Chapter 7
Pip
“Do you think Aeldryc might be avoiding me?” I asked.
The footman he’d sent to check on me set my lunch on the desk and took a step back, looking startled enough that I wondered if it was not appropriate to coax a footman into a quick chat.
“Sir?”
“I might have gotten a little carried away on our ride out to Clovermere. And now, he keeps refusing to do another. He insists his day is full of important meetings.”
“He is the commander of the Grey Guard. He does have important meetings.”
“Oh, I’m sure he does! I’m just worried I got carried away on the ride the other day, and now he’s leaving me to die of boredom in this bedroom.”
The footman cleared his throat, his eyes darting towards the door. “Very well, sir.”
“We needed to get to Clovermere, and I rode in his lap, but there was no choice, since I don’t know how to ride.”
The footman started to say something, then stopped himself.
“What? What were you going to say?” I asked.
“Nothing, sir.” He took a step towards the door.
“Why does everyone act like it’s odd that I don’t know how to ride? Some people don’t grow up around horses. Surely there are poor people in Qoksmere.”
The footman cleared his throat.
“What? Just spit it out.”
“I was just curious why the Commander didn’t take you in a carriage or a cart.”
My eyes widened, and I leapt to my feet. “There are carriages? That is a good question.”
The footman looked slightly panicked as I approached him, and hurriedly backed out of the room. “It seems the Queen is ringing for me. Good day, sir.” He slammed the door in my face, and I heard the distinctive snick as he turned the lock.
Perhaps I’d been a bit too aggressive with my interrogation.
I picked at my lunch, turning the footman’s words over in my head, but I couldn’t sit still.
I’d already done two drawings and taken three showers—the allure of unlimited hot water was too strong—but a frantic energy still thrummed under my skin.
Being trapped was driving me crazy. I needed to move.
I stood and paced across my room, then paused, staring at the dresser. It was just the right height to use as a barre. If I moved the chair in the corner over by the desk, there was enough room to do a little warm up, and maybe a barre routine.
I didn’t have anything to wear to dance in.
Qoksmere fabrics were dreadfully stiff. But I did have the pink jockstrap I’d arrived in.
I’d been washing it in the sink every night before bed, drying it by the fire so I’d have clean underwear the next day.
And I was accustomed to dancing in just a jock strap: that was the entire second half of my cage dance routine.
So I stripped off my clothing before starting with stretches. The horseback ride had done a number on my inner thighs, my lower back was tight, and my hamstrings were screaming. I worked through a warm-up and series of stretches that always helped with stiffness.
Then, I moved on to a barre sequence I knew by heart; relevés, pliés, and port de bras with my arms sweeping through the air. The room had stone floors, which were murder on bare feet, but I’d danced on worse.
I moved into combinations. A simple one at first: glissade, jeté, land, repeat. Now that I’d moved the chair, there was enough room, and the tapestries blurred as I picked up speed. I could feel the tension leaving my body, melting into the movement, being sweat out and spun out and kicked out.
Speaking of kicks.
I was warmed up enough for grand battements now, and there was something deeply satisfying about throwing your leg as high as it would go when you were frustrated and confused and trapped in a medieval fantasy bedroom by an absurdly sexy man.
The vase didn’t stand a chance.
It was a big, elegant ceramic thing, hand painted in blue and white, sitting on the edge of the dresser.
My grand battement caught it perfectly—the ball of my foot connecting with the curved belly.
The vase achieved a surprising amount of air and for one frozen second I thought it might land on the bed.
Then it hit the stone floor, shattering with a sound like a gunshot in a cathedral. Shards flew everywhere. I jumped back on instinct and my bare foot came down on a piece that sliced clean across the arch. The pain was a bright, sudden shock that stole my breath.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit—”
I hopped to the bed and sat down, pulling my foot up to look at it.
The cut was long but not deep—a clean line across the arch that was bleeding steadily in the way that foot cuts always bled, which was excessively and dramatically, as if my foot was auditioning for a horror movie.
Blood was dripping onto the stone floor, mixing with the ceramic dust, and I pressed the heel of my hand against it and tried to think.
Did they have band-aids? They had showers and plumbing and enchanted fire, but what about basic first aid? Was there a medieval equivalent, like a poultice or a salve? Was I supposed to pack it with moss and pray to a forest god?
I looked around the room for something to wrap it with and saw nothing useful. The bed linens were too thick to tear, and the shirts in the wardrobe were too far away.
It did something I wasn’t expecting. The pain lanced through the numbness I’d been hiding inside, and suddenly, it wasn’t just my foot that was bleeding. My pain was overwhelming, and it wasn’t just coming from my foot, it was coming from everything that had happened to me.
And nobody was coming. Nobody could help.
Not with the cut, specifically. Somebody probably would check on me eventually, if I yelled loud enough.
But no one could help me with being here, being gone, being disappeared from a world where I was already barely visible.
My boss at the bar would notice when I missed a shift and then replace me within the week.
My landlord would notice when rent was late and start the eviction process.
The tears came and I didn’t stop them. I was tired of stopping them. I let it happen (the ugly crying, the snot, the shaking) and pressed my bloody hand to my bloody foot, curled up on the bed, and just let out all of the emotions that I’d been forcing down.
The door burst open, and Aeldryc was standing in the doorway.
“What happened?”
“I kicked a vase.” My voice was thick and wrecked and I didn’t even try to make it sound light. “Like an idiot. And then I stepped on it. Also like an idiot.”
He was already moving. Crossing the room in three strides, crouching in front of me, his hands reaching for my foot with a gentleness that was so at odds with how he usually moved that it made me cry harder.
“Let me see.” He’d dialed back his usual commanding tone to something low and quiet.
I moved my hand. The cut was still bleeding, and Aeldryc studied it for a beat. He stood, disappeared into the corridor, and came back in under a minute with a basin of water, strips of clean linen, and a small clay pot of something that smelled like herbs and honey.
He knelt at my feet, cradling my foot in one hand and cleaning the cut with the other, his fingers careful around the edges of the wound. The linen was warm and damp and he worked in small, precise movements, clearing the blood, checking for ceramic fragments.
He reached for the clay pot. “It’s not deep. Ilyndra’s powder should heal it quickly. Is it okay if I use it?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and we both watched the magic work, sealing the wound in an impossible way. He grabbed a clean linen and wiped off the last of the blood, then set it aside, not letting go of my foot.
“Why were you crying?”
I frowned at him. “I cut my foot.”
“That was more than a cut foot cry.”
“Bad day,” I said. “Interdimensional jet lag. You know how it is.”
He didn’t smile or look away. He just stayed there, on his knees, holding my ankle, and waited. Maybe this was part of his interrogation technique.
“I don’t have anyone.” Once I got the hardest part out, the words just kept coming. “Back home. There’s no one who’ll miss me. No one who’ll come looking. I just… disappeared, and it doesn’t matter because I was already kind of disappeared.”
Aeldryc’s thumb moved once across my ankle, a slow deliberate press, and then went still. His grip was snug and oddly reassuring.
“Can you—” my voice cracked, and I tried again. “Would you just hold me? For a minute. I know you’re not a hugger, I know you’re like, Captain Stern McStoicface, but I really need someone to—”
He was on the bed before I finished the sentence.
I don’t know how he moved that fast, but he was pulling me against him, one arm around my back and the other cradling the back of my head, and I was pressed against his chest. My cheek was against the leather of his armor, and I was shaking.
It was the first time anyone had comforted me in so long that I couldn’t remember the last time.
A sob slipped from my lips, and his arms tightened around my waist.
This time the emotions hit harder, and he pulled me closer against his chest and didn’t let go. He was solid and warm and immovable, like a wall that had decided to be kind, and I pressed my face into the hollow of his throat and breathed in leather and iron and slowly the shaking eased.
I pulled back enough to see his face.
His eyes were on mine: violet, dark, and so close I could see the silver flecks in them that I’d missed before.
His jaw was tight. His breathing was careful, measured, the kind of breathing you did when you were controlling something.
His hand was still on the back of my head, fingers threaded into my hair.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
His fingers traced the shape of my jaw, settling underneath it, tilting my face up to his.
He pressed his mouth to the corner of my eye where the tears were still wet and he kissed the salt off my skin.
He moved to my other eye, then to my cheekbone where a tear had dried, then to the bridge of my nose, swollen from crying, and finally, he kissed the hot, tender skin just below my eye.
He was kissing the tears off my face.
Every one of them, his mouth moving across my skin like he was erasing every trace of the crying, and each press of his lips sent a shock through me that was so far beyond anything sexual I’d ever felt that I couldn’t categorize it.
It was intimate in a way that sex had never been intimate.
It was personal in a way that made me feel cracked open and seen and absolutely terrified.
His mouth found the tear track that had run down to my jaw. He kissed along the line of it, slow, his lips warm against my skin, and when he reached the corner of my mouth, he stopped.
He hovered, a breath away from kissing me. “Tell me to stop.”
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Don’t you dare stop.”
His hand tightened in my hair and he tilted my head just a little, before dropping his lips to my mouth. Finally. And oh god, oh fuck, oh every expletive in every language.
It was consuming. His mouth was hot and firm and he kissed the way he did everything: with total focus, like I was the only thing in the room, the only thing in the world, the only thing that had ever required his attention.
His hand cupped the back of my skull and tilted my head exactly where he wanted it.
I opened for him like I’d been waiting my entire life to open for exactly this mouth.
Which, honestly, maybe I had.
A desperate, needy moan came from somewhere so deep inside me I didn’t recognize the origin.
His tongue stroked mine and the taste of him was strange, ancient, like cold iron and the way a forest smells where the roots go deep.
I grabbed the front of his leather chestplate and pulled him closer, harder, needing more, needing everything.
His other hand moved down from my back to my waist, cupping the bare skin of my ass to pull me close, massaging and squeezing until I was rutting into his stomach.
His fingers dipped lower, teasing at my balls, and I broke the kiss, letting out a rough sob of pleasure as his fingers teased the base of my cock.
“The thing you’re wearing,” he said, eyes on me. “It’s obscene.”
I sat up, still straddling him, and let him look.
He traced my abdominal muscles, and I shivered at the rough brush of his calloused fingers against my skin.
They wandered lower, exploring the strap around my waist, the edge of the pouch in front, and finally, down over the ridge of my erection where it pressed against the fabric.
“It’s a jockstrap. It’s very popular where I’m from.”
“It covers nothing.”
“That’s the point. To let you look.” I rocked against his hand and watched his eyes go dark, the violet swallowed by the black of his pupils.
A sharp rap on the door froze us both. He didn’t seem surprised.
“When I went to get Ilyndra’s powder, I sent for someone to clean this up.”
I pouted. “Can’t it wait?”