Chapter 15 Sage #2
But a moment later: “I don’t love him, you know.
I don’t even like him.” She says this with no more passion than if she were mentioning a distaste for kidney beans.
“Of course, you will have guessed that the marriage is entirely political—and financial. Once Yael abandoned their post as heir, it fell upon me to take it up. So you see, Denby doesn’t care in the slightest what I do or how I feel, so long as I turn up at the altar at winter’s end. ”
“Oh…” Sage says when no better response comes to mind.
“He would not, for instance, care one bit that I now know you’re warmer on the inside than a hot spring.”
Sage shivers even as her whole body flushes. “Don’t, Bard,” she commands, summoning her authority as party leader even as she feels entirely out of control.
“Apologies, Ranger,” Araphi murmurs. “Just…tell me this. Would Ollie care?”
Her words are so soft that Sage could pretend she hasn’t heard them. And for a moment, she considers it. If she wants to shore up the invisible wall she’s built between them over the past three days, her silence now would be a powerful rune.
“No,” she says at last, nearly as quietly. “Ollie wouldn’t care.”
“But do you wish Ollie would?”
Sage rolls back over on her cot. Now that her already sharp eyes have adjusted to the darkness inside the tent, she can see Araphi’s face clearly enough to imagine the details. Her lips—which Sage knows the exact taste and texture of—are pressed together against a held breath.
“No,” she answers again, louder now. “Look, I don’t…I haven’t thought about them in a long time. It just slipped out.”
“Then I don’t understand. I’ve got a fiancé I don’t give a twig about, and who doesn’t give a twig about me.
If you won’t judge me for that, I certainly can’t judge you for having had a lover.
For gods’ sakes, I’ve had more than a few myself.
So what’s stopping you? What’s stopping this? What’s stopping us?”
Sage shoves herself upright to plant her feet on the cold dirt, unable to lie still any longer. “Ollie wasn’t a lover.” She drops her head into her hand to tangle her fingers in her short hair, all the better not to meet Araphi’s eyes. “They were my wife.”
Across the tent, Araphi bolts upright again. “Your wife? But how old—er…”
“I’m not that old!” Sage insists for the second time since this adventure began; perhaps life on the trail has weathered her.
“No, I just meant…I know you are a bit older than me, but how young were you when you married?”
“Too young.”
“Did you know them when you lived in the Rookery?” Araphi presses on, reminding Sage how much of herself she’s revealed.
Far more than she ever meant to.
But Sage nods. “We were sixteen when we left our impoverished but perfectly loving families to become adventurers together. That was my brilliant idea. Got married on a whim soon after, when we passed a little roadside temple to a goddess of apples; that was Ollie’s idea.
It seemed romantic. The priestess never asked our ages, and didn’t care.
I’m reasonably sure she was drunk on the holy cider they fermented in the temple cellar.
We had no clue what we were doing—as adventurers or as partners.
It’s a miracle we both survived as long as we did, till…
Anyway, that was ten years ago, and we haven’t seen each other in five. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I see,” Araphi says, dropping back to little more than a whisper.
“It doesn’t,” she insists, then looks up when Araphi’s cot creaks.
Shedding her blanket, Araphi crosses the tent to kneel between Sage’s feet. Her hands come to rest lightly on Sage’s knees. “Then can I ask…”
“Go ahead,” Sage prompts when she hesitates, hearing her own voice darken. “Ask for what you want.”
“I want to forget this is ever going to end. The adventure, I mean. Just for tonight.”
Quick as a snake strike, Sage cups a hand around Araphi’s jaw to tilt her chin up, and surges down to crush her mouth to the bard’s.
“Just for tonight,” she murmurs against Araphi’s lips a moment later, then pulls away.
“We get each other out of our blood, and then we don’t look back.
Agreed?” Sage can uphold her end of the bargain, she’s sure.
She’s good at that. Better even at leaving than adventuring.
“Agreed,” Araphi promises breathlessly.
“I’m going to light the lamp,” Sage informs her, “so I can see you properly.”
Araphi swallows, her throat fluttering beneath Sage’s fingertips before she reluctantly lets go to kneel beside the lantern. By the time she’s lit the wick with a bit of kindling from inside the camp stove, then lowered the globe back over the flame, Sage looks up to find Araphi standing above her.
She can see too that Araphi has lied: She’s perfectly capable of undoing her laces all by herself.
Her heavy dress lies pooled around her ankles.
She stands only in her riding pants, skintight around her thighs, her hips, and the slope of her belly, and exposing breasts that Sage remembers fitting perfectly inside her cupped hands.
(They felt impossibly smooth compared with her own calloused grip.) In the warm and flickering light now filling the tent, her very skin seems to glow.
Sage’s mouth dries, but before she can reach for Araphi, the bard plants a foot on her thigh. “Help me out of these?”
“Your pretext gets thinner every time,” Sage manages to point out.
But she doesn’t mind a bit as she undoes the laces at Araphi’s waist, then peels down the cloth, pressing a quick kiss to Araphi’s calf as she reveals it. At last Araphi stands naked, her dark sleeping braids tossed over her shoulders to hang down her back.
She grins down at Sage. “You were right; it’s quite warm in here now. Join me?”
Sage isn’t nearly so careful with her own loose-fitting shirt, and sends the top button flying as she tears at it.
Araphi bends forward, one braid falling to brush Sage’s collarbone. “Let me, or one of us will have to mend it before we travel.”
Sage obeys, holding very still as Araphi takes painful care in undoing the rest of the buttons that trail halfway down her shirtfront. Finally, Araphi has to kneel as well to tug the hem of Sage’s shirt out from her breeches.
“Arms up, please?” she prompts.
Again Sage obeys, raising her arms so that Araphi can lift her shirt over her head.
Tossing it aside, Araphi loosens the knot on the linen binding Sage wears, unwinding it from around her chest and upper ribs far too slowly for Sage’s liking.
Araphi tosses that away too, then skims her fingertips back down Sage’s stomach, lingering just slightly at her scar, until they come to rest at the laces of her breeches.
And that is the end of Sage’s patience for keeping still.
Practically growling, she braces Araphi with an arm behind her back as she lunges forward, sending them both toppling to the half-frozen earth.
“Not quite so warm down here,” Araphi says, shivering against her.
At once, Sage whips the mammoth skin from Araphi’s cot to spread out on the ground next to them, knocking the cot on its side in the process.
“Easy, Ranger,” Araphi says with a laugh, “or I’ll have to sleep on yours tonight.”
Sage scoots onto the blanket, then hooks her hands around Araphi’s thighs to pull her over, where she hovers above Araphi with one palm braced beside her head. “I don’t think the queens’ army built their beds to withstand us.”
Araphi’s eyes sparkle. “Then we should spend the night down here, where we’re safe.”
In the past ten years, Sage has crossed swords with pirates, survived ambushes, and stared down the burning throat of a flame viper after disturbing its cliffside nest. Yet she has the unsettling feeling that she’s never been in greater danger than she is right now.
“What is it?” Araphi asks, dark brows furrowing. “Did I say—”
Sage lowers down to brace her body over Araphi’s as she kisses her to stop her from talking.
Better that she saves her breath, anyway.
Sage reaches down to wedge a hand between them and cup Araphi’s sex.
She is so warm, practically aflame, and the sound that slips free when Sage grinds the heel of her palm steadily against her is like a prayer, or a song.
She simply must hear more.
With a questioning glance, answered by a nod of permission from Araphi, Sage sheathes two fingers deep inside her.
“Gods,” Araphi moans in response, tipping her head back.
Sage could kiss the long, exposed arc of her throat all night and hardly get her fill. Instead, she holds perfectly still.
Araphi lifts her head again, eyes burning with impatience. “What are you waiting for, Ranger?” she asks, voice as ragged as her breath.
Sage grins. “ ‘Never share thy lips with a lady who shan’t speak your name.’ Isn’t that what they say?”
“Sage,” Araphi growls, a desperate sound. “Please.”
Now Sage obliges; she doubts she could restrain herself if she wanted to.
Withdrawing her fingers to the knuckles, she buries them again, over and over, curving them to seek the spot her lovers have always particularly enjoyed.
By the arch of Araphi’s back and the animal cry that escapes her delicate throat, Sage suspects the bard does too.
With her thumb, she finds the pearl at the center of Araphi’s sex.
Araphi slides her fingers between their bodies to grip Sage’s wrist with surprising strength, bracing herself to ride Sage’s hand all the harder.
But a moment later, Sage stops again, slipping out of Araphi’s grasp to kiss a trail from her collarbone to the cleft between her breasts, from the flat of her stomach to the crease of one delightfully round hip, all while the bard murmurs her frustration.