10
Ryhn
"Not here," I managed against her mouth, with the last coherent thought I owned. "Tabitha. Not on the floor behind my father's throne."
She laughed breathlessly, her good hand already fisted in my hair. "Nobody has ever said anything that romantic to me."
"My quarters." I pulled us upright, her body warm against mine.
I did not so much walk her there as carry her in my arms down corridors I had walked ten thousand times.
I didn't see any of it. My whole body had narrowed to the scent of her, the warm sweet want pouring off her skin.
It was undeniable now. I had read it for days and was finally, recklessly, allowed to answer.
My purr had climbed to a register I had not made since I was a cub, loud and helpless.
I gave up trying to govern it somewhere on the second stair.
She should have been afraid of me. I was a head and a half taller than her and so much bigger. I was carrying her through a sleeping palace with my control in tatters. Any sensible creature would have feared me.
She did not. She had never once feared me, not in the worst room in my world, not now. I think it was that, more than any touch, that broke me. She looked at my size and my sheathed claws and saw the safest place she had stood since the light tore her out of her own world.
My door closed behind us and I had her against it, careful even then, my forearm braced so the stone took none of her weight.
I made myself stop and look at her in the low light.
Her hair was a wreck. Her eyes were enormous.
She smelled of triumph and exhaustion and want — and underneath all of it, steady as ever, patience.
"We should say it out loud," I said. My voice had gone to gravel. "What this is. My people do not hide their want. We cannot — our bodies tell on us." I set my brow to hers. "I want you. Not your hands, not your gift, not the cure you have given my house. You."
"Ryhn." Her hand came up and flattened over the purr beneath my breastbone. "I have spent my whole life being the one who takes care of everybody else. Nobody's ever—" She stopped. "Take care of me tonight. Just once. Let me be the one somebody chose. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I said. "Tell me if anything frightens you, and I will stop." I drew back enough to see her face. "And Tabitha. If you want me to keep my voice down so the purring does not embarrass us both, you should ask now, because I have very little dignity left and it's fading fast."
"Don't you dare keep it down," she whispered. "I want to hear it. I want to know exactly what I'm doing to you."
So I let her hear it.
What I had not told her, because there is no graceful way to tell a creature who lives by her eyes, is that to a Kaithran, the act of love is mostly scent and sound and heat. She had been overwhelming all three of my truest senses since the moment my door shut.
I could smell the want in her grow with every breath, smell the caution finally put down.
I could hear her heart climb and the small involuntary sounds she didn't know she made.
She was a whole language being spoken straight into my body.
I had spent two weeks learning to read her.
Now at last I could answer in kind, and I was half undone before I had truly touched her.
I undressed her slowly. I had spent two weeks learning the power of slow. I wanted to memorize her, the unglamorous, capable strength of her. I eased the binding from the strapped shoulder. I wanted to see all the soft human places that had no fur to hide behind.
She watched me with her chin up, daring me to find her ordinary.
I set my mouth to the pulse at her throat and let her feel my purr shift and drop, deepening into the register that has no translation, the one that means treasure, treasure, treasure.
I felt her breath stutter. No one had ever touched this woman as though she were precious.
"That sound," she breathed. "It changed."
"It tells the truth," I said against her skin. "It cannot lie. Right now it is saying you are the most precious life in this world, and I cannot make it stop. I would not, even if I could."
I dragged my jaw and my breath along her shoulder and her collarbone, marking her with my scent and claiming her as mine.
She arched into it, making a low sound of her own that undid the last of my control.
Every sense I owned had gone overfull. I could smell exactly what my mouth did to her, could hear her pulse climb, could feel the heat of her against me.
I gathered her up and laid her down on my bed, covering her with the warmth of my body. I wanted, against all sense, to keep her.
But she would not simply be taken care of.
I should have known she would not. It was not in her.
When I would have given and given, she pressed a flat hand to my chest and pushed, gently, until I understood she wanted me beneath her.
The warrior in me balked for half a heartbeat, the old creed shrieking that a male of my blood does not lie back, does not yield the high ground, does not let himself be tended like something breakable.
And then I looked up at her face, fierce and tender above me, and I let the creed die where it lay.
She took her time with me. She traced the fur-patterns on my skin that no lover had ever once bothered to learn, and asked me what each touch did.
She read my purr, learning which drag of her nails dropped it deeper and which kiss broke it into that helpless stutter.
No one had ever tended me like this, not in my whole life.
She held me and learned my body as though I were the precious one. I understood at last, with her mouth at my throat and her body a benediction on my chest, exactly what it was to surrender. It is no small surrender, to be cared for. It is the bravest one there is.
She pulled me down by the purr in my throat.
I, who had been raised to take, to hold, to stand between and never yield, let a small soft woman from a world I had never heard of take me apart with her mouth and her hands.
I surrendered every piece of myself to her.
I found in the surrender a strength I had no name for.
I was so much larger than her. I had spent my life being told my size and my strength were weapons, the whole of my worth.
That night every careful, controlled, trembling moment of holding her was the opposite.
It was devotion made of restraint. I kept my claws sheathed.
My weight stayed on my arms. I read her by scent and sound and the language of her body.
I gave her what she reached for. When she finally pulled me into her, both of us shaking, my purr broke into a sound I had never made in my life. She pressed her hand to it and laughed and wept at once. I came apart in her arms, finally allowed to set my strength down and be home instead.
There is a rite my people have at the height of making love. The claiming bite, at the join of neck and shoulder, the bond that cannot be undone, the vow written in the body that says You are mine, and I am yours, for as long as we both draw breath.
I wanted it the way I have never wanted anything. My mouth was at her shoulder and my whole being strained toward it. I held it back, held it back with everything the past two weeks had taught me about wanting and waiting and not taking what is not freely, fully, foreverly yours to take.
She felt it. She felt all of it.
"What are you holding back," she gasped. "I can feel you holding something back. Don't — you don't have to—"
"I cannot give you the bite," I said, wrecked, my forehead against her shoulder where my teeth ached to mark her.
"Not this. Among my people it is forever, Tabitha, it does not come undone, and I will not write forever on your body when the houses are going to tear us apart.
I will not claim what I am not allowed to keep.
Everything else — everything else I have is yours.
But not that. Not a vow I cannot honor."
And the not-taking — the careful, aching restraint of it — was what finally undid her.
She came apart with my name breaking out of her and her hand fisted in my hair.
The sound of it, the scent of it, dragged me over the edge behind her.
For one blinding moment there was only the two of us and the truth our bodies could not lie about.
For a while neither of us moved. I stayed braced over her, holding my own weight as I had taught myself, my purr gone soft and broken. She looked up at me wet-eyed. "I felt it, when you held the bite back. I felt how much it cost you."
"Good," I said, though my voice barely worked.
"I want you to feel it. I want you to know it was real, even when I would not take it.
That is the only vow I am permitted to make you, Tabitha.
Everything I gave you tonight was true. What I kept back, I kept back because I love you too well to mark you and then leave you marked and alone. "
I had not meant to say it. But it was out of me before I could stop it, bared in the dark, and her breath snagged.
She did not say it back; I understood that she could not. To say it would be to confront how much her leaving was going to cost us both.
I gathered her against my chest where the purr still rolled, low and content now. I smoothed the damp hair back from her face while she traced lazy circles over my heart.
"You're still purring," she said, half asleep.
"I am aware."
"It's adorable. The terror of the border clans, purring like a kettle."
"If you tell my court," I said, "I will deny it with my last breath."
She laughed.
I felt it move through both of us. I pulled her closer and let myself have the comfort of being held.
We lay tangled while the braziers burned down.
I helplessly marked how the scent of the room had changed, how hers and mine had become one.
It was the smell my people have only a single word for, the smell of us, of a den with two safe creatures in it.
I did not tell her what it meant. I breathed it instead.
She fell asleep on my chest with her hand over the purr.
I lay awake a long while in the dark, counting her breaths, memorizing what I already knew I would not be allowed to keep.
I would have bargained the throne and my own name and every false star my father ever gave me for forty years of exactly this.
I should have known better.
The knock came at the grayest hour before dawn, soft and apologetic. Something in Kesh's voice through the door put me on my feet with my heart already falling.
"My prince. Forgive me. The king."
Tabby was up and pulling on her scrubs before I had the door open. The old handler stood in the corridor with his ears flat to his skull. His scent was grief again, the grief I had let myself forget for the length of one stolen night.
"He has slipped back," Kesh said. "Badly.
The waking in the hall, before all of them, it took more from him than he had to give.
He has not held a man's shape since they carried him out, and an hour ago he stopped taking water.
" His old eyes found mine, and then Tabby's.
What was in them was almost worse than the words.
"And there is more. Vaelin has gone to the houses in the dark.
He is telling them the public waking proves the king can rise on command, and that the healer simply will not let him, that she prolongs the sickness to extend her stay near the throne.
He has called for the deadline to be moved.
" Kesh swallowed. "To dawn tomorrow. They are deciding now. "