44. Archer
Archer
I’ve never been this fucking hard in my entire five hundred years of existence.
“That was…” she trails off, looking dazed.
“I know,” I mutter, still savoring the sounds of her pleasure and the feel of her beneath my touch.
I wanted it to be about her and I loved that it was.
But when her hand had brushed over my cock?
Triad save me, I’d nearly come in my pants.
She probably doesn’t fully comprehend how long it’s been for me.
Which is one of the reasons I pushed her away.
I’m fully aware that when I’m touched for the first time in two hundred years, it’s going to be an unleashing.
One that I don’t want to happen in a damn market, veil or no.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when all my rules went out the window, but they have.
Completely and utterly. Like dust in the wind.
I have to steel myself against my own desire as I kiss Saige again and reluctantly pull us away from the wall.
With the veil still in place, I sling an arm around her slight shoulder, tucking her into my side as we start the walk back through the tunnel beneath the hill.
I glance down to find Saige smiling at me. As though she wasn’t expecting the intimacy to continue after the main event, but that she’s quietly pleased, pleasantly surprised. Fuck that. If she can come on my face, I can damn well hold her afterwards. The problem is, I don’t want to let her go.
“Don’t think I’m going to leave you unsatisfied, General,” she says coyly.
“There was nothing unsatisfying about doing that to you,” I tell her. “Giving you pleasure gives me pleasure.”
“I could tell.”
“Good.” I’ve already adjusted the throbbing erection in my leathers, hiding it from view, but I’m glad my enjoyment was obvious to her. It seemed like something she needed to know.
“So when we get back to the bindery…” she trails off again, biting her lip.
That small act alone sends a fresh wave of desire coursing through me and I have to hold myself in check.
“Grayson, when—not if—when I fuck you, I want it to be the only thing I do for the foreseeable future. Once I start, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop, which means we deal with the Confluence first.”
“When…?”
I’m done pretending, so I don’t hesitate before I nod. “When.”
We reach the tiny shed once more, and Saige finds the mechanism to the secret door. Daylight streams in as we let ourselves out, and amidst the green slopes and fresh air, Saige takes a deep breath and settles herself against my side.
“Archer?” she says quietly, still looking up at me, her silver eyes shining.
“Mmm?”
Her arm curls around the back of me, her hand cupping my waist as we walk downhill together. “I see you.”
I know she does. That’s what’s terrifying.
Time is a fickle beast. When you’re immersed in pain, it’s a slow, torturous trek through the mud.
When you brush against something close to contentment, time races along, unchecked, unstoppable.
And fuck, with her, I wanted to suspend it entirely.
A lump thickens in my throat, and I don’t know what to say.
So I kiss her temple and pull her a little closer.
The one thing I know is that this bookbinder is going to be the fucking end of me.
Back at the Awl and Cradle, I build a fire in the wood burner while Saige returns to her workstation, the little vial of gold from Ignizar sitting on her bench.
She hasn't bothered to change out of her dress but has simply thrown a tattered old apron over the top. She has also piled her hair messily atop her head, securing it with a long, thin pin, too eager to start work to waste time on looking polished. She looks better this way anyway, a flurry of movement, loose tendrils of blonde framing her face. I can’t look at her without thinking about the sounds she made with my mouth against her, or the way she cried out my name.
I adjust myself in my pants and focus on the kindling.
“I don’t want you to be alarmed,” she calls out, tapping a tool against her chin as she considers the project before her.
“That doesn’t exactly bode well,” I reply, wiping the soot from my hands as orange flames flicker to life in the small burner. “What is it?”
“What I’m about to do… it’s called tearing apart.”
I tense. “That also doesn’t bode well, Grayson. You’re meant to be putting it back together.”
She places the battered Confluence on the flat surface of her work bench and opens the front cover, ignoring the edge of panic in my words.
“The good news is that the parchment is folded and sewn, not guillotined, so I can rebind the book in its original way. But I have to detach all the binding components first: the mull, pages and the cover, and remove all the adhesive as well. It’s going to look… brutal for a while.”
“I was imprisoned at Gravereach for two hundred years, Grayson. I can handle brutal,” I tell her, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Good.” With no further warning, she unsheathes a sharp knife and cuts right through the end sheet and the covering material. Her movement is precise and practiced, but she’s right—it does look brutal, particularly on a battered old tome that’s meant to help save the realm.
My magic hums in response, floating to the surface within me, its curiosity piqued as a different magical aura trickles from the Confluence.
Saige doesn’t seem to notice, or if she does, she’s too interested in the task at hand to mention it, her brow furrowed in concentration as she ensures that her blade doesn’t reach the wrong thing.
“Explain it to me,” I say quietly.
“See these gathered bundles of parchment with the holes and thread? These are called signatures. We want to keep them intact if we want to replace the binding without creating more damage to them. Right now, I need to detach the loose threads, like this.” Carefully, she unthreads the pages, collating them as she goes.
Her eyes are bright with enthusiasm as she points to some black bars that are marked on the folded edges of the pages.
“See these? Whoever bound this initially made this a little easier on us. With this guide, we won’t risk losing the sequence of the signatures, it’s arranged sequentially already. ”
Her joy is infectious, and I find myself grinning back at her when she looks at me to explain the next stage of the process.
“I need to flatten the grooves before I work on the rebind.” It’s like a foreign language to me, but I’d listen to her for hours.
Watching a master of a discipline is always a privilege and when it comes to Saige and her bookbinding, I’m mesmerized.
She makes it look like the art that it is—unbending the bundles of parchment until they are smooth.
Taking an individual section at a time, she taps them with what looks to be a cobbler’s hammer before she places each one under its own clean board, placing weights atop.
“When do you use the gold from Ignizar?” I ask.
“Not for a while. But I didn’t want to start without it in our possession. I get the sense that there are a few elements to this that we’ll need to acquire from actual Azkari lands. With the gold we needed, I suspected Jack would have some, so I went for it.”
It’s hard to believe that it was a few hours ago I had my fingers and tongue buried inside her.
What I want more than anything is to do it again, and again, and then bury my cock inside her as well.
But I can’t afford to get lost in her now, not when we have the Confluence in our possession, not when Malevron likely knows we have it.
I suspect I’m the only person in Lorevael who truly knows the extent of the consequences if we fail.
It will be the end of the realm as we know it.
I keep Saige company as she works late into the afternoon, and I help in the small ways I can—lighting the lanterns and ensuring there’s enough light, making sure she drinks enough water and eats something. I’ve noticed it’s common for her to forget if she’s caught up in a task.
“Could you hand me those guard strips please?” she says, motioning vaguely to something on the far side of the workbench.
I take a stab in the dark and hand her something that looks more like a patch you’d cover a wound with, but as she takes them and sets about repairing the damaged pages, I suppose it’s an equally apt description.
As she covers the tears with the strips, I feel another faint thrum of power, as though the book is a patient responding to a healer’s treatment.
“Can you feel that?” I ask her quietly.
“I can,” she replies, equally softly, her hands still moving over the book.
“There’s a pulse… a delicate kind of magic.
There’s something rhythmic about it, something hypnotic that feels like nostalgia.
It’s mesmerizing—beautiful—in a way that I don’t understand.
Whatever magic it’s emitting seems to amplify as I work. I can see it too.”
“See it?” I balk. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It’s like bits of dust, drifting in the air around the Confluence,” she says.
“Only something tells me it’s more than that, it’s as though they’re pieces of the Weave itself.”
I can sense the magic, I can practically feel it dancing across my skin, trying to coax my own power to make an appearance, to come out and play. But I see nothing other than Saige and the book itself.
Saige hums while she works. It’s no tune I recognize, but even without obvious musical talent, I like the sound.
“This is a piercing cradle,” she tells me as she maneuvers a wooden contraption onto her bench. “It’s what holds the manuscript as I make the holes for new threads—” She inhales sharply, her breath whistling between her teeth.
I reach for her instinctively. “What is it?”
A strangled sob escapes her, and she doubles over, curling in on herself, her gloved hands clawing at her left side. “Pain,” she croaks, she moves to pinch her thighs, where the bruises have only just started to fade.
I lace my fingers through hers. “Squeeze my hand instead. Whatever you’ve got, Grayson, I can take it.”
Her satchel is on the nearby stool, and I swipe the pouch of dried herbs from it, holding it to her nose as I’ve seen her do before.
She inhales deeply, but it does nothing to clear the haze of agony in her eyes. “I can’t…”
I don’t know what it is she thinks she can’t do, but I cradle her in my arms. “You are fucking formidable, Grayson. Even rattled by so much pain, you are a force. Don’t ever believe differently.”
Her grip on my fingers would be hard enough to break a mortal’s bones.
But I’m no mortal.
And I’ll take whatever pains she gives me, if it means hers is even a fraction less.