Vadh
She is pressed against my coils when I wake.
Her back fits into the curve of the loop she pulled close last night. Her breathing is slow. Her hair has come loose from the braid and has spread across the scales beneath her head. She did not use a pillow. She used me.
I hold still for a long time. Her weight against my body is slight. Her ribs expand and contract with each breath, the rhythm of it transmitted through the scales.
I ease out of the coil slowly. The movement requires me to unwind from the loop she is resting against without disturbing her. I am not good at this. I am a creature that fills a corridor when he moves. But I manage it, and she sleeps on, and I go to the lower hall.
The paired grooves are carved into the floor. Two channels, side by side, shaped for two bonded keepers. I have been using a bowl instead for five years.
I set the bowl aside. I lower my body into the nearest groove. The stone is cool and shaped for coils. My body fits. The venom flows from my scales into the carved channel, drains into the distribution network below.
The second groove is empty beside me.
The liquid is cleaner than yesterday. Less amber. Less cloud. Nearly clear.
I pull myself out of the groove and rise in the lower hall.
One groove warm from my body. One cold. But I am not thinking about the groove.
I am thinking about her mouth. The shape it made around my name in the corridor.
The way her lips parted on the second syllable, the sound breaking, her hands gripping the scales behind my jaw with a strength I did not expect from a body that size.
I think about the places I have not tasted. The inside of her wrist where the teal is deepest. The soft skin behind her knee. The dip at the small of her back where the bedroll shifts when she turns in her sleep.
I want to know every sound her body makes.
I want to map her the way she maps this building, by touch, by feel, running my hands along every surface until I know where each line begins and ends.
I want to press my tongue against her pulse and feel it accelerate and know that I am the reason.
I want her underneath me. I want her voice raw and her fingers digging into my scales and her body shaking with something I put there.
I have been alone in this building for five years. I did not know I was starving until she fed me.
In the main hall, I stop. The stone where I coil each morning. The dead patch. Pale, powdery at the edges. I have seen it every day for years. My body killing the stone beneath it.
But at the edge of the patch, near the section of floor where Bryn has been clearing channels, the stone is different. Still gray, still dead. But the powder is thinner there. The pale circle has pulled back from that edge. As if the decay is retreating from something.
I go to the corridor outside my sleeping chamber. Her bedroll on the stone floor. The wall beside it. The moss is thicker than the moss anywhere else in the corridor. Greener. Growing where she sleeps.
I look at the two patterns. My resting place. Her sleeping place. Decay pulling back where her work has been. Growth pushing forward where her body has been.
The stone where she sleeps is rough. I noticed it last night. A ridge in the floor near her bedroll, a lip of uneven stone that catches her blanket when she turns.
I smooth it. My tail against the stone, the flat underside pressing and grinding until the ridge is level. The work takes longer than it should. The tremor is not skill. It is the care of a creature doing something he does not want her to know he is doing.
I go to the supply room. Make the bread. Flat, dense. No berries. My hands simply do not reach for them this morning.
I am not thinking about the bread. I am thinking about the sound she made in the corridor.
My name, broken into pieces. The taste of her still on my tongue from yesterday, the salt and the heat of her, the way her hips lifted off the bedroll when the compound reached the places where her skin is thinnest.
I want that taste again.
I want her body arched against the stone and her hands in the scales behind my jaw and her voice wrecked and saying my name in pieces that do not resemble my name.
I want things I have not allowed myself to want. I want to put my mouth on her throat and feel her pulse against my tongue and not stop. I want to unravel her. I want to be the reason she forgets how to speak.
The bread is burning.
She comes to breakfast with her hair still loose and sleep still in her face. The teal is at her throat this morning. The hollow above her collarbone. I have not touched her there with my hands. Only my tongue.
She sits on her stone. Tears the bread.
“It’s a little burnt,” I say.
“I noticed.” She eats it anyway. “Tastes like the stew. I’m deciding it’s a style.”
I do not tell her what I was thinking about when it burned.
After breakfast she goes to the garden. I hear her through the walls. The sound of earth being turned, stems being pulled.
She comes back to the anteroom with a handful of basil and holds it up.
The word. My mother’s word. The Naga name for the herb I taught her in this room. It comes out of her mouth correctly. Every syllable. The vowels open at the end as they should.
I stay in the anteroom with the sound of my mother’s language in a human mouth and I do not move for a long time.
The next morning, there are berries in the bread.