15. Cain
Cain
The morning after the peddler, Marion was at the kitchen window at first light with the basket already in her hand.
She dressed in the dark. She came out of the back room with her hair already braided, her shawl already over her arm, the elderflower basket beneath it.
She didn't speak to me at the door. She just looked at me.
I rose from the couch. I crossed the front room and the kitchen behind her without speaking either, I lifted the basket out of her hand and held it against my hip, and held the gate for her at the gate-post.
"He'll sleep until midday," she said in a faint whisper. "He hasn't slept like this since the river."
"He'll be fine," I said.
"Owain will pass back through at noon. If anything is wrong he'll knock."
"I already asked him to."
She looked at me and paused. She didn't ask when. I didn't tell her I'd spoken to him before dawn. She nodded once and went through the gate, and I closed it behind us and we went west.
We walked down the path.
This morning she went west, not east. The track lifted slightly through the line of pines at the back of the clearing and then dropped down through a stand of birch I hadn't been in, and she walked it with familiarity; not looking down for the stones, not looking up for the angle of the light.
I walked at her left shoulder a respectful arm's-length behind.
I didn't walk ahead, nor did I walk too close. I kept my pace at hers and let the woods around us do the work the silence between us wasn't yet ready to do.
The neutral woods between Swiftwater and Brackenhold in late summer were full of bird-song and the dry rustle of the canopy above. The light came down through the leaves gently.
We walked in silence — the silence of two people, neither of whom had yet learned to be the one to speak first. By the time the track came up out of the birch into the clearing where the elderflower stand grew, it had become a thing we were inside together.
The cottage was out of sight.
The stand was older than she was. Six stems of elderflower as thick at the base as my forearm, the white late blooms still on the high branches at the south side, the lower branches stripped from her gathering in years before this one.
The clearing around it was warm. She set her shawl down on the rock at the south edge of the clearing. She put her hands on her hips.
She didn't look at me.
She looked up at the high branches and reached for one a hand's-breadth above her highest reach. Her balance shifted onto the ball of her right foot as she came up onto her toes.
I stepped in.
I steadied her with a hand at her hip.
I didn't mean for the hand to do more than steady her. The hand was at her hip. It stayed there. The branch came down in her hand and the spray of elderflower lifted toward her face like it waited all summer for a hand to take it, and I should have moved my hand.
But I didn’t.
She didn't move either.
She stood with her back to me and the spray of elderflower in her hand, and my hand on her hip. The woods around us were very quiet. She didn't turn, nor did she step back. The line of her shoulder under the cloth of her dress agreed with her to let my hand remain.
The wolf in me, which had been screaming for weeks, surged.
I kissed her.
I kissed her with my back against the trunk of the old oak that grew at the edge of the elderflower stand — turned her in my arms first, the spray of elderflower still in her hand, the basket forgotten on the rock — and her mouth came up under mine in a startled inhale of a woman who had never been kissed, and the inhale broke open against my mouth and became something else.
I turned us.
I turned us both, slowly, so it was her back against the bark of the oak and not mine, and her hand with the spray of elderflower in it came up against my chest with the small white flowers crushed between her palm and the linen, and her other hand went into my hair.
My hand found her braid and pulled it loose.
She said my name into my mouth.
“Cain.”
I heard her say my name dozens of times, but never like this — never with that sound at the end of it. The wolf and the man in me went taut as one.
I held her face in both hands and kissed her until her mouth was open under mine and her breath was uneven against my cheek, and the wolf in me, which had been a roar at the river and a watch in the kitchen, had no name for what it was now — only her back against the bark and my mouth on hers.
I broke the kiss.
I broke it with my forehead against hers and her breath against my mouth and her hand still in my hair. She didn't open her eyes.
I breathed her name. "Marion."
"Don't stop,” she ordered.
"Do you… want to —"
"Yes," she said.
I went to my knees in the leaves.
I worshipped her there.
I gathered the cloth of her dress into both my hands and lifted it slowly up the line of her thighs and let the late summer warmth of the clearing come up between her legs against my mouth, and the first breath I took at the soft of her thigh was the first breath I'd taken in six years of a woman who wasn't a memory.
I hadn't put hands on a human woman this way since Savannah. The way I was doing it belonged to the wolf and the man at once.
I went slow.
Slow because the woman against the bark above me was a woman alone in a cottage for three years, a mother for five, and a witch's apprentice for many before that, and never asked another adult for the touch of a mouth on her body.
The going-slow was the only thing I had in my own bones to put down on the leaves at her feet that hour.
I went slow because the one part of me that knew exactly how to do this was the wolf — the one that had been screaming for weeks.
I used my mouth and tongue.
I used them at the soft of her thigh first, where her skin had the warm smell of the dress, and then higher, where the warm smell became the smell of her.
I said her name into her body. “Marion.”
I said it once when her breath caught above me and her hand went into my hair, and twice when her hips moved without her permission against my mouth, and a third time when her body gave up, opening against my mouth, her thighs beginning to shake against my shoulders.
She tried not to cry out.
The cry of a woman in a wood carried, and she knew it.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth above me and tried not to let the wood take the sound — and she lost. She lost slow.
She lost in pieces. The first piece came against the back of her hand, small and broken.
The second piece came around my name when she said it the third time.
The third piece came when her hand let go of the spray of elderflower and went into my hair instead and her hips lifted against my mouth as she came apart against the oak with her thighs shaking against my shoulders and her hand fisting in my hair while the small white late blooms of the elderflower fell around us in the leaves.
The wolf in me didn't call for more.
That was the calibration. The wolf liked what it saw: her body on the bark of the oak in the slow gold of the morning, my mouth at her, her name in mine — and the part of it that would have wanted more had not yet been given permission to want anything she didn't ask for.
The wolf knew the difference. The man, on his knees, knew it too.
I held her up.
I held her with my hands at her hips and my forehead pressed against the soft skin below her navel until her knees took her own weight again, and then I rose, slow, still clothed, and pressed my forehead to hers.
She didn't open her eyes.
"Cain."
"Yes."
"You didn't —"
"No."
"I want —"
"Not here, Marion. Not yet. Not until you have asked for it in a place that isn't the woods."
She made the small private noise of a woman who was told, by a man on his knees half an hour ago, that the choice was going to be hers and she was going to have to walk back to a cottage and decide it in plain awareness. She opened her eyes. She looked at me.
I ground against her.
I did it slow. I did it full. I pressed her against the bark with the line of my body against the line of hers and let her feel exactly the size of what the going-slow cost me.
Her eyes went dark in the gold light of the clearing, and her hand at my hip closed on the linen of my shirt — careful, steady, sure of the weight she was holding.
I went over the edge with my forehead against hers, breathing her name.
I didn't take more than this. Not yet.
We stood against the oak a long time after.
Her hand was at the back of my neck. My forehead was at hers. The spray of elderflower she dropped was in the leaves at our feet beside her shawl, and the small white late blooms were in her hair where they fell from the high branch, and I didn't take them out.
I straightened the cloth of her dress for her, slowly, with my hands at her hips. She lifted her hand from my neck and pushed her loose hair back over her shoulder. She looked at her hand and saw the elderflower in her palm. She didn't brush it off.
I gathered the rest of the cut spray off the ground and laid it in the basket on the rock.
She watched me do it.
She didn't speak. She stood at the oak with her hand at the bark where her shoulder pressed against it for a long while, and her hair was down where my hand took the braid out.
I held out my hand.
She took it.
I took her shawl off the rock and draped it back over her arm, and she didn't reach to fix it. I put my hand at the small of her back. Not possessive. Anchoring.
We started back.
The path east was slower than the path west.
We walked it together. I kept my hand on her back. She kept the basket in one hand and the spray of elderflower in the other. Her shawl was on the inside of her arm, and the small white late blooms in her hair where they fell.
She looked at me sidelong on the path.
"Cain," she said.
"Yes?"
"What did we just do?"
She said it almost flatly.
I paused for a moment.
"I don't know. But I am not sorry for it."
She didn't answer at once. She walked beside me three steps further down the path with my hand on her back and the basket in her hand, and then she stopped.
She looked at me.
"I think something is happening to me I don't have a word for."
I closed my eyes.
I closed them because what she had just said landed in me the way her words in the workroom doorway some nights ago landed — Then say what you are here for — because those had been the words of a woman who didn't trust me. What she said just now was the words of a woman who did.
I breathed in for a beat.
I had the word. I opened my eyes.
I gave her the answer I allowed myself to hold.
"I have one. But I will not give it to you until you ask."
She didn't ask.
I kept my hand on her back as we walked the rest of the way back together.
The cottage came into the clearing at the end of the path.
The kitchen window had the late morning light on it.
The back step was empty — Noah was asleep, the way she said he would be, Owain still an hour or two from his pass on the road outside.
The smoke from the chimney was the small steady smoke of a kettle she left on the back of the stove before dawn.
She didn't ask for the word yet.
I understood, with my hand on her back, that it was the gift.
She didn’t ask, but she wasn't refusing.
She wasn't yet ready to be the woman who asked.
She wanted to be a woman walking back to her cottage with her shawl on her arm and a man at the small of her back and the smell of elderflower on her hands.
I let her be that woman.
The not-asking sat between us the whole walk, and the wolf in me let it sit there. The wolf, for the first time in six years, was not in a hurry.