Chapter 13 #2
But Matilda… Matilda called it what it was. Something that had happened to a boy.
"I was old enough tae ken better and young enough nae tae care." He paused. "It was a lesson."
"A costly one."
"Aye," he said. "Most useful ones are."
She was quiet for a moment, still tracing.
He could feel the exact position of her fingertip, the way you felt a flame held close. Not burning, not yet, but the heat of it impossible to ignore.
Nobody had touched that scar in fifteen years, either by accident or on purpose. He hadn't let anyone close enough to find it. Yet here she was, and what she was doing with it was not pity; she was just learning it.
The same way she'd learned the keep and learned his men and learned the garden and the burn and the sound of the tide off the north cliffs. Quietly, thoroughly, with a dedication that felt as though it was something worth knowing.
Something in his chest that he had kept at a careful distance for fifteen years moved closer without his permission.
His mind cast back to the rule. He had made it in the storage room the first night and held it on the road and in the tent and on the crossing and in the kitchen, and he was keeping it here.
He did not take more than she offered, and he did not let what was happening in his chest show on his face more than he could reasonably prevent.
He was aware, in a way that was becoming difficult to manage, that he was preventing less than he'd intended.
What he wanted was not complicated.
It was, in fact, entirely simple, which was its own kind of problem.
He wanted to lift his hand from the rim of the tub and put it against her face and bring her mouth to his, and he wanted to do it slowly. He wanted the steam and the firelight and all the time she needed and none of the waiting.
He wanted to stop being careful. He had been careful for almost two weeks, and careful had cost him something, and he was running a balance on it that was approaching its limit.
He kept his hands where they were.
She moved her finger to his collarbone. The line of his shoulder.
Her wrist dipped close to the surface of the water and he watched her face instead of her hand—the small line between her brows, the focused, genuine attention she gave things she was actually trying to understand rather than things she was performing interest in—and then he looked at the wall instead because watching her face was not helping him hold the rule together.
The wall did not help either. Nothing in this room was going to help.
"Ye're very still," she said, without looking up.
"Aye."
"Is that difficult?"
The honest answer was that difficult didn't begin to cover it.
That he was holding himself in place by the edge of his teeth, that the specific weight of her fingertip against his collarbone was doing things to his self-possession that no amount of cold patrols in the dark would have managed to undo.
He considered all of that and gave her the version of it that was still true.
"Ye have nay idea."
She looked up at that. Her eyes met his and held for a moment, and something passed through them that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite a question but sat between the two. She looked back at her hand.
"Good," she said, very quietly.
He felt the word land somewhere between his ribs like an ember finding dry ground, and did not move a muscle, and understood with complete clarity that he was in a great deal of trouble.
She was taking her time, which was the thing he hadn't anticipated.
He had thought, in the part of his mind that was still capable of thought, that if she reached for him at all it would be brief and tentative, something to be gotten through.
Instead she was learning him the way she learned everything—quietly, thoroughly, without apology for the time it took—and the patience of it was considerably harder to withstand than urgency would have been.
His jaw was locked. His knuckles had gone pale against the rim of the tub.
He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that had moved well past inconvenient.
Then she spread her palm flat against his chest.
The breath left him as one long, slow exhale that he hadn't decided to release and couldn't stop, and under her hand his heart was going hard and fast and there was no amount of effort whatsoever that could disguise it.
There was nothing to be done about that.
The heart was not par tof the rule. The hands were the rule, and the hands were still where they were supposed to be.
"That," she said softly, her palm still flat against him, "is nae the heart of a man who's unaffected."
"Nay," he said. His voice had gone rough. "It isnae."
"Ye're nae going tae dae anything about it, are ye?"
"Nae yet."
She looked up at him fully then. "Why?"
He held her gaze. "Because I told ye two weeks. And because ye walked intae this room and reached fer me, and that matters more tae me than—" He stopped. Set his jaw. "The two weeks hold, Matilda."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at him. Then, very softly: "And if I dinnae want them tae?"
The question sat in the steam between them. He felt it the way he felt the bath going cold, slowly, and then all at once.
He looked at her.
At the hand still flat against his chest and the color in her face and the steadiness of her eyes, and he wanted to give her the answer she was asking for.
He also wanted to be certain that when he gave it, it was because she had slept on it and woken with it still true and chosen it in daylight rather than in a steam-warm room with the fire at their backs and two weeks of careful distance finally running out.
She deserved that. He was not going to shortchange it because the moment was convenient.
"Ask me that again tomorrow," he said, and his voice was not entirely steady. "In the mornin'. When the fire's cold and the steam's gone, and it's just a plain question in a plain room. If it's still what ye want then."
She looked at him for a long moment. Her hand was still on his chest. She nodded, once, the way she nodded when she was filing something away, not as a defeat.
She was looking at his face now. Not at the scar and not at her own hand but directly at him, steady and unhurried and taking in everything he was offering, which was more than he'd meant to offer and less than he had.
He let her look. There was no point in trying to manage his expression any further than he already was; she was too good at reading faces and they both knew it.
The point was the hands. The hands were still. Everything else she could have.
She leaned forward slightly.
He felt the shift before he saw it, the small change in the weight of the air between them, the warmth of her coming closer through the steam.
Her scent reached him: woodsmoke and lavender and underneath both of those, something that was just her, that he'd learned without meaning to over a few days in the same chamber and the same fire and the long quiet hours of the same dark.
He knew that scent the way he knew the sounds of his own keep, without thinking about it, in the part of him that tracked things automatically and never quite stopped.
He leaned forward.
"Ivar." His name in her mouth, very quiet.
"Aye."
"I'm nae afraid." She said it the way she said things she'd decided on. Flat, plain, no softness put around it as a buffer. "I want ye tae ken that. Whatever happens tomorrow."
He looked at her. At the steadiness of her eyes and the color in her cheeks and the hand still warm against his chest. "I ken," he said. "I've kent fer a while."
"Have ye?"
"Aye." The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.
Something shifted in her face at that, something that was almost a smile and was more than that and the space between them narrowed to the length of a breath.
Her hand was still flat on his chest, and he could feel his own heartbeat in his palms, and the fire at his back was the loudest thing in the room except for the two of them not quite closing the last distance.
He was looking at her mouth. She was looking at his.
The space still between them was the size of a single decision, and neither of them had made it yet, and the steam moved slowly between them, and the fire crackled, and the room held its breath along with them.
Three sharp knocks at the door.
Neither of them moved.
Three more. Harder. The knock of a man who knew exactly what he was interrupting and was doing it anyway because the alternative was worse.
"Me Laird." Torvald's voice had a specific quality to it when he was genuinely sorry, lower than usual, carefully neutral, making no attempt to pretend the timing was anything other than what it was. "King's men at the gate. More than last time. They're asking tae be received taenight."
Ivar closed his eyes.
He held them closed for one full second, long enough to breathe, enough to put what had been happening in this room somewhere he could retrieve it later, and then he opened them.
She was still close. Her hand still flat on his chest, her face still level with his, color in her cheeks from the steam and from something else entirely, and her eyes on his with an expression he was going to need considerably more time than he currently had to think about properly.
He looked at it anyway. One moment, no more, taking it in the way he took in things he intended to remember.
"Timing," she said, very quietly, "is an extraordinary thing."
"Aye." He held her gaze. "It is."
"Aye," he said, toward the door. The word came out rough, stripped of everything he would have put around it otherwise. "I'm coming."
She straightened.
She stepped back, her hand lifted from his chest, and the cold that moved in where her palm had been was immediate and unreasonable and entirely disproportionate to how small a thing the absence of one hand should have been.
He sat in it for one moment before he stood and reached for the linen folded over the chair.
She watched the way the water ran off his skin, and how the fire’s warmth reflected on his back.
She had turned to face the window, her shoulders straight, her hands clasped behind her but saw his reflection.
He watched her for one breath, and then he pulled himself back to what was waiting downstairs and started to dress.
Tunic. Belt. Boots. He moved through each piece with the efficiency of long practice, the kind of efficiency that came from having dressed in worse conditions than this and he used the familiarity of the routine to pull his mind back into the shape it needed to be in.
King's men. More than last time. Henry with his paper and his careful eyes and the questions he was going to find some way to answer without answering.
He reached for his cloak.
"Will ye be long?" she said, without turning from the window.
"I dinnae ken. Long enough."
"I'll wait up."
He looked at her back. At the straight set of her shoulders and the stillness that was hers. "Ye dinnae have tae."
She turned her head slightly, not quite far enough to look at him fully. "I ken I dinnae have tae." A pause. "I said I would."
He held that for a moment. Set it somewhere he could find it later when he was sitting across a table from Henry trying to be civil about things he had no intention of being civil about.
"Matilda."
She turned fully. She stood in the center of the room with her hands folded against her chest and her chin level and her face composed.
The steam had curled the hair at her temples.
There was still color along her cheekbones.
She looked, he thought, like a woman who had walked into a room and done a brave thing and was now standing in the aftermath of it with her spine straight and her eyes steady, and he thought he had never in his life wanted to go downstairs less than he wanted to right now.
He looked at her for one moment longer than he needed to.
"Dinnae go anywhere," he said.
It came out quiet. Low. Not quite a command and not quite a question and not quite a promise, but something that held all three of those things inside it and meant all of them.
"I'll be here," she said.
He left.
The latch dropped into place behind him, and he stood in the cold of the corridor and breathed, and the stone walls were a mercy against his skin.
Downstairs, the King's men were waiting with their paper and their requirements and their opinions about what constituted a marriage, and he set his jaw and went to deal with them.
She was still up there.
She had said she would be.
He held onto that and walked down the stairs.