Chapter 17 #2
The knight leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the arch of his stomach, just where the wings of his ribs came together.
She felt his flesh tremble beneath her lips and was struck suddenly by an awful terror.
He was so vulnerable like this, so fragile.
His head was thrown back, and even the skin of his throat was whole and unmarked, though she remembered the slick twist of scars.
She pulled away. ‘Perhaps we should not.’
‘What?’ He blinked down at her, flushed and unsteady.
Then his eyes went to her hands, and the knight realized she had curled them into fists, rather than reach for him.
He touched the white points of her knuckles, smiling a little.
‘Do you truly think you would hurt me, still? I am not afraid, Una.’
Darkly, she answered, ‘You would be, did you know my thoughts.’ She wet her lips. ‘It is not—gentle, the way I want you.’
‘Ah,’ the scholar said, ‘you’re the one who’s afraid.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Shall I tell you what I want? Shall I make an order of it?’ The knight drew a sudden, sharp breath and the scholar knew he was correct.
There was a certain pleasure, God knew, in following orders, in placing the heavy reins of your life in someone else’s hands.
All your sins were not truly yours, then; all your unruly desires were safely curbed.
But now the knight held her own reins, and her hands shook with the weight of them.
The scholar leaned down so that the stubble of his cheek scraped along her jaw. ‘Take me however you want. Use me cruelly or kindly, as you like. Command me, if you can.’
He smiled as he pulled away, a sly and arrogant smile that made the knight’s fists loosen suddenly. It was a thrown gauntlet, a taunt from a challenger who stepped grinning into the ring. It made a battle between them, and oh—she liked to win.
‘Though I warn you,’ the scholar added, and stroked the back of his hand down his own throat, where his scars had once been, but were no longer, ‘I have a history of mutiny.’
She said, shakily, ‘Then kneel, boy,’ without knowing if it was a plea or an order.
‘Make me,’ he answered, without knowing if he was begging or demanding.
The knight grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled him to the floor. He went too easily, forgetting to resist. His face was very hot. He could feel his pulse in his skull, his stomach, his cock.
The knight lifted the long hem of her shirt and let her knees fall apart. He said, in some torment, ‘You weren’t—you weren’t wearing anything under—God.’
He stared, trembling a little, until the knight made an impatient sound and reached for him. But she hesitated, hand hovering just before it reached him. Gently, the scholar covered her hand with his and brought it to the back of his head, curling her fingers into his hair.
Then she brought his mouth to her cunt and kept it there.
He came to her ravenously, almost roughly, and she had to pull his hair hard to slow him down, make it last. Still, the sight of him kneeling between her legs—his lips slick and swollen—
She pulled him away from her, panting, thighs shaking.
He groaned. ‘Just let me—you were close—’ Her scholar, always so articulate, was slurring slightly.
She stood, pulling him clumsily to his feet, bringing his mouth to hers. ‘Shh,’ she whispered into his mouth, and felt a tremor move through him.
Then she turned and shoved him down on the mattress. She stripped his trousers roughly from his legs—his fault, for coming fully dressed to her bed.
He protested. ‘I won’t last—you don’t understand how long I’ve—’
The knight climbed astride him. He struggled beneath her, and oh, she liked that. She caught his wrists and pinned them above his head easily, one-handed. He stopped struggling, abruptly, and she liked that even more.
The knight lowered herself onto his cock in one fast, merciless push, and rode him until he lost their first battle. He came hard and helpless, on a hoarse shout.
When the scholar recovered (he did not think he would ever recover), he turned in bed to find the knight breathing very carefully, strangely still. Almost resigned, as if she were accustomed to being used and left like this, flushed and hazy, unsated.
The scholar rolled her gently onto her back and slid his fingers between her legs.
‘You don’t have to—’ the knight said, but she had thought of those long, clever fingers often, almost more often than his mouth.
He spoke into the shell of her ear—of course he did.
Of course he would not stop talking, even now, with his hand working inside her and his cock pulsing thickly against her.
He told her how good she was, how beautiful, how badly he needed her.
He brought her to the very edge—and she hung there, tense and sweating, unable to let go.
It was a surrender, and a knight does not surrender until she’s told to.
The scholar said, softly, ‘It’s alright. I have you. Come, Una,’ and she did.
He held her afterward, her head on his chest, her leg pulled across his.
He stroked her hair, wonderingly, and touched her scars, until the owner of the boardinghouse knocked politely on the attic door and asked them to please leave, as this was a decent establishment, and neither of them wore wedding rings.
Later, the scholar asked the knight if she would like a ring. ‘Or, I don’t know, a proper ceremony, with a priest. Or a certificate from the state, though not under our legal names—’
‘No,’ the knight said, in some alarm. The crown and the church were the reason they were running; why would they seek sanction from their enemies?
‘Oh,’ said the scholar, in a slightly crushed voice.
‘But I hope you do not need a ring to keep you at my side,’ the knight said. Her voice was lower and more serious than she meant it to be. ‘I fear I am a jealous woman, and do not share what is mine.’
‘Oh,’ the scholar said again, in a much happier voice.
When, in the years that followed, the knight and the scholar felt their losses too keenly—if they missed the glory of war or the labor of study or the sounds of their own names—if they felt like cart horses cut loose from their traces, running in no direction save away from the lash—they reached for one another.
The knight would put her mouth to the scholar’s collarbone and his pulse would rise under her lips and they would think: We have this.
And it was enough, or would have been.
The knight, who had died many times, had no talent for survival. So the scholar was obliged to lay down certain rules.
The first rule was that they could make no home for themselves for very long, lest word spread of a tall, grim woman and a slim, nearsighted man, or of two strangers who spoke with old-fashioned accents.
The second rule was that they could not travel before the knight’s death or after the scholar’s birth, lest they forget themselves again, and become lost.
The third rule, which the knight resented most of all, and which the scholar was most adamant about, was that they could not interfere.
The wicked queen could not travel in time without her enchanted book, but there were so many versions of her already tangled into the history of Dominion that no era could be truly safe from her.
Even if she wasn’t wearing the crown, she was surely lurking nearby it—as a princess, perhaps, or a duke’s wife, an angel or an abbess, a minister or a general—tending her terrible dream as carefully and ruthlessly as a vintner tended his fields.
And now that dream was shriveling like a grape in a drought.
Dominion didn’t die outright. The knight had vanished only at the very end of the queen’s plot, after all. The crown had already been won, the crusades already fought. But the grail had never been found, and the Queen’s Champion had never returned from her grand quest.
There were many endings invented for her story, none of them satisfying.
Some claimed they had seen the knight themselves decades later, still miraculously young, and so she must have stolen the grail for herself.
Others said no, the dragon must have taken her, for she would never have abandoned her quest. (At this the knight would snort, meanly, and the scholar would contrive to step on her foot.)
But no one disputed what happened next: The first queen had died tragically young and named no heirs.
For the next few decades, the throne was traded between squabbling usurpers, like a sweet among children, while the Hyllmen and Galls quietly slipped Dominion’s leash, and the Hinterlands were lost once more.
If the wicked queen ever clawed her way back to the throne, it was not an empire she would rule, but only its remains. Wherever she was, whatever name she used: She was angry, and she was looking for them.
There could be no rumors of a white-haired woman who swung a blade as if it were a stalk of wheat.
There could be no whispers of a dark-eyed man who knew too much about the future.
There could be no change or break in the pattern of history, which the queen might follow, like a dropped stitch, back to them.
The scholar had explained all this to the knight many, many times, and still she argued with him.
If they found themselves lingering overlong after one of those paganish village festivals that had sprung up as the church lost its hold on the countryside—if they were dizzy with mead and sex and the playful taunt of the lyre in the distance—she might say, softly, ‘There’s a cottage out on the marsh, empty since their last peat cutter died.
’ Then, even more softly, ‘She might never find us.’
And the scholar would shake his head and say, ‘Rule one.’
Or, as they dragged a pair of mules over a craggy white mountaintop, she might burst out: ‘What of Hen? He suffered as much as you or I. You said she sent him back like us, over and over. Let me go back before the crusade, when he was a colt—’
‘Rule two,’ the scholar would say, wearily.
‘—and take him with us. You miss him, I know you do—’
‘Rule three, and no I don’t.’ (He did.) (A little.)
Or, worse, when they came upon three soldiers in Dominion red, laughing as they beat a beggar in the streets of Old Cantford, the knight would lunge forward—she carried no sword, but she was weapon enough—and the scholar would catch her wrist.
‘Please,’ he would say.
Eventually she would answer, grinding the words through her teeth, ‘As you will.’
Late on the night they left the beggar to his fate, she said, bitterly: ‘Well done, boy.’ She threw a branch onto the fire, and the sparks wavered in her vision, distorted by tears. ‘You’ve killed Una Everlasting once and for all.’
‘God knows I’m trying,’ the scholar answered, too sharply. Then, with more patience: ‘She has to die, for you to live. Or at least disappear so thoroughly that no one ever, ever finds her.’
‘I know,’ said the knight, and she did. ‘It’s only that I miss her, sometimes. I miss being…’
He said, gently, cruelly, ‘You were never a hero, love.’
She flinched, as he knew she would, because it was not only the beggar she wanted to save; it was the cities she’d burned and the soldiers she’d slain, the villages she’d pillaged and the heretics she’d put to the sword.
It was everyone who suffered still under the failing, grasping, lurching power of Dominion; it was her evil horse; it was her fathers, most of all, who were the first reason she held a sword, and the first people she hadn’t saved.
The scholar rose to his knees at her back. ‘You were only ever a weapon. A tool, fashioned for a purpose.’ He set his lips beneath her ear, so that she shivered. ‘But at least you are no longer hers.’
Then he lay back and pulled her astride him.
She took him deeply and not gently, the way he liked best, his wrists pinned, his pulse beating frantic in his throat.
She rode him until he arced beneath her and came, shouting her name so loudly against the dark that she knew she had not—not quite, not yet—disappeared.