Chapter Thirty-One #4
He kisses me, and I sense his fear. I lift my skirt as he unties his breeches.
He’s going to take me here on the altar. And I need it. I need to feel him inside me. I need to become one with him—
My eyes snap open, and I’m back in the clearing. Ronan’s hand is still in mine, but we’re on the ground now, propped up against something. A log, I realize, as I scrape my hand on bark when I pull myself up.
“They’re back,” yells Taran, alerting the others. “You were out for over an hour.”
Ronan looks at me, his eyes clouded with desire, and I know he had the same vision I had. His feelings are urging him to grab me and put me onto Kira, and that desire echoes between us, compounding and strengthening with each reverberation.
“Blessed Mother Kerensa, your hands,” says the priestess.
I lift our hands, and they’re covered in blood.
The wounds I gave us in the dream. They’re real.
The priestess reaches for us, reciting a prayer and preparing to heal us with her magic, but Ronan beats her to it, the sight of my blood snapping him out of his lust.
“Here,” says Taran, handing us a damp handkerchief. “Please let me take this torch away from here. You have to see that whatever this is, it’s hurting you. Physically, now.”
The priestess mutters something in Orsan. We’ve learned a little now from living here, but she speaks too quickly for me to understand her.
Taran speaks to her, his voice rising as the exchange continues.
“What is she saying?” asks Ronan, climbing to his feet and pulling me up with them.
I pick up a few words here and there—please, speak, help—and our names. The priestess shakes her head and turns and leaves abruptly.
“Taran,” says Ronan, a question and warning in his tone.
“She’s no danger to you. The sight of the blood at the altar of Kerensa reminded her of some ancient Orsan superstition. She refused to explain, but she asked if she could do a ritual of protection over you. I declined on your behalf. It would have involved the sacrifice of a lamb.”
I shudder. He was right to decline.
“What are you thinking, darling?” asks Ronan.
“Just wondering if the Orsa might know something about the Shadowbound Prophecy. Maybe the apocrypha were preserved in their myths and superstitions.”
“I can follow after Priestess Greta and find out,” says Taran, already heading in that direction.
“Tomorrow,” says Ronan. “Tonight, we owe my wife a celebration.”
My wife. My heart skips a beat when he says it.
We head from the clearing into the meadow where Kira and now Bitey have made their nests.
The others have brought the dining tables out from the cottage, setting them with arrangements of bluebells, white hyacinths, and pale daffodils and a spread made of dishes from four cultures: roast chicken and rabbit prepared in the Selaran style, stewed carrots and parsnips from Nithyria, and an Enezian vanilla cake served with Orsan blackberry jam for dessert.
And the drinks span our cultures as well. Nithyrian red wine, casks of beer and rum from Selara and Enez that Larus and the others obtained during their travels, and a bottle of a fermented honey mead that the Orsa serve on special occasions.
Which is to say that after just an hour or two, everyone is pleasantly drunk and unpleasantly full.
Ronan and I are sitting together at the end of the table nearest to the woods, my legs draped over his as the others talk and dance and sing, when Larus comes over.
“May I speak with you?” he asks Ronan.
“Him?”
“Just a quick word, man to man,” he says.
A word and a warning, most likely, but I won’t refuse him the honor of being the man to put my new husband in his place. It’s a time-honored tradition: the warnings given by each spouse’s parents to protect their child.
And Larus is like a father to me. In many ways, he’s more like my father than my actual father was.
“Go on,” I say, kissing Ronan’s cheek.
Quinn leaves Octavia with Typhon and comes to join me once Ronan is gone.
“Take a walk with me,” she says.
I grin. She’s taking on the role of Ronan’s mother, giving me a warning of my own. “Lead the way.”
Quinn leads me back into the woods along the same path, her cane in one hand, a flame in the other to see in the dusk.
She turns to me, her face serious. “Sylvie, as Ronan’s guardian, I must be certain you understand your obligations to him. You must honor him, but do not obey him. He has enough people obeying him. Make him obey you.”
“Done.” My mind jumps to the incident in which we put out all the lights in the palace.
“And you must swear to always keep him in his place—” She stops abruptly. “Did you hear that?”
I listen to the night-quiet woods, my body on high alert. There are a few crickets chirping and the hooting of an owl in the clearing where we held the ceremony, but no snapping of branches.
Still, I prepare my shadows. I have no weapon on me, but I am weapon enough.
“Tell me to stop,” comes a voice from far away.
It’s coming from off the path somewhere in the woods.
“Quinn,” I say.
“Shh. I’m trying to hear them.”
“Tell me to stop,” says the voice again, and my stomach sinks when I recognize it. “Tell me you don’t want this.”
Seth.
“Oh, hell no.” I am not standing here listening to my brother and Taran do…whatever it is that they’re doing.
Or not doing. Preferably not doing.
I start walking back to the reception.
“Stop, they’ll hear you,” says Quinn.
“Good!”
“Sylvie, come on. Close your ears for a minute. Just let me have this. I have to know what’s going on with them.”
“You know what I want,” says Taran, his voice low and frustrated.
“No, no, no, no,” I say, jamming my fingers into my ears. “You stay if you want to. I’m going back.”
“You cannot leave a handicapped woman on her own in the woods. Don’t make me restrain you.”
“You wouldn’t. Wait, are you arguing that I can’t leave you because you’re handicapped while simultaneously threatening to overpower me?”
“Would either of those work?”
“No!”
“Tell me this isn’t enough for you,” says Seth, his voice closer, calling after Taran.
Good, they’ll hear us soon.
I open my mouth to yell, and Quinn puts her hand over it. “I’m begging you. Taran will never tell me what happened.”
“You need more than this?” says Seth, and I hear him push Taran into a tree.
Taran moans.
I bite Quinn’s hand, and she reaches the other one around to cover my mouth again. I reach out with my shadows, but I’m too far from Ronan or the torch.
“Tell me this isn’t enough for you.”
“It isn’t,” says Taran weakly.
“Are you sure? Or is this exactly what you need? Do you want me to stop?”
I stop fighting Quinn and listen. If Taran refuses him and Seth doesn’t listen, I’m stepping in. I don’t care that he’s my brother. I won’t stand by and let something like that happen.
I hear nothing at first. No refusal from Taran.
Then there are soft sounds: the rubbing of fabric, the scraping of bark. Quiet moans and gasps.
“Don’t stop,” says Taran through a sigh. He curses in Orsan.