Edria
The house sits half a mile past the mill creek, tucked behind a stand of birch trees that screen it from the road. It belongs to one of Nyrius's riders — a small stone building, two rooms, a hearth that draws well and a wood stack that someone replenished recently.
I stand in the door frame for a moment after we arrive and breathe.
No lane noise. No whispers cutting off when I walk past. No one watching from doorways with careful, assessing eyes. Just cold air and birch trees and the sound of the creek in the distance.
"Better?" Nyrius asks, behind me.
"Ask me after I've been inside for an hour."
He takes my coat.
He makes the fire while I relax on the low couch and watch him work.
There's something consistently surprising about Nyrius doing ordinary things — building a fire, pouring water, pulling bread and salt meat from the pack one of his men brought ahead.
He does it without self-consciousness, without the performance of a lord managing beneath his station.
He just does it, because it needs doing.
The fire catches. The room warms.
He sits beside me on the couch and hands me a cup of something warm — not tea, something with spice in it that spreads heat down my chest on the first sip. I wrap both hands around it and stare at the fire for a while.
"Say it," he says.
"Say what?"
"Whatever you've been turning over since we left the village." He doesn't look at me, just watches the fire. "You've been quiet since the lane."
I turn the cup in my hands. "I've been thinking about the child." I pause. "About what I'm actually capable of giving them."
He waits.
"I grew up in a failing forge learning how to survive, not how to live.
" I set the cup down. "I've been a criminal.
I've been arrested, accused of treason, and spent over a week in a prison cell.
Half the village thinks I'm either a traitor or a harlot, and the other half is being polite because they're scared of you.
" My eyes watch the fire. "What kind of life is this child coming into? "
"An honest one," he says.
"That's not an answer."
"It is, actually." He turns to face me. "You spent three years doing something dangerous and uncomfortable and deeply illegal because it was the only way to keep your brother alive.
That's not a criminal's character — that's a mother's.
You've been doing it before you even knew you were going to be one.
" He takes my hands in his. "The fears you have right now, about being enough, about the world being too difficult — those fears are the proof that you're going to do this well.
People who don't care don't lie awake worrying about it. "
"I never thought I was capable of this," he says quietly.
"Any of it. I've governed these territories for thirty years and I did it from a distance because distance was safe.
No attachment, no exposure, nothing that could be used against me.
" He squeezes my fingers. "You made that impossible.
And I have never been less sorry about anything. "
I lean into him, and he puts his arm around me, and we sit like that while the fire settles into a steady burn.
Then I turn my face up to his.
He kisses me softly — forehead first, then my lips, his hand coming up to the back of my neck. I kiss him back, and then I kiss him properly, both hands moving to his chest.
He pulls me closer.
I work at the buttons of his shirt until it comes free and push it off his shoulders.
His chest is warm under my palms — muscle and dark skin, the landscape of him familiar now in a way that still makes my breath short.
I run my hands over his chest, down his sides, feeling him respond to every movement.
He makes a low sound against my mouth.
He pulls my shirt over my head and cups my breasts in both hands, his thumbs moving in slow circles that pull heat up through my chest and into my throat.
I suck in a breath and my fingers find his hair, gripping, as he works his hands over me with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who has learned exactly what I respond to.
He lowers his head and takes one nipple into his mouth — warm and deliberate, tongue and teeth working in a rhythm that makes me gasp and clutch his shoulders. The pleasure runs from there down through my stomach and lower, spreading and pooling.
I throw my head back. A shiver runs the full length of my spine.
I can feel him hard against me through his remaining clothes, pressing where my thighs have settled across his lap. He moves his mouth to my other breast and I tighten my fingers in his hair and hold on.
We shed the rest quickly — his hands, my hands, mutual impatience that ends with his clothes on the floor beside mine.
I wrap my fingers around his cock, already thick and urgent, and draw them slowly down the length of him. He groans and buries his face between my breasts for a moment, his hands gripping my hips.
I shift my weight, position him at my entrance, and lower myself onto him.
The sound he makes against my skin is low and helpless. I settle fully into his lap, knees on the outside of his thighs, and stay still for one breath while every nerve adjusts to the fullness of him.
Then I begin to move.
Long, slow rolls of my hips — lifting and dropping, taking my weight on my knees, setting a rhythm that I feel in my thighs and my stomach and the heat building at my center.
He holds my backside in both hands, firm and possessive, and thrusts up to meet each movement, driving deeper than the angle gives on its own.
His mouth finds my neck, my collarbone, working warm trails across my skin. I moan close to his ear and feel him shudder.
I quicken the pace. His hands tighten. My legs tremble with the effort and the pleasure compounding on itself, tighter and more urgent with every drop into his lap.
He kisses my collarbone, my throat, his teeth grazing the side of my neck as I gasp and grip his shoulders hard. My insides pull taut and quiver around him, and then the climax breaks through me in long, crashing waves — I moan and cling to him while the pleasure rolls and doesn't stop.
He pulls my mouth to his and kisses me fiercely, swallowing the sounds I make, his hips driving up into me faster as my walls close tight around him. He groans into the kiss and his whole body goes rigid, his hands locking at my hips, his release hitting in deep, shuddering pulses.
We stay tangled together while the fire burns low.
Eventually we find the blanket folded over the couch's arm and pull it across both of us. I rest with my head on his chest, his arm around my shoulders, the room warm and quiet.
"A house," I say. "Eventually. Not the forge — the forge stays the forge. But a house with a room for the baby and a kitchen that doesn't smell of coal."
His chest moves with something close to a laugh. "Done."
"And Finn can come and go as he wants."
"Obviously."
"And Papa's leg gets a proper healer, not just the apothecary."
"Already arranged." He kisses the top of my head. "Anything else?"
I think about it. The fire. The warm cup. The birch trees outside and the creek in the distance and Nyrius's heartbeat steady under my ear.
"Ask me in six months," I say. "When the baby's here and I know what we actually need."
His arm tightens slightly. "Six months."
I close my eyes and let the quiet exist around us, unhurried and uncomplicated, and I don't count a single cost.