Chapter 36 Want and Hunger and Greed
Want and Hunger and Greed
The blade slices through the air.
It is a testament to Orran’s training that Sascia dashes to the side mere seconds before the scythe scrapes the floor. It leaves a carved mark on the black rock, deep enough to trace with a finger. Nugau truly meant it; a blow to kill.
Already, Sascia’s backing away, palms raised up. “Nugau, please—”
He swings again, this time in a wider, deadlier arc. Sascia ducks away as fast as she can, feet carrying her backward down the vast expanse of the throne room.
“We can find another way,” Sascia pleads. “Make a choice of kindness.”
“This is kindness.” His shaggy hair has fallen over his face, completely curtaining his eyes. Sascia can only see the hard line of his mouth and the white grip of his hands around the scythe. “A swift and merciful ending at the hands of an equal.”
The words break something in her. The Queen’s bargain might have offered him everything he ever wanted, but Sascia refuses to be the price he pays.
“I don’t want swift and merciful! I don’t want an ending!
I don’t want to be just your equal—I want more.
Don’t you understand? I’ve always wanted more. ”
Nugau replies with another fall of the blade, but this time, Mooch is there to meet it.
All six inches of its body and wings shift into hard onyx; the scythe screeches against it.
The prince’s arms reverberate with the contact, yet still he stalks forward.
Sascia backtracks, clumsily tripping over her own steps.
His eyes cut to something behind her—over her shoulder, the mouth of a half-collapsed train tunnel yawns like a toothless smile.
“Don’t run,” he warns, but there’s something lurid, almost inviting in his voice.
Sascia runs.
The aesin let out a collective snarl as she scrambles over the rubble.
Rocks cascade down the debris. Footsteps crunch behind her, slow and measured.
From the corner of her eye, Sascia can spot the Dark moving—but it’s not Nugau wielding his power.
It’s moths, dozens of them, slipping out of the shadows to coalesce around her.
Don’t hurt Nugau, Sascia thinks to them, a hand outstretched to keep them at bay. I can fix this. I can turn it around. Just don’t hurt him.
But in the darkness of the tunnel, Nugau attacks in earnest. The first strike is parried by Mooch, the second Sascia just barely evades, the third smacks her in the thigh with the dull flat of the blade.
The moths form a vortex around her and Nugau, caging them together.
Nugau launches into a breathless attack.
A feint to the left, a slice through the right, then a kick at her knees.
Sascia goes down. Before her head can hit the hard rock, there is a hand there breaking her fall, and a body lowering over hers, and a face hovering inches away.
The moths are in a rampage, shaping a thunderous funnel that hides them from the rest of the world.
But they do not defend her. They do not attack.
They only shield her, her and Nugau both, in a cocoon of razor-sharp wings.
“Even here?” the prince grits out, his breath feathering against her cheeks. “You won’t fight back even here, when it’s only the two of us?”
But she can’t. She won’t. She hasn’t forgotten their promise to each other over stale candy, the forbidden look during the tarant, the tenderness last night, the unspoken grief this morning.
The Queen’s bargain might have been sweet enough to sway him, but even he can’t deny: in another time, in another world, the two of them could have been something brilliant.
His betrayal cuts deep, coaxing tears into her eyes.
Sascia refuses to make this easy for him. He has made his choice, and so has she.
Panting, she vows: “I will not be your enemy.”
“No, little gnat. You’re far, far worse.”
The words are striking, disorienting—worse still, his hands trace up her arms, pinning her wrists to the ground. His legs press into hers, locking her in place beneath him, their torsos lined up inch for inch. His breath comes out hot and raspy against her cheek.
“You,” he whispers with difficulty. “You have been my unraveling. All the seams of my being, the stitches I have crafted over my wounds—you have picked at the threads, unwoven the fabric of my essence, and now I am something new, something else, something yours.”
Sascia’s heart roars against her rib cage. “And is it a crime worthy of death?” she gasps out. “To be new? To be mine?”
“No, little gnat. It is an absolution.”
Little gnat, he called her.
Absolution, he named this thing between them.
Sascia realizes at last—he wasn’t swayed by the Queen’s bargain. He will not be her executioner. He is what he has claimed: hers, hers, hers.
His fingers around her wrists go soft and tender; he weaves their fingers together.
Sascia smooths her body along his, widening her hips, arching her back, stretching her neck to make room for him, for his lips.
Nugau lingers there, an inch above the velvet skin beneath her ear.
His gaze has become dulcet, dripping with honeyed want.
He whispers, “If I begged—”
Sascia doesn’t need to hear the rest. She arcs up and kisses him.
His lips are ravenous; they part her mouth and deepen the kiss.
His hand buries in her hair, tugging. Her chest is flush against his, a lightning-bright friction that sends a hum of pleasure down her spine.
She is present in her body like she has never been before, in soft and hard flesh, in want and hunger and greed.
Because Nugau was right. She is starved, she is hungry, she is greedy.
There is a craving inside her that never had a shape and name, could never be sated or satisfied.
But now its name is Nugau, its shape is his lips and hands and body, and she is satisfied, oh so satisfied that she could burst with joy.
Her hungry, hungry mouth moves to devour the hard line of his jaw. He stills beneath her touch, exhaling warm air against her neck. He moves only to give her access: to the soft flesh beneath his chin, the long column of his neck, the crook where clavicle meets shoulder.
Then he shifts, lightning-fast, and takes her earlobe into his mouth. All thoughts slip out of Sascia’s head. She becomes only sense. The jittering pleasure of her earlobe in his mouth. The pulsing trail of his fingers beneath her shirt. His grip in her hair. The weight of his body against hers.
There is only travel and discovery, of lips and fingers and flesh upon flesh, and this is what Nugau meant when he named her an Ariadne.
This is the true pleasure, the true joy—exploring.
This is Sascia’s Labyrinth, his touch and his want, and she will gladly be enamored, an Ariadne in love with the Labyrinth itself.
He flips them so that she is sitting on his lap. His hands groove around her ribs. He reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ears. His thumb trails circles beneath the curve of her breast, in a way that makes her warm and aching. His mouth is dark with kissing.
“You wanted the Queen to believe you were going to kill me,” Sascia realizes. “You wanted me to run into the tunnel, where we would be out of view.”
“I couldn’t beg you to kiss me in front of the entire army of the Jagged Blade, now could I?”
A heady laugh bubbles out of Sascia’s lips.
Footfalls echo from the end of the tunnel.
Nugau sits up, an arm around her waist to keep her close, and peers through the hurricane of moths that surrounds them.
They’re hidden from view, but not for long.
He touches her left shoulder—his fingertip comes away red.
Her stitches must have torn during the chasing or the frolicking; Sascia didn’t even notice.
Nugau looks at the smear of scarlet as though it is the most terrible thing he has ever seen.
“Mooch,” he whispers.
The itka springs out of the vortex of wings and hovers prettily between them.
“You can lead her out, can’t you?”
In reply, Mooch flutters its wings, the movement endorsed by the dozens of moths around them.
“I’m not leaving you here,” Sascia says.
“You can’t stay, little gnat. My mother’s bargain was clever: killing you would make me the son she wants, the ruthless prince she can support.
Letting you live would make me a traitor to my kind and allow her to continue ruling.
But in either case, this is not a place for you any longer. She and her council want you dead.”
Nugau unfolds, lifting Sascia with him. He pulls the bloodied bandage from her shoulder and smears the red on his scythe, speaking fast as though to convince himself as much as her.
“I’ll show them the blood. I’ll tell them I killed you and that Mooch carried your body into the Dark.
They will doubt me, but you’ll already be gone, and the Queen won’t be able to discredit me without proof.
I’ll make the Claim and weaken her power and force us to retreat to Itkalin.
And I’ll—I’ll find a way to seal the doors.
To keep the Ul’amoon away from you and keep your light bombs away from us. ”
“Come with me,” Sascia breathes.
He begins to shake his head, but Sascia raises her chin, getting right into his face, vexing as a gnat.
“Come with me,” she says again. “We’ll tell humans about the ymneen and the itka’s purpose, and we’ll rally the whole world behind us—because we’re all scared, yes, but we don’t want to be.
We want to be safe, human and aesin alike.
We’ll make them draw up a peace treaty that stops the nova-bombs and controls the Ul’amoon and promises whatever kind of help we can offer each other.
And with that treaty in hand, Mooch will bring you back here.
If your mother is as clever as she sounds, she will sign it. ”
At his back, the first aesin are visible through the curtain of moth wings, pushing down the narrow tunnel. Nugau must hear them, but he doesn’t look. His attention is locked on Sascia. His fingers are clenched tight around the scythe.
“No more blades,” Sascia says, clear and decided. “Nugau, come with me.”
She offers her hand, palm open, almost juvenile in its theatricality, but something about it breaks him. A quiver passes over his lips, a shine gathers at his eyes.
“I’ll come,” he whispers, “I’ll come, Sascia,” and he closes his hand around hers, and Mooch doesn’t need to be told or instructed; the black beneath them splits, and they slip through space and time.