Chapter 20
Moerrven
The cottage behind Kethilda’s library was too small for two grown men and a cat, which meant we lived in a state of permanent, accidental contact.
Not that I minded. By the fourth day we’d formed a routine that felt far too much like a permanent lifestyle choice and far too little like the fleeting moment in time I knew it to be.
Like we did every evening, we lay tangled skin to skin on the narrow bed with the lamp turned low and a borrowed Liminian ledger open against my raised knees.
Sky was reading with me, sprawled across my chest, warm as a banked fire.
Poppy had claimed the foot of the bed and was pretending to be asleep.
The window was open to the summer dark, and the whole of Frostholm had gone quiet around us.
“Read me the part again,” Sky said. “The bit Kethilda flagged.”
I flipped to the page and found it. “‘And the crossing,’” I read, “‘is not a single act but a road, which is to say it may be walked in both directions by one who knows the manner of it.’” I let the page settle.
“Kethilda thinks it confirms the rest. That the Order didn’t only send people through. They brought them back.”
Sky went still against my side. “Both directions,” he said. “A door that swings both ways.”
“So the account claims.”
“So the Liminal Order knows the technique for finding the way back. We just have to figure out how to find it from them.” He was talking faster now, the way he did when hope outran him.
“It’s a method. A thing a person could learn.
” He pushed up onto an elbow and looked at me, and his face in the lamplight was so openly, painfully hopeful that I had to work to keep mine still.
“Moerrven. I could go home. And come back. It goes both ways.”
“You wouldn’t have to pick,” I said, chest tightening with fear. Every page we turned took him closer to a door, and the door led away from me. And there was no guarantee of his return once he was back in his regular life.
I understood what we were doing in Kethilda’s cottage every morning.
We were building Sky a way out, a way home, a way away from me.
He bent over the ledgers because he wanted his brother back, his mother, his school, the whole warm, crowded world that had made him who he was.
And he was right to want it, and I wanted it for him.
I would have torn the island out of the sea with my hands to give it to him.
But every inch of progress was a stone out of the bridge I was standing on.
Trolls do not move. That is the thing humans never understand about us.
When a troll wants a town, but happens to be on a mountain, he does not weigh whether the mountain is convenient.
He builds the town on the mountain, because that is where he is.
You do not relocate a life because the ground is hard.
Not that he could ask me to join him. A troll in a world where everyone looked like Sky would be a disaster.
“Hey.” Sky’s hand came up and turned my face toward his, and his eyes had gone soft, and for one cold second I thought he’d heard the whole thing I hadn’t said. “You went somewhere.”
“I’m here.”
“Your body is here. Your mind just wandered miles away.” He studied me. “You’ve been working as hard as I have, for a guy who’s going to use it to leave.”
His words landed too close to the bone, and I flinched.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.
“I know how you meant it.”
“You’ve been good to me,” he said. “Really good. Patient. Which is not a word I would’ve put on you, day one. You’ve been a very good assistant, Moerrven Mossren.”
And there was the turn in him, the moment the warmth tipped over into heat, as it always did between us, the two states never far apart. He slid his hand from my jaw down the side of my throat, and his leg pressed in, and his weight shifted as he came up over me.
“A perfect assistant.” He took the ledger out of my hands and set it on the floor with a care that was its own kind of filthy. “Diligent. Patient. Excellent penmanship. Hours of service. Never once complained.”
“I complain constantly.”
“Mm. Not as much as I would be.” He pushed the blanket down off my chest and followed it with his mouth, a slow drag of lips down my sternum that made the muscles under it jump. “I think a contribution like that earns a reward. Don’t you?”
I had spent years not being touched. I thought I had made my peace with stone and solitude and the particular cold that lives in a long-unused body.
And when Sky crawled between my legs and put his mouth on my cock, it was not only pleasure.
It was a man being reminded he had a need that could not be sated by a good book and a warm cup of tea.
“Sky.”
He lifted his head and grinned at me. “Mm. Hold still and let me thank you properly for all of your work.” He nosed at the base of my cock where it lay heavy against my stomach, already thick, already wanting, traitor that it was.
He breathed me in then gave it a long, slow, luxurious lick.
He looked up the length of my body, his pupils blown dark, his mouth an inch from where I needed it, and he made me wait there, in the warm and the lamplight, while my pulse slammed.
“Look at you,” he said. “How did you spend so long pretending you didn’t know what you wanted?”
“I knew.” It came out of me unguarded. “I just didn’t expect to get it.”
His smile faltered, there and gone, and then he took me into his mouth, and I lost the thread of every thought I had been so carefully managing.
He was good at this, as if he had studied the art of sucking cock.
And I appreciated the master who’d taught him such skill.
He took me deep on the first stroke, deeper than the difference in our sizes should have allowed.
He swallowed against the head of my cock, then forced me into his throat, and it took every single ounce of control in my body not to rut up into him as he swallowed around my shaft.
I reached down and stroked his jaw as he braced himself on my thighs and sucked me like he wanted to pull me deep inside him and make me part of him, alternating between licking and sucking the shaft, and deep, devastating strokes that looked impossible and felt like we would be joined like that forever.
What he was doing looked like submission, but I knew better.
Every time he let me into his throat, he owned another part of me.
Every time he lifted, taking a deep breath, I whimpered like an addict unable to get his drug of choice.
Then he impaled his mouth on my cock, tight heat enveloping me, and all was right in the world again.
His pace was brutally fast and a tightening low in my groin told me my orgasm was growing close. He had taught me to read the signs closely, because my orgasms were his, and they required his permission in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever get enough of.
“Sky, I’m not going to last, if you—”
He pulled off long enough to say, “That’s the idea, big guy,” his lips wet and obscene, his eyes shining. “Let go.”
I tried to hold it. I wanted to make it last because lasting was the only way I knew to keep anything. But when he lifted his eyes to me all I saw was permission. Let go. I’ve got you. It’s allowed.
So I came down his throat with my hand fisted in his hair and his name breaking apart in my mouth. He licked and sucked, devouring every last drop like he was starved for it, swallowing it down. Swallowing me down, so I would know all day that he had a part of me inside him.
He crawled up the bed and knelt over my face, offering me my second orgasm.
His hands on my horns while he fucked my mouth like it was his hole to use sent my body spiraling over the edge as he flooded me with his cum.
I sucked him long and slow, gentling the pressure but holding him there well after his orgasm had passed.
“You okay?” he asked, stroking my trolgar as I held onto his soft cock like a lifeline. I nodded, because I didn’t want to let go. “Okay, sweetheart. You can hold me a little while longer.”
Eventually, I felt okay to let go, and he climbed off of me and settled beside me. I waited for his breathing to slow, for his muscles to go slack, and I slipped out of the bed.
I found paper. I sat with the quill freshly dipped and unmoving for a long while, while the cottage ticked and Poppy rearranged herself in the warm place I had vacated.
The first draft asked the question plainly, and I fed it to the stove. The second buried the question so deep that Thessaly would have needed a mining permit to find it. The stove took that one as well. The third struck the proper balance, by which I mean it lied with dignity.
Dear Thessaly,
I am researching a matter for the next novel.
A troll character and a human character, if you can imagine such a pairing.
The story requires a horn-binding, and the human has no horns, and I cannot write my way around the problem.
You understand charm-craft better than anyone living.
Could elven magic carry a trolgar into one born without it?
Say a piece of horn, freely given, worked to lie against the skin.
I know it’s no replacement for the gland, but if my human character could feel even a modicum of the trolgar bond, it would be delicious. For my readers, of course.
Yours,
Moerrven
I read it back twice. It was the least convincing lie I had ever produced. I added a note about sending any response to Frostholm, and sealed it before I could feed it to the stove with its brothers.