23. Chapter 23
Kalli
They keep me in the hall until my head starts to throb.
There’s a woman who nursed my mother and needs to hold my face in both hands.
There’s a man from the eastern ledges who walked two days to watch me stand up.
There’s the council, who ask questions until they blur into each other.
I take hands. I say names. I eat what’s put in front of me, and I sit the way I was taught to sit.
By the time my mother lets me go, my jaw hurts from holding my face still.
Hesper walks me to my old rooms. The bed has been made up with the good sheets. Somebody has put winter flowers in a bowl, the small white ones that grow above the falls, and I have to stop in the doorway and look at them. A year ago, I’d have walked past them without seeing them at all.
“Sleep,” Hesper says. “The mountain will still be here in the morning.”
“I know.”
“You don’t look like a woman who knows.”
She goes. I stand in the middle of my own room and work out that I’m not going to sleep in it.
They put him four levels down. I heard my mother give the order in front of the whole hall. A room with no window, at the back, beneath the old stores. She spoke like she was handling staff. He stood there and took it, and I stood there and let him take it. I can’t stop thinking about that.
I know the way. I know every passage in this mountain.
I stare down at my bed with the good sheets and have a conversation with myself. The last time I had a conversation like this, it was very different.
I’m going down there. Me. Awake. All of it. You stay where you are.
My dragon turns over once under my ribs and settles.
Good.
Of course she’s not arguing. This is where she’s been pushing me since she saw him in that loading bay. Finally, the two of us want the same thing at the same time, and it’s so unfamiliar that I stand there another minute just to let it sink in.
Then I pull my boots off and set them by the bed, because boots are loud, and I go.
The Eyrie never fully sleeps. Somebody is always watching a fire, and there’s always a runner on the outer stairs, or somebody’s grandmother awake by a hearth with her knees aching. I grew up knowing which passages carry sound and which ones don’t, and I take the ones that don’t.
At the second staircase I hear voices below and have to stand in a doorway while two of the kitchen girls go past with a basket between them.
This is ridiculous, Kalli!
This is my home. I’ve never once had to hide in it and my body doesn’t know how to. My feet are too loud on the stone. My breathing is too loud. I have every right to be here, and there isn’t a person alive who can question it.
It doesn’t help, because if they knew where I was going now, everything would change.
I take the last flight with my palm flat on the warm stone.
The hallway is empty. The stores smell of grain and lamp oil and cold iron, and through it all, there’s him. Clean cloth. Old leather. Cool skin. Something I would know in a room of two hundred people.
His door is the last one. I look at it longer than I need to.
I lift my hand to knock, and the door opens before my knuckles land.
He’s dressed. A lamp is burning in a niche behind him, and the bed hasn’t been slept in. His boots are on. I know that he heard me three passages back, the way he hears everything. He’s been standing behind that door deciding.
He opened it.
“You’ll get cold out on that stone,” he says.
“I run hot.”
“I remember.”
Neither of us moves. At the cabin this was easy. Here there’s a mountain over our heads with my ancestral name cut into it in nine places. He’s a man my mother offered money to in front of the hall. And I don’t care about any of it.
“Are you going to let me in,” I say, “or do I wait here until someone finds me?”
He steps back. I come in. He shuts the door, and then he drops the inside bar, quietly, and watches me while he does it. The room is ours now.
It’s small and sparse; just a bed and not much else. Right now, that’s the most important part. His coat is drying on the chair back. His pack sits by the wall with the straps still buckled. I try not to look at it, because packed means ready.
“You didn’t sleep,” I say.
“I don’t sleep much here.”
“The mountain?”
“The mountain’s fine. It’s the quietest place I’ve been in a long time.” He looks at me, and my skin warms under it.
“They fed you?”
“I didn’t need anything.”
“Hesper must have been disappointed.”
“I think Hesper has been waiting a lifetime to watch a vampire drink out of a jug.”
I laugh, low, and something in his shoulders eases. He watches my mouth while I laugh and doesn’t hide that he’s doing it.
“Gideon,” I say, the name coming out on a soft breath.
He goes still.
“You never called me that the last time,” he says.
“The last time?”
“The last time you came to me,” he says. “You never said my name.”
“I didn’t?” I don’t know what that means, but it seems significant to him.
“No.” He doesn’t say anything else. He crosses the room and takes my face in both hands, and his hands are cold. I turn my mouth into one palm before he can kiss me—just to feel the cold on my lips first.
“Slow,” I say into his hand. “That’s the rule tonight. I make the rules tonight.”
“You made them the first night too.” He pauses. “Or did you?”
There it is. He’s never pushed. Not at the cabin, when he asked, and I gave him a tenth of the truth. Not on the road since. He has carried the question the whole way up this mountain and never once pushed. And that is why he gets the answer.
“I wasn’t there the first night.” I take his wrists and hold them and make him look at me. “It was her. The dragon. I took too long, so she decided for me… For herself.”
“Kallista,” he says, as if he’s talking about a different person. “That was her.”
“Yes. I guess you could say that. I got the morning after; your marks on my skin and four seconds of memory I can’t make sense of. My own body knows things about you that I don’t.” My voice stays level. “I want to know what I missed. All of it. And this time I’ll be there for every minute.”
His thumbs move once along my jaw.
“Then we go slow,” he says.
He undresses me first, and he takes his time over it. My coat goes on the chair on top of his. Then each button of my shirt, one at a time, his eyes coming up to mine between them. I let him look, because as cool as he is, his eyes still warm me.
When the shirt’s off, he finds the two bruises above my hip bones with his thumbs and stops there. They’re still dark.
“Those are mine,” he says.
“They are.”
“They haven’t faded.”
“Nothing fades on me like it used to. Not since that place.” I put my hands over his and press them into the same spots, hard enough to feel it. “Yours stay on me. Mine don’t stay on you. I don’t like that.”
“I know,” he says. “I’d change it if I could.”
He goes down on one knee and sets his mouth against each bruise in turn, unhurried. My fingers go into his hair, and I stand there in a stone room under my own mountain and watch him do it.
His mouth is cold on my hip, and everywhere it leaves goes hot behind it. It’s like he takes the heat out of my skin, and my body sends it straight back, twice as much. I want him to do it again somewhere lower.
He does. Not there yet. The soft place beside the bone. Then the crease at the top of my thigh, through the fabric, which is worse.
“Take the rest off me,” I say.
He does that too, and he does it kneeling. By the time my pants are down around my ankles, and off, I have both hands braced on his shoulders, and my knees are not entirely reliable.
Then his shirt’s on the floor, and my hands are learning his chest in the lamplight. Smooth. Nothing on him anywhere. I saw four nail marks across his skin, and there’s not a line left now.
“Gone,” I say.
“They always go.”
I pull his mouth down to mine and stop keeping track of anything after that.
The bed is narrow. We use all of it. He lays me back and starts at my throat, his mouth working wide of the bite without being told.
My collarbone. The inside of one arm. Under my breast and then over it.
When he closes his mouth around my nipple, the cold of him goes through me hard enough that my back comes up off the blanket.
“Oh!”
His hand flattens on my stomach and pins me down, and he does it again on the other side, slower. I choke out a moan.
“That’s cheating,” I tell the ceiling.
“You said slow. You didn’t say gentle.”
He stays up over me, his mouth at my breast, his weight on one forearm. His other hand goes down between my legs and finds me wet, and he makes a low sound against my skin when he finds that out.
“Tell me what we did,” I say, voice hoarse. “When I came to you. When I wasn’t myself.”
“You came in the door already certain.” His fingers slide into me, easy, and stay, moving slow. “You crossed the room and pushed me into the door hard enough to bruise a man with a working spine.”
“What else?” My breath is coming faster.
“I put my mouth on you until you came. And then you pushed me on my back.” His lips are against my ear. “You settled over my hips.”
“What else?”
“You told me to talk. You said you wanted my voice under you.” His fingers keep moving the whole time, unhurried, and his thumb settles on my clit and stays there, small circles, patient in a way that should be illegal. “You said I was like snow inside you.”
“That sounds like me,” I pant.
“It didn’t sound like you at all. That’s how I knew.”
I don’t have an answer, and then I don’t need one, because he puts his mouth back on my breast and keeps his hand working in exactly the same rhythm, and I stop thinking in words.