12. HEAT UNDER ASH
Chapter twelve
HEAT UNDER ASH
PORTIA
The Havoc gets into me through the air, and by the second night in the croft I understand that this country is going to take from me what nine years of discipline kept locked.
It is not like the heat in the garden. The garden was want, clean and mine, a wave I could at least see coming.
This is different. This is the Cup's wrongness seeping in through every breath, finding the new bond where it lives raw under my sternum and turning the dial past anywhere the dial is meant to go.
Bond-sickness braided with Havoc, two fevers learning to share one body.
I have been shaking since dusk. My skin runs hot then cold then hot again with no rhythm I can name, and the cold blue fire keeps surfacing at my fingertips without my asking, guttering, sparking, a thing gone loose in its housing.
Leon notices, of course. The bond does not let him not notice. He has spent the evening pretending to study the map by the fire while watching me out of the side of his eyes, and when I press my back to the cold stone wall for the third time, chasing relief that does not come, he sets the map down.
"Tell me what's happening," he says. "Not the brave version. The real one."
"The air here is poisoned," I say. The words come out frayed.
"And the bond is new, and the two of them together are," I stop, because pride is a tall thing and I have run out of the height to look over it.
"I am not in control of myself the way I need to be.
And it is getting worse, not better, and I do not know how long I can hold it. "
He crosses the small room and stops just short of touching me, the way he always stops just short, that maddening, undoing restraint of his. "What does holding it cost you?"
"Everything," I say honestly. "And not holding it costs more.
If I let the heat run unchecked in a body this bond-sick, in air this thick with Havoc, I do not know what comes out the other side.
Maybe just scales and fire and a great deal of broken furniture.
Maybe something I cannot put back. I have spent my whole life never finding out. "
"And if it's grounded," he says slowly, reading something in my face, or feeling it down the line between us. "If there's a tether. Does that help, or does it make it worse."
I look at him for a long moment. The bond is right there, humming, offering the answer before I can dress it up.
"It helps," I say. "A bond this new wants its anchor.
Proximity steadies it. Contact steadies it more.
And the thing it actually wants, the thing it was built to want, steadies it most of all.
I am not saying that to ask. I am telling you the mechanics, because you asked for the real version. "
"I know the difference," he says quietly, "between you telling me the mechanics and you telling me yes."
That undoes the last of the knot. Because he does. Because in a country that has rewritten me into a traitor on every wall, this man is standing in a freezing croft refusing to mistake my fever for my consent.
"Then let me say the other thing too," I tell him, and I make my shaking voice carry it clearly, because it matters that it is clear.
"Yes. Not because the bond is screaming.
Because I want you. I have wanted you since a garden, before any of this gave me an excuse.
The fever isn't choosing for me, Leon. It's just stopped letting me pretend I hadn't already chosen. "
The fire throws our shadows up the rough stone wall, two shapes leaning toward each other. He closes the last of the distance and frames my face in his hands the way he did in the garden, careful, reverent, asking even now. "Tell me to stop and I stop. That doesn't change. Not tonight, not ever."
"I know," I say. "Don't stop."
He kisses me and the fever turns, all at once, from a thing tearing me apart into a thing with somewhere to go.
The cold blue fire at my fingertips banks down to a glow.
The shaking gentles into something else entirely.
His hands learn me slow and certain, and where the garden was frantic this is deliberate, the deliberate care of a man who has decided that the most important thing in a poisoned country is to make the person in his arms feel, for one hour, like the safest creature alive.
The scales come, shimmering up my arms, and he traces them like they are the most ordinary beautiful thing, no flinch, no fear, only that steady gold-eyed attention that says whatever you are, I am not afraid of it, and means it down to the floor.
The bond does the rest. It pours his steadiness into me and my heat into him and somewhere in the middle the two stop being separate weathers and become one warm front with no edge to it, and for the first time since the moonstone the screaming under my ribs goes quiet, replaced by something I have no practice holding.
Not safety. I have never trusted safety.
Something better. Belonging. The thing the law promised at the end of the waiting and I had half stopped believing I would live to feel.
Afterward, in the low red light, I lie with my head on his chest and his heartbeat under my ear, steady as a tide that means to keep coming back, and the fever is gone, just gone, banked all the way down to embers.
I feel almost human. I feel, for one stolen hour, like a woman and not a relic, not a spare cup, not a face on a poster.
Just Portia, warm, and held, and for once not alone with the size of what is coming.
"I'm going to get your father back," he says into my hair, not a boast, just a fact he is laying down. "And then I'm going to spend a very long time making you feel like this on purpose. As a hobby. As a calling."
I laugh, and the laugh surprises me, rusty from disuse. "You are absurd."
"I'm a pop star. Absurd is the brand." His arm tightens. "Sleep. I'll keep watch. The bond will wake me if anything wakes you."
I should not sleep. There is a brother with my father's seal and a sky full of Havoc and a clock I do not control. But the bond is quiet and his heart is steady and my body, finally given the one thing it was built to want, surrenders the way it never surrenders, all at once, into the dark.
Which is exactly why I do not feel it coming until it is already here.
The wards break. I built them myself at the door and the windows, small dragon-work, the kind of thing that should hold against anything that does not know it is there, and they do not so much fail as shatter, all at once, blown inward like glass under a fist, and I am awake and on my feet with fire in both hands before I have finished understanding that the warmth and the safety were always going to be the bait.
Ember-light floods the windows. Boots in the yard, too many to count. And Kael's voice, carrying across the cold dark, delighted, patient, the voice of a man who has simply waited for his sister to lower her guard for one single hour.
"Sister," he calls. "You should not have made me come and get you."
Leon is already up, already between me and the door, the gold rising clean in his eyes, no panic in him at all. And the warm front we made an hour ago turns, in a heartbeat, into the storm it was always going to have to be.
Dearest Readers,
"I know the difference between you telling me the mechanics and you telling me yes."
Loves, I have been writing romance for a very long time, and I want you to underline that sentence in whatever you are reading this on, because a man standing in a freezing croft refusing to mistake a woman's fever for her consent is the most romantic thing I have ever put on a page.
She said yes. Clearly, on purpose, in her own voice, for her own reasons.
And for one hour, in a poisoned country, she was safe.
One hour. That is all he could give her, and now the wards are in pieces and there is a voice in the yard, and it is her brother's voice, and he sounds delighted.
He was always going to wait until she lowered her guard, my darlings. That was always the plan.
Turn the page.
Your author.