23. Erik
Erik
The bathing room is through the second door, and the women in gray went all out.
A tub the size of a small boat, copper, steaming.
Someone hauled that water up here bucket by bucket and timed it so it would be hot when we arrived.
Petals floating on the surface. Candles on every ledge, two dozen of them, and the light they throw is soft and moving, and I approve of the work.
Then I remember who ordered it, and approve less.
For her. All of it. The realm has been getting ready for her for two weeks and I can’t figure out why.
Besides the obvious. They called her queen. This castle has stood for as many generations as the stories of female dragons have existed, and until yesterday I would have called its purpose about as far-fetched as the stories themselves.
I look back into the main room. Elara is at the table, picking at a bowl of grapes. She hasn’t looked at me since the staircase. She knows exactly where I’m standing anyway. She’s doing it on purpose.
If she starts eating, the water cools. Because the argument between her and Gunnar is already starting and the bath doesn’t have time for that.
“Ella.”
She looks over. Still mad. Good. Mad means she still cares what I do.
“Come on,” I say, quietly, and hold the door.
She comes. Mad the whole way, arms crossed, but she comes, and I shut the door behind us. The room goes small and gold and quiet. It’s exactly what she needs.
“What are you doing?”
“I owe you an apology.”
“Oh, I know you do, Erik.” Arms still crossed. “But I don’t know if an apology is going to cut it.”
I wait. Waiting is the thing I’m good at.
“Though…” Quieter now. Her eyes go somewhere near my collar. “I know that standing up to that old woman… Ezra. That wasn’t easy.”
I step toward her, shaking my head. “It was nothing.”
“Bullshit, Erik.”
It wasn’t nothing. Telling the eldest of the Vestry no in her own chamber is the kind of nothing they write into Legion records with your name attached.
My dragon wanted her nowhere near Elara and my body agreed and the word was out before the consequences finished lining up. I’d say it again. I’ll likely have to.
She doesn’t need the details tonight. Tonight she needs the bath.
I smirk. Can’t help it.
“What… what is that look for?”
I come closer. Let the smirk turn into the real thing.
“For a woman who does jumping jacks in her living room and talks to her houseplant,” I say, “you’re handling all of this really well.”
Something rustles in her hair. Gerald’s head appears, takes a look around and I swear he can feel the energy has shifted. He maneuvers out of her hair, makes himself small — smaller than I’ve seen him go — and pours himself down her shoulder, across the floor, and under the door. Gone.
Elara watches the gap under the door. “He’s been my chaperone for years and he picks now to develop discretion.”
We both laugh, a little, and she forgets to be mad for a moment and I’ll take it. I stop laughing, because she’s standing in candlelight with petals behind her, and a man can’t do both at once.
“You’re stunning, Ella.”
“Don’t call me—”
“My dragon decided the first time I met you that that was what he wanted to call you.”
She stops. Blinks. Her mouth opens and closes on three different starts, and I watch her try to process it and fail.
The first time I met you. It’s right there. She could pull the whole thing out of me with one question, and I’d let her. Part of me hopes she asks. I keep my mouth shut and let her decide.
She doesn’t ask. She just looks at me.
Relief and disappointment, both at once. Noted.
“Come on,” I say. “Before the water gets cold.”
She looks at the tub. Back at me. I don’t move toward the door.
“Let me help you.”
“What? Erik—”
“Please?”
The word does more than it should. I don’t use it often. She knows I don’t.
She holds still and nods.
I start with the jacket. Slowly. There’s no rush. I make sure there’s no rush. The jacket off her shoulders, folded over the rail. It means something to her, I know it does. After everything she’s been through in the last few days, she deserves this done right.
Then I go down on one knee.
“Erik—”
My hand goes around her lower leg. Warm through the fabric. I lift, a small pressure, and she gets the idea and picks up her foot, and her hand comes down on my shoulder for balance and stays there, gripping, and I look up at her from the floor and let her see the smirk.
“Don’t get used to this,” she says.
“I should tell you the same thing.” I pull the boot free and set it aside. “But I wouldn’t mind you getting used to it.” Second boot. Her fingers flex on my shoulder. “My queen.”
I stop there. One knee, her foot in my hand, and I watch her.
She goes red all at once. “Oh my God. Not you too.”
“Everyone else got to laugh about it.”
“You’re supposed to be the good one.”
“No one has ever accused me of that.”
She laughs, and I feel it travel down her leg into my hand, and I’d kneel on this stone the rest of the night to feel it again.
The leggings from here, since I’m down anyway.
I hook the waistband and draw them off slow, and she steps out one foot at a time with her hand still on my shoulder, and her skin comes warm under my palms — calf, knee, the back of her thigh — and my dragon presses close and I make him wait.
He’s had three years of practice. So have I.
I stand. Her shirt, over her head, her hair coming down messy after it, and I want to put my hands in it and I don’t. Tonight isn’t about me or my dragon. It’s about her.
She goes redder with every layer. Ears, then her face, then her chest, and she’s naming things — the candle count, the petal supplier, the water temperature, anything to distract herself from this. From me.
I move behind her, standing far closer than necessary. I feel her shiver and I am absolutely not grinning about that. My hand slides from her neck, down the top of her shoulder until it reaches her bra strap. My fingers travel down, and my lips find their home in the spot behind her ear.
She tastes like her scent has been promising for three years.
She lets out a breath, and I keep going. My mouth works while my hands find the clasp of her bra, and it gives, and I slide the straps down her arms slow enough that she could stop me anywhere along the way. She doesn’t. The bra lands somewhere. I’ll find it later.
Then I go down again, mouth first. A kiss to the top of her spine. Another between her shoulder blades. Another at the small of her back, following my own hands as they hook the last of the fabric at her hips and draw it down, and she’s trembling under my mouth, and it isn’t cold in here.
I come back up the same road. One more kiss at her neck, longer.
“Erik…” Barely sound. “You can’t—”
“I can.” I say it into her skin. “But I’m not going to.”
I step around to face her.
And there it is.
Her eyes. Not the blush, not the bare skin, not even the nerves. Her eyes, up on mine and wide open, and what’s in them isn’t about how I touched her. It isn’t even about how I was going to. It’s me. She wants me.
Me.
She didn’t stop me. She didn’t even try. She nodded when I asked, and her hand stayed on my shoulder the whole time I was on my knees, and none of this is new to her.
None of this is new.
“How long?”
She blinks. Twenty different thoughts cross her face before she can focus back on me. “What?”
“How long have you wanted this?”
“Erik.” She shakes her head. “You can’t ask me that. I don’t… that’s not…”
She turns for the tub.
“Wait.”
She stops. Her bare feet on stone, three steps from the water, and she stays stopped. I wasn’t ready for that.
She turns back to face me slowly and I look at her. Just look. The candles are generous with her and they don’t need to be.
Her arms come up, crossing over herself, and I wish she wouldn’t, but I understand it.
“How long, Ella?”
“Erik. Oh my God. I can’t.”
“You can.”
“You want a number?” Her laugh comes out with no air in it. “I don’t have a number. I have… you moved in on a Tuesday. That’s all I’m saying about that.”
It was a Tuesday. I remember.
“And I never said anything, because men like you don’t—” She stops. Starts again anyway, and I stand very still because I need her to keep talking. “I never thought you would ever be interested in a woman like me. Okay? There. It’s out. Blame the steam… Or something.”
“A woman like you.”
“You know what I mean. All of…” one arm moves from where it’s covering her to gesture at herself, “…this. You’ve met me, Erik. Repeatedly.”
“Years, Ella. Right across the hall.” I keep her eyes. “How many women did you ever see me bring home?”
“I don’t know.” Defensive now, chin coming up. “Probably dozens. You’re you, Erik.”
“None.”
She stops.
“None, Elara.” I take one step, close enough that her crossed arms brush my shirt. “Because none of them were you.”
I watch the fight go out of her.
Staying away isn’t an option anymore, so I close the last of the distance and put my forehead to hers. Her breath is quick. Just like mine.
“I’ve dreamt of you more times than I’d like to admit,” I tell her. “And unlike Rayner, my dreams are my own.” Her eyes come up. “But this. You. So much better than any dream I’ve ever had.”
She makes a small wrecked sound, and I help her into the bath before I stop being able to.
I watch her sink in up to her chin and groan, long and unguarded.
Worth every bucket somebody hauled. Petals ride the wave of her, and I roll my sleeves and kneel at the side of the tub, and she watches me do it with her eyes going soft and suspicious at the same time, which is my favorite combination.
“What are you doing now?”
“Washing you.”
“I know how to wash myself, Erik. I’ve been doing it for years. I’m considered gifted.”
“I know.” I pour the first water over her shoulders. “This isn’t about what you can do.”
I take my time. Her shoulders. Her arms, one and then the other, her fingers, the inside of her wrist where her pulse gives her away.
Soap that smells like the gardens outside.
Her hair, which takes two pourings and earns me a sound I intend to remember on bad days.
I work through it slow while the steam climbs, and my hands drift lower before I can stop them, working out the knots the Vestry put in her shoulders one at a time.
Some of those are probably from me too.
She’s melting into it. I can feel it under my hands, one muscle at a time.
“There’s a story,” I say, somewhere in the middle of it. “An old one. Mothers tell it to dragon children when they’re small. Mine told it to me.”
“Mm.” Her eyes are closed. “Is there a version where the girl gets eaten? Because the night’s been long.”
“No one gets eaten. There was a male dragon, wounded in a war and left where he fell in the mountains, too broken to fly and too far from anyone who cared whether he lived. A female found him there. This was long ago, when the world still had them. The war wasn’t hers and she could have left him to die, but she carried him to her cave instead, and she fed him from her own hunts, and at night she slept against his side so her fire could keep the cold from finishing what the war had started.
She guarded his sleep like that the whole winter.
He was too broken to give her anything back, and she never once asked him for anything, and that was how he knew. ”
“Knew what?” Quieter now.
“What she was to him.” I wash the back of her neck.
She lets me. “So when he could finally stand, he didn’t bring her a trophy or a hoard, because she had no use for either.
He went down to where the hot springs run under her mountain and carved a basin into the rock, wide enough for her, right where the warm water rises, and then he bathed her in it.
Washed the whole winter off her, every scale, as slow and as careful as she had been with him.
He never spoke a vow and he never made a claim.
Just his hands, and the water, and the time it took. That was his answer.”
Her breath has gone slow and careful, listening hard and pretending not to. Her hand found my forearm somewhere during the story. She hasn’t moved it.
“That’s the whole story?” she asks. “They fixed each other and took baths?”
“Dragon stories are short. We’re a practical people.”
“Terrible pacing. No third-act conflict.” Her thumb moves once against my arm. “I loved it.”
I know she did. Years of watching her fall in love with the books she read from across the hall, and none of it comes close to being the one telling her the story.
I pour the last of the water through her hair, slow, and set the pitcher down. She opens her eyes, and the candlelight is in them, and what looks back at me is soft and warm and still holding one thing back.
I can live with that. It’s more than I’ve earned tonight.
“I think they wrote that about us, Ella.”
A small smile comes over her face.
“Maybe they did.”