Chapter 25
MARIS
The bakery smells like yesterday's bread when we get home.
I set Elin down inside the door and she goes straight for the stairs without being told, trailing Pip behind her, moving with boneless exhaustion because she used up everything she had.
I follow her up, sit on the edge of her bed while she pulls the blanket up herself, and stay until her breathing evens out. It takes less than three minutes.
I go back downstairs and stand in the middle of my kitchen and don't do anything for a while.
The bread pans are still on the rack from yesterday. The counter is clean. Through the front window, the square is ordinary — a dog crossing the cobblestones, two men talking near the fountain, a woman closing her stall for the evening. Completely ordinary. As if this morning didn't happen.
Pella was in that crowd. I keep coming back to that.
Pella, who buys honey muffins four mornings a week and once helped me carry flour sacks up the back stairs when I had a bad wrist. She wasn't shouting, but she was there, and she stayed there, and I watched her face when Geld was talking and she wasn't arguing with him.
What am I supposed to do with that? What am I supposed to do with any of it?
I'm still standing there when the knock comes.
Two raps. I cross to the door and open it without the two-inch gap I usually leave myself.
Kaedrin steps inside. He moves carefully, which is new — one hand pressing briefly against his left side before he drops it. I notice but don't ask yet.
"How is she?" he says.
"Asleep." I turn back toward the kitchen. "Come in."
I put the kettle on because it gives my hands something to do. He takes the chair at the worktable and waits, and the quietness of him is steadying in a way I don't examine too closely.
"You came through," I say. "At the council. That was—" I stop. "I didn't know if you'd make it in time."
"I said I would."
"People say things." I set out two cups. "You actually did it." I glance over my shoulder at him. "Thank you."
He nods once. "I have everything now. Maps in his own hand, his mark on them. Routes, drop points, all of it. The council will have no more room to doubt which direction this points."
"Good." I pour the water and bring both cups to the table. "Good."
I sit across from him and wrap my hands around the warm ceramic and stare at the steam coming off the surface.
"Do you think it goes back?" I ask. "To what it was before?"
"It may take time—"
"That's not an answer." I look up at him.
"Pella was in that crowd. Dora from the weaver's shop.
People I have known since I was a girl." I set the cup down.
"I watched them stand there while someone called my daughter a monster, and they didn't leave.
Some of them nodded." I press my palms flat on the table.
"Those are people I'll still be selling bread to next month. If they'll buy it."
He doesn't fill the silence with reassurance. He waits, which is what I actually needed.
"I was going to leave," I say. "I made the plan in my head, more than once.
The strongbox under the floorboard, the horse in the stable, Elin's doll and three changes of clothes.
" I frown and my eyes shift to the window.
"Rip her out of the only home she's ever had, every routine she knows, and take her somewhere new and start over.
" I exhale through my nose. "And then what?
Wait for the next drought? The next famine?
The next animal that dies near a forest and gives people something to point at? "
"Maris."
"She's going to keep looking more like you.
" I say it evenly, without accusation. "Every month, a little more.
Her skin, her ears, her eyes. And I love what she is.
I would never change it. But I also know this town, and I know what fear does to people who think they're protecting something.
" I sigh and shrug. "So I don't know that it goes back.
I don't know that it gets better. I don't know how to stop waiting for it to happen again. "
He stands up. He comes around the table and I don't move away, and he puts his arms around me from behind, his chin near the top of my head, one hand coming up to the end of my braid.
He pulls the tie loose slowly and combs his fingers through the bottom of my hair, just the ends, a slow and careful motion.
"You won't face it the same way again," he says. "Not alone. Not with no one between you and whatever comes at her."
"You can't promise that. The courts—"
"I'm not talking about the courts." His hand moves through the ends of my hair again, unhurried. "I'm talking about me. What I intend."
I don't respond to that immediately.
"I regret not being here," he says. "From the beginning. I missed three years with her, and I watched that hall today, and I couldn't get to her fast enough. I couldn't be the one to hold her."
"You weren't there because I didn't—" I start.
"I'm not placing that on you." His voice is even. "I'm not. What happened was mine to prevent and I didn't prevent it." His hand stills at the base of my braid. "I just wanted to be the one holding her. And I wasn't."
The kitchen is very quiet. The candle on the worktable moves in a draft from somewhere.
I turn around.
He's closer than I expected, and his silver eyes are on my face with an openness I haven't seen from him in daylight — none of the controlled stillness, just what's underneath it. I reach up and put my hand flat against his chest. His heartbeat is steady under my palm.
He leans down and kisses me.
He kisses the way he does everything — with full attention, nothing held back. I open my mouth and he takes the invitation, his tongue sliding against mine slow and deliberate, and the warmth that moves through me has nowhere to go except forward.
His hands find my sides. They move up my ribs and back down, tracing the curve of my waist, and then he palms my backside and pulls me in hard against him. The press of his erection against my stomach is unmistakable and my breath goes short against his mouth.
I pull back just enough to look at him. I bite my lower lip.
"Bedroom," I say.
His pearly eyes are dark. He nods once.
We make it to the doorway before he pulls me back against him, his mouth finding my neck, and I turn into it and get my hands on the buttons of his shirt.
He works the laces at my back. We pull and tug our way down the hall, shedding pieces as we go — his shirt on the floor by the door, my dress half-unlaced before we reach the bed.
I shrug it off my shoulders and it drops, and the lamplight enshrouds me while he watches me with the same open attention he had in the kitchen. No control over it, no filter.
I reach out and get his belt.
We finish undressing each other with the unhurried focus of people who have decided to take their time and mean it.
His hands slide up my sides and cup my breasts, his thumbs brushing over my nipples, and the contact sends a quick, bright sensation through me that tightens my whole chest, and my thigh clench.
I exhale against his throat. He rolls each nipple gently between his fingers until I'm pulling at his shoulders, and I moan, leaning into his touch.
He tips me back onto the bed.
He kneels above me and takes his time, which I should have expected from him. His fingertips trace from my hip inward, along my inner thigh, no rush in any of it, and I feel every nerve under my skin wake up ahead of his touch. I grip the blanket.
His fingers find the junction of my thighs and trace the outer edge of me first, light and exploratory.
My hips lift toward the contact and he gives me a little more — fingers slipping between my folds, slick immediately with how ready I am.
A slow, deliberate stroke upward and his fingertip finds my clit, swollen and aching, and I suck in a sharp breath.
"There," I manage with a strangled moan.
He circles. Slow, steady circles, adjusting to every response, reading me.
The pressure builds in rolling waves and my thighs fall open further and my hand goes to his forearm not to stop him but to have something to hold onto.
He keeps the rhythm and I stop tracking anything except the sensation climbing through my core, tightening, rising — and then it breaks, a hard, full-body release that pulls a moan from my throat and arches my spine off the mattress.
I come back to myself slowly, my whole body loose and warm.
He hovers over me. His cock is hard and flushed, pressed against my inner thigh, a bead of moisture at the tip. I reach up and pull him down by the back of his neck and kiss him, and he groans into my mouth, low and rough.
I feel him position himself at my entrance.
He pushes inside slowly, filling me by degrees, and I wrap my arms around his neck and breathe through the stretch until he's seated fully inside me, his hips flush against mine. He stills for a moment. I feel his heartbeat where our bodies meet.
Then he moves.
Long, deep thrusts, each one drawing out and pressing back in with a steadiness that winds the pressure up fast despite the fact that I just came.
His hands grip my hips, fingers pressing into the curve of them, angling me slightly upward, and the new angle sends a sharp pulse of pleasure through me on every stroke.
I move with him, rolling my hips to meet each thrust, and he groans against my mouth, rough and unguarded, nothing of the controlled hunter left in the sound.
We find the rhythm together. My nails press into his shoulders and his pace builds, and the pressure in my core climbs again, faster this time, more urgent. His forehead comes down against mine and our breathing tangles between us and I stop trying to be quiet.
The climax hits me and him at almost the same moment — mine first, a sharp, deep wave that clenches around him, and then his, his groan muffled against my neck, his hips pressing into me and going still as he spends himself inside me, his whole body shuddering once before he exhales long and slow.
We lie tangled together while the lamp gutters low. I press my ear to his chest and listen to his heartbeat slow down. His arm settles around my shoulders, heavy and warm.
The day replays behind my eyes in fragments — Elin's face buried in my collar, the crowd noise, Hestara's flat verdict. And underneath all of it, the fact that Kaedrin came through the door of that hall and changed the room.
"Do you think we have a future?" I ask. I say it to his chest, not to his face. It's easier that way.
He's quiet long enough that I start to pull back from the question. Then he says, "I've thought about it."
I lift my head. "You have?"
"More every day." He doesn't elaborate, and I don’t need him to. The simplicity of it lands more solidly than a speech would.
I put my head back down against him. Outside, the square is quiet. A few rooms over, Elin is sleeping, her pointed ears uncovered and her steely eyes closed, and she has no idea that the two people who made her are lying in the dark trying to figure out what comes next.
I press closer to him and close my eyes.
It's enough. For tonight, it's enough.