16. Marion
Marion
Noah had been asleep for fourteen hours and was still asleep. I lay with the cover up to my chin and listened to the light steady breath of Cain on the couch in the front room, and the bark-mark at the back of my neck where the oak pressed me yesterday was warm against the linen of the pillow.
I came back from the elderflower stand as a different woman.
I didn’t know what to call the woman I became in the leaves at the foot of the oak. I set it aside and started the morning.
I rose and dressed, then went to the kitchen. He came in from the front room a few minutes later. I saw him differently now, and the hum at my sternum was still there, lower now, and hungrier.
He stopped at the kitchen doorway.
"Marion," he began.
"Noah’s still sleeping."
"I know."
"The herb bed needs the morning work."
He looked at me for a long beat. Whatever he thought the herb bed meant in that moment, it wasn't what it had ever meant to me.
"I will fetch the gloves," he said.
A few minutes later, we were in the herb bed, working the rosemary line together.
I knelt at the south end. He knelt at the far end. The cleared ground between us was the line of dark soil he turned for me in the last two weeks, and the new green growth that had been worked by two hands instead of one for the first time since I was eighteen.
The sun came up over the cottage. The light came down on the rosemary line slowly, and the smell of the rosemary under my hand was the smell that had been in this bed for the better part of fifteen years.
We didn't talk for the first half-hour. I let the silence be what it was at the elderflower stand yesterday — a place we were inside together.
He spoke without a preface.
"Her name was Savannah."
I had heard that name only once before, when Noah was asking about his mother. I didn't look up. I kept my hands in the soil.
"She had a laugh I loved. She held Noah the same way you do; with both arms, close. She said the keep was wrong, the morning before she died. I didn't listen to her."
The rosemary under my hand stayed where it was.
He didn't grieve aloud. He said her name without grief in his voice for the first time.
He worked the next clump of weed out of the soil.
I didn't ask a question. I held my hands where they were until the heat in my chest came back down to something I could speak through.
I said it without a preface either.
"Her name was Theodora."
His hands went still at the far end of the line. He only knew I was a witch's apprentice before, with a few half-truths between us. This time, he would know the truth. He didn't look up.
"She wasn't my blood mother. I was left on her doorstep as a baby — she never told me by whom.
She raised me openly as her adopted daughter.
She brewed the four-herb sleeping draught at the workbench I taught Noah to read at.
She taught me to grind roots when I was six.
" The next sentence waited for years, and I let it wait one more.
"She walked through the cottage door on my eighteenth birthday, and didn't come back. "
He didn't speak.
"I stood at the door for two days. The brass latch. The kitchen window. The corner of the path past the curve where she would have come back around if she'd been coming back. Then I stopped standing at it, and I was the eighteen-year-old at that door for the next eight years."
The rosemary under my hand was warm now where the sun came down through it.
"I don't know who she went to. I don't know whether she walked. In eight years, I hadn’t met another person in the neutral woods between Swiftwater and Brackenhold who knew her four-herb draught."
I let the eighteen-year-old out at the south end of the rosemary line.
I didn't cry. I worked the next clump of soil out from under the rosemary at the base, and my hand was very steady.
He didn't move at the far end of the line for a long beat. Then he said it, very quietly. "Marion."
"Mm."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
He didn't say more. He went back to work, and I did as well. The rosemary line took the rest of the morning, and at the end of it the bed was clean, and neither of us said another word about what we laid down between us in the soil.
Noah woke at midday with his dark hair pressed flat on one side of his head from the pillow and the sleepy face of a boy who slept fourteen hours and didn't understand why.
He ate the bread and the cheese at the kitchen table.
He read the next chapter of the lore book aloud to Cain at the back step in the afternoon light.
He helped me carry the basket of late cherries in from the cherry tree.
He fell asleep at the kitchen table at the end of supper with his small dark head on the lore book.
Cain carried him.
He lifted the boy out of the chair without waking him — careful, practiced — and carried him through to the back room. He laid him down and pulled the cover up to his shoulder. Then he stood at the door, and looked at him for a long beat.
I watched from the kitchen until he came back.
He stopped at the doorway between the front room and the kitchen with his hand on the wood of the frame.
"I do not know what my wolf is and what my heart is anymore.” He said it carefully. “But I know what is in front of me."
I didn't plan what I did next.
I crossed the kitchen and put my hand on his chest.
He didn't ask if I was sure. He was told at the oak. He was told in the rosemary bed. He was told at the kitchen window of the boy he carried in his arms five minutes ago. He nodded once.
He took my hand.
We went into the back room together. He closed the door behind us. The cottage went very quiet around the closed door.
* * *
The lamp on the side table was already lit.
I lit it earlier for Noah. The light from it was a low yellow, and the moon at the slat of the shutter was thin this time of year.
I stood at the foot of the bed. He stood at the closed door.
I slept in this room alone for twenty-six years.
He crossed the room slowly.
He stopped at an arm's-length and waited for the beat he had been waiting for since the morning of the knock, and I lifted my hand and put it against the line of his jaw. The dark stubble of the day under my palm was warm where his blood was, and his eyes closed at the touch.
"Cain."
"Yes?"
"Tonight."
"Yes."
He undressed me like a man taking off armor that no longer needed to be worn.
He unbuttoned the line of bone buttons down the front of my dress one at a time, slow, careful, his hands very steady.
He lifted the dress off my shoulders and let it fall around my hips.
He lifted the shift over my head. He didn't look at my body before he looked at my face.
He looked at me until I opened my eyes and looked back, and then he let his eyes go down the line of my bare body slowly.
His hand came up to the bark-mark at the back of my neck.
He named it now without speaking — the touch of his thumb against the red line of skin where the oak pressed me — and the private smile at the corner of his mouth was the smile of a man who, in plain awareness, decided to leave a different mark before the night was out.
I lifted my hands to the buttons of his shirt.
I undressed him the way he undressed me. I let myself look at his shoulders the way I had been not-looking at them across a kitchen workbench for six weeks, and I let my hand rest at the line of the muscle at his side, and let it stay.
He laid me down on the bed.
He came down over me slow. He held himself above me on the meat of his forearms and let me feel the warmth of his body without the weight of it.
"Marion."
"Mmm?"
"Tell me to stop if you need me to."
"I won't need to."
"Tell me anyway."
I almost laughed. I lifted my hand to the back of his neck instead and pulled him down, and his mouth came against mine as it did at the oak, slower this time, deliberate, and his hand went down the line of my body.
He went slow.
Slow with his mouth at the curve of my neck and slow with his hand at my breast and slow with his hand lower, between my thighs. His thumb worked the place his mouth was at the oak, meticulous and unhurried.
I came apart against his hand, my hand in his hair and his mouth on mine and the moan he made when I gave him my undoing — a sound he didn’t make a day before. It was his wolf that made that sound. I felt it under my hand at the line of his shoulder where the heat was.
He went inside me slowly.
He pressed his forehead to mine the same way he did at the oak, and he went slow and went deep and went steady, with his mouth at my temple.
I held him — my hand at the back of his neck, my other hand at his shoulder — and I let myself be held. The man over me was someone I had not been letting in for many mornings, and it came off in the soil at the rosemary line earlier.
He said my name the same as yesterday. “Marion.”
He didn't move off me for a long beat. He stayed with his forehead at mine and his breath against my mouth and his hand at the line of my hair where my braid came undone an hour ago.
Something settled.
The bond wasn't sealed. I didn't have a word for the bond — I was told yesterday in the woods that he had one and would not give it to me until I asked — and I didn't want to ask yet. But the thing in my chest that had been a hum for weeks was a steadier thing now.
He rolled onto his side and pulled me with him.
He pulled me so my back was against the warm line of his chest, his arm came around me at the waist, the meat of his other arm went under my shoulder, and his forehead pressed against the temple where his mouth was an hour ago.
The cottage was very quiet.
The moon at the slat of the shutter was the same thin moon. The boy across the wall was asleep. The lore book was on the kitchen table where he fell asleep on it. The wooden bird was on the shelf above the bed. The smell of elderflower was still on my pillow from yesterday afternoon.
He breathed against my temple a long beat.
Then he said it. Very quietly.
"I will not fail this twice."
I didn't ask what he meant.
I was half asleep against the warm line of his chest, and the words came against my skin. The shape of the sentence sat in the bed between us. I felt it sit there.
He didn't say more.
I listened to him breathe.
In my twenty-six years of life, I had never slept against anyone.
I slept against him.