Sarn
Itold myself taking her apart would quiet the rut. It does the opposite. A starving thing fed once is not less starving. It has learned what food tastes like.
The pits keep handing me the sound she made. I did not know I could be made worse by getting what I wanted. I am learning a great deal this week about what I am.
And what I am keeps wanting the same thing my body has wanted since the dock, which is not only to breed her.
It is to wrap her. To take the whole length of myself and close it around her until there is no part of her I am not pressing, until I can feel her heartbeat through six loops of my own muscle, until she could not move if the cliff came down.
The breeding-drive I can name and shame. This other one runs deeper and has no decency in it at all. I want to crush her down to the size of a thing I can keep, and the only reason I have not is that I know what my coils do when they close and stop knowing they have closed.
So I govern the one part left to me. I can’t stop the scent.
I can do the rest. I have food sent up that a coastal woman knows, not garrison rations, the cook digging out salt fish and flatbread and the sharp green stuff that grows in the cracks above the tideline, because she is a creature of this water and I want one thing in that room to tell her so.
I move the night watch off her stair so no soldier passes her door and tastes what is behind it. I leave the dock alone in the grey hours, when I know she goes down to it, because the water was hers before it was mine, and I will not take it by standing on it.
The pits give me everything about her and the one thing I need they cannot reach.
I know when she wakes by the change in her warmth through the stone.
I will know she is fertile before she does.
I read all of it, clean, certain, and every grain of it could be nothing but my own scent handed back to me.
And under the wanting I keep my watch on the worse thing.
The rut is climbing. I feel it bank higher every day, toward a peak I will not govern, with the coils closing on her at the moment my body decides breeding and holding are one act.
I have locked before. Not on a woman. On stone, on a beam, on a rift-hound that came over the north wall, and every time the thing in my grip broke before I felt the edge coming.
She has told me she will learn my edge for me. Read it the way she reads water that drowns men, because I can’t. A human. A woman who would not fill the curve of one of my coils. I told myself it was the kind of thing people throw when they are frightened and won’t show it.
The pits read no fear in her when she said it. None. She meant it. And I have caught myself believing her, which is the most dangerous thing either of us has done yet.