazed my cheek like something almost tender.
He let out a little snore and pulled me even closer, burying his face into the side of my neck.
I didn’t know how long it was that he slept: maybe an hour and maybe less.
All I did know was that his fingers moved first.
They curled around mine where our hands had ended up tangled together at some point while he slept.
It was the slow press of each finger finding its grip, one by one, like he was making a decision one knuckle at a time.
I went still as I felt it again: that deep-seated sense of yearning, of need.
I turned to face him.
His eyes were already open, and they weren’t the bleary, slow-blinking eyes of a man just surfacing from sleep, but they were fully open. Amber, steady, fixed on my face with that particular quality of attention he reserved for things that mattered.
He’d been awake for a while.
“How long?” I asked.
“Long enough.”
I waited.
His thumb moved across the back of my hand in one slow arc, and his eyes didn’t leave mine.
“You have no idea,” he said, “how many times I almost...” He stopped, then started again, his voice lower this time. “Every time I held you. Every single time.” The words came out rough, scraped clean of any pretense. “I wanted to kiss you, Guin. I wanted to pull you in and not let go.”
The shutter moved again in a small wind, and somewhere below us, a door swung shut.
“I wanted the same thing.” The words left me without the careful hedging I’d spent years wrapping around this particular truth. Instead, they came out plain and clear, and I didn’t take them back. “Every time.”
His chest rose and fell once.
“Then why didn’t you—”
“—why didn’t you?”