Thyran
The inn room is Jotunn-scale. Bare stone walls, a wide bed built from timber and hide, a window that faces the mountain. It smells like strangers and tallow candles and nothing like home.
None of it matters. She’s here.
Eseld closes the door behind us. The latch catches. She turns and leans against the wood, looking up at me. Road clothes. Her hair in a rough knot. Her face drawn and tired and her eyes clear.
She chose me. In front of a crowd of strangers, with alternatives lined up and an exit in every direction, she said my name and walked down the steps and pressed her face into my chest and held on.
“You followed me,” she says.
“I will always follow you.”
“That’s not a promise you can keep.”
“I kept it today.”
She looks at me. I look at her. The room is spare and the space between us is warm the way the space between us is always warm now. My body runs hotter near her. It has since the day I carried her out of the snow.
She reaches for my shirt. Pulls at the laces. Her hands are quick and sure and she doesn't ask permission because she told me what she wanted in the hall and the answer hasn't changed. She gets the laces free and pushes the fabric over my shoulders and puts her palms flat on my chest.
My temperature spikes.
This is not the hall. In the hall she was in control. She set the pace, read the gauges, managed me the way she manages every system. Hands steady. Voice steady. Telling me when to move and when to stop.
I am not being managed tonight.
The air in the room goes hot. I feel sweat break across my back. Her palms press harder against my chest and she doesn't pull away from the heat. She pushes into it.
“You're burning,” she says.
“I know.”
“Hotter than the hall.”
“I know.”
She starts to pull her shirt over her head. I take it from her hands. Pull it off myself. She goes still. Looking up at me.
“My turn,” I say.
I have spent weeks being careful. Holding still. Gripping stone and cracking wood and locking every muscle against the need to move. In the hall she guided my hands. Showed me where to touch. Set the pace and kept it.
She ran. She left the hall and walked into the cold and tried to disappear and I tracked her across the Wastes and found her on a market platform choosing between me and a creature who would never touch her at all.
I'm done being guided.
I pick her up. One arm. She wraps her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and her mouth finds mine and the heat between us flares so hard the window fogs.
Her mouth is hungry. Urgent. She kisses me like she’s afraid I'll disappear if she stops touching me.
“I'm here,” I say against her mouth. “Min?n. I'm here.”
I carry her to the bed. Set her down on the edge. Her legs are still wrapped around me and I have to unhook her ankles gently. She doesn't want to let go.
“I'm not going anywhere,”
I say. “Lie back.”
She lies back. Her hair spread across the furs. Her body pale against the dark hide. Looking up at me, her face stripped of every guard. Not careful. Not measuring. Just open.
I pull her trousers down. She lifts her hips to help and my own follow. I kneel between her legs and she props herself up on her elbows and watches me and I can see her pulse in her throat.
I press my lips to the inside of her knee.
She makes a sound. Small. Surprised. I work up her thigh. Slow. The heat of my lips against her skin, and I can feel goosebumps rise in the wake of my mouth, her body caught between the cold room and the heat rolling off my lips. She’s expecting me to go higher. I don't. Not yet.
I kiss the other knee. The other thigh. Take my time. Let the heat of my breath reach her before my mouth does. By the time I reach the crease of her hip she’s trembling and her skin is flushed and I can smell her arousal, sharp and warm, cutting through the tallow and stone smell of the room.
“Thyran.” My name in her voice, strained. “Please.”
I put my mouth on her.
Not patient. Not exploratory. I know her now.
I know the sounds and the way her hips move and the place where my tongue makes her grab the furs with both hands.
I find it and stay there and she arches off the bed.
The heat of my tongue against her is different from my hands — hotter, wetter, more direct.
I can feel her swelling under my mouth, feel the slickness spreading, her body opening up in response to the heat the way cold things expand when you warm them.
I speak Jotunn against her skin. “K?lthu. Rauei k?lthu.” My cold one.
My burning cold one. And the vibration travels through her where my mouth is pressed and she makes a sound that goes through me like a blade.
Her hips jerk and her thighs clamp against my head and she’s grinding against my mouth without realizing.
She comes. Hard. Her whole body locks. I feel it against my tongue — the pulse of her, the clench, the heat flooding through her. Her hands fisted in the furs, her back arched, a sound torn out of her that has no words in it.
I don't wait. I slide my hand between her thighs while she’s still shaking.
One finger. She gasps. She’s soaked, swollen, her body still clenching from the orgasm, and the heat of my finger inside her makes her hips buck off the bed.
I can feel how hot she is from the inside — not my heat, hers.
Her own arousal burning, her body running warmer than it should, the way it started doing in the hall. Matching me.
“Hj?rtakh,” I murmur. Her eyes are glazed. “Tell me.”
“More.” Her voice is wrecked. “I can feel — the heat of you — it’s —”
She doesn't finish. My finger curls inside her and whatever she was going to say turns into a sound. I find the place that makes her lose language and I work it, feeling her body clench around me, feeling the wet heat of her coat my hand.
A second finger. She bites her lip. I work her slowly.
Stretching. Feeling her body give around my fingers, the tight resistance easing into something slick and yielding.
The heat of her is different from the inside.
Softer. Wetter. I can feel her pulse around my fingers, fast and hard.
I curl them and she makes a sharp sound and her hips buck.
“There,” she says. Breathless. “Right there. Don't stop.”
I give her what she wants. My fingers moving inside her, my thumb pressing where she’s most sensitive. She’s getting closer. I can feel it in the way she tightens around my fingers, the way her breathing goes shallow, the way her thighs are shaking.
“Not yet,” I say. I slow my hand. She makes a sound of protest.
“Thyran, I swear—”
“Not yet.”
A third finger. Careful. Slow. She breathes through it. Her hand finds my wrist and holds on. Not pulling me away. Anchoring herself. The stretch is significant and I watch her face — the moment of resistance, the breath she takes, and then the easing. Her body softening around me. Opening.
“I can feel every knuckle,” she says. Half-laughing, half-gasping. “The heat of your hands inside me is — it’s like being warmed from the inside out.”
“Good?”
“So good it’s making me stupid.”
I work her open. Patient where it matters. My other hand flat on her stomach, feeling her muscles flex and release. She’s ready when her body goes liquid around me and her hips start moving on their own, riding my hand, her slickness running down my wrist.
I withdraw my fingers. She whimpers at the loss. An actual whimper — desperate, involuntary — and the sound goes through me and my temperature spikes and the air in the room shimmers.
I position myself over her. My hands on either side of her head. She looks up at me and her hand comes up and rests on my jaw and stays there.
“Stay with me this time,” she says. “All the way.”
I push inside. Slow.
The first inch and her breath leaves her in a rush.
The heat of me pouring into her, and she’s ready for it but it still makes her gasp.
Not pain. I can see it in her face — it’s the sensation.
The temperature of me flooding into a body that’s already running warm from my hands, from my mouth, and the addition of more heat inside her is pushing her somewhere her body doesn't have a map for.
I press deeper, my ridges registering against her, each one dragging across nerves that are swollen and oversensitive. Her eyes go wide. Her hand tightens on my jaw.
“I can feel them,” she breathes. “The ridges. Every one of them.”
Deeper. Her legs wrap around me. I watch her face as I sink into her — the parted lips, the flutter of her eyelids, the flush spreading down her throat and across her chest. She’s taking all of me and her body is adjusting around me, the tight heat of her pulsing, clenching, releasing.
I seat myself fully inside her. Stop.
The heat equalizes between us. I feel it — the moment where my temperature and hers meet somewhere in the middle and the boundary blurs. Her body is hot around me. Not her normal temperature. Hot. Matching me. The fire I started in her that first day, burning from the inside.
Her ankles cross at the small of my back. She pulls me that last fraction deeper and her breath catches and her eyes find mine.
“There,” she whispers. “Right there. I can feel your heartbeat inside me.”
I hold still. One breath. Feeling her around me. Feeling her heart beating against mine through our skin. The room is already warm. The window is already fogging.
Then I move.
Not slow. Not careful. This is not the hall. Her body knows me now, and mine knows hers and there is no careful left. The force of me pushes her up the bed, and she grabs the headboard with one hand and my shoulder with the other and holds on.
“Yes,” she says. “Like that. Don't stop.”
I don't stop. Every thrust pushes the heat higher between us.
My ridges drag through her on every stroke, and I feel her clenching around them, feel her body gripping me, the wet friction and the heat building and building.
The furs beneath us are damp and warm. Her skin is slick with sweat, and so is mine.
Where our bodies meet the heat is almost unbearable and neither of us is pulling away.
The Jotunn pours out of me. Full sentences, the old language, the deep language.
“Min?n rauei vétkha.” Mine. Burning always.
The vibration of the words travels through my chest into hers where our skin is pressed together, and lower, through my body into hers where we're joined.
She feels every syllable. I know because her whole body tightens around me and the sound she makes is raw and open and has my name buried in it somewhere.
“Keep talking,” she says. Her voice is wrecked. “Keep — the vibration — I can feel it everywhere — keep —”
I talk. I tell her things I have no words for in Common.
The Jotunn word for the warmth that stays after the fire dies.
The word for the sound someone makes in their sleep when they're safe.
The word for coming home. I press the words into her throat with my mouth and feel them vibrate through her pulse.
I speak them against her chest and feel her heartbeat stutter.
I say them into the hollow behind her ear and she digs her nails into my back hard enough to draw blood and I don't care.
“I'm close,” she gasps. “Thyran — I'm —”
“I know.” I feel it. Her body going tight around me, the rhythmic clench that means she’s on the edge. “I can feel you.”
“Don't stop. Don't change anything. Right there — right —”
The room is an oven. The furs are soaked. The window drips with condensation. The stone walls are warm to the touch.
Her hand finds my face. Makes me look at her.
“Stay with me,” she demands. Her eyes locked on mine. “Right here.”
I break.
Her name comes out of me in Jotunn. Not the Common word, not the sound she knows.
Rauemin?n. My fire. The one I came back for.
It tears out of my throat and fills the room, and I feel the release flood through me, heat cresting, the pulse of it pouring into her.
She feels it — the heat of me spending inside her — and the sensation tips her over.
Her body tightens around me, her back arches, her hands grip my arms. She doesn't go quiet this time. My name. Rough and loud and real.
I ease my weight to the side. Her body pressed against mine. Her face tucked against my collarbone. Her breathing rough and slowing.
We lie there. The room is warm. Too warm. My temperature starts to bank, the furnace easing down. Her hair is damp against her neck. I reach over and pull the loose strands off her skin, tuck them behind her ear. My fingers are clumsy at that scale. I do it anyway.
She catches my hand. Holds it against her cheek. Turns her face into my palm. Her lips move against the heel of my hand. Not a kiss. Just contact. Her mouth warm and soft against my skin.
“Why did you run?”
Quiet for a long time. My heartbeat. Hers. Both slowing.
“You made me want things I don't deserve.”
“You don't get to decide that.”
“Who does?”
“I do.” I tighten my arm around her. “I decide what I want. And I want you.”
She presses her face harder against my chest. Her breathing changes. Not crying. Something else. Something letting go.
“The comb,” I say. “You left it on my chair.”
“I couldn't take it.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the kindest thing anyone’s ever given me. And I didn't think I was allowed to keep it.”
I reach for my pack. It’s within arm’s reach because I set it beside the bed when we came in. I've been carrying it since the hall.
I pull out the comb. Bone handle. Carved birds. I take her hand, open her fingers, and set it in her palm. Close her fingers around it.
“Keep it.”
She holds it against her chest. Her eyes closed. Her breathing steady. The bone handle warm from my pack, warming more from her skin.
Hers.
I pull her closer. She settles into the space under my arm, small and warm, filling the hollow that nothing else has filled since Vortek.
The room cools around us. The window clears. The stone walls releasing what we put into them.
I do not let go.