Chapter 27 Sage #2
Sage can’t keep a low whine from escaping when Araphi stands again.
She fetches a feather pillow from the bed, then readjusts the stool so Sage’s knee is propped atop it, properly cushioned.
In the face of her impatience, Araphi works slowly, carefully.
She removes Sage’s boots, and coaxes her to lift her hips so she can slide off her breeches and underpants, gently working the last leg over Sage’s tightly wrapped knee.
Then off comes Sage’s shirt—the one with the sewn-up shoulder and long-dried bloodstain—as well as her linen bindings, so she sits naked in the chair in their swiftly warming chamber and stares up at Araphi, like a wounded raptor trapped just beyond reach of its prey.
“Comfortable?” Araphi asks. The studied innocence in her voice does nothing to belie the sparkle of mischief in her brown eyes.
“Enough,” Sage growls, grasping for her.
The speed with which Araphi throws off her dress and riding pants and straddles Sage suggests that despite her teasing, she’s in complete agreement.
Then there’s no more worrying, no more planning, no more talking.
Only the muffled crackle and pop of the logs inside the clay stove, and their quickened breathing as Araphi grinds her mound against Sage’s.
Araphi’s fingers return to the hair at the nape of her neck, whispering so gently against her skin that it almost tickles, while Sage digs her fingers into the soft slopes of Araphi’s hips.
When Sage arrives from the pressure and friction of their bodies alone, it feels something like a homecoming.
For the next few weeks, they shelter in Wren’s family quarters, doing their best to stay out from underfoot.
Araphi helps Wren’s mother with the mending, and they both help her momma with repairs around the compound.
It turns out the bard isn’t bad with a needle or a knife, though where she really shines is while performing for the villagers in the mess hall or the common spaces.
Wren’s momma found her a battered old lute that someone’s grandparents had passed down, but never taught them the trick of, and now she’s much in demand.
The children of Arkney have taken to trailing after her, starry-eyed, when she’s simply passing through the corridors on the way to the washroom.
As her knee continues to mend, Sage has lately been accompanying Wren on her hunting and foraging trips around the Graywood, though she uses the walking stick still.
Arkney is grateful for the extra food to pad their winter stores, and she suspects Wren is glad for the company, though they say little to each other in the forest. It’s the same business Wren was about when she found them in the hunting cabin.
The first time they get drunk with Wren, they’re in Arkney’s only tavern, which is really more of a big cupboard off the mess hall, where a woman named Barya makes oat beer and liquor brewed from rice.
It isn’t until she’s three mugs of beer deep that Wren confesses the cabin’s true purpose, and what she’d hoped to find there that day.
“It’s been there for generations, since Arkney was a much larger village on the banks of the Halhazy where it neared the Willowthorn. No idea who built it. It’s older than the temple, even. My ancestors built that, you know?”
Sage recalls the ruins where they sheltered, its dusty floors and slowly collapsing roof, and the peeling icon of the dragon in the sanctum. “Truly?”
“Mmm. The room you said you slept in? That was ours. My mothers’ and mine, when I was a child.”
“It took you this long to tell us all this?” Sage asks incredulously.
She thinks of the dragon’s tooth, sewn into the dress that Araphi has tucked away in favor of wearing clothing provided by the inhabitants of Arkney.
What would Wren say, she wonders, if they dared to tell her that they’d found the artifact her family had dedicated themselves to protecting, and carried it here?
Wren shrugs and pets Goway, who perches on the countertop pecking at a bit of meat.
At least the sight of him has become less startling over time.
“What’s to tell? We tended the altar, kept the fires burning, guarded a great dragon’s grave—even after the rest packed up to find a safer place, away from what you two call the Swallow.
Or some did, at least. Many went south to try their luck in the kingdom proper.
But we stayed, my mothers and me. I was fifteen then.
Another six years, we kept the fires, till finally I begged them to leave it behind, or I’d make my own way and never come back again. ”
“That must have been a lonely six years,” Araphi says sympathetically.
“Often it was. Only sometimes my friend…no, not a friend,” she corrects, blushing over the lip of her mug.
“Jasper. He left with his parents when the rest did, came here, and built Arkney. But as you’ve seen, it wasn’t so far that we couldn’t meet.
The first time, he ran away all by himself, found his own path back to the riverbank.
Along the way he found the cabin, nearly halfway between us.
He told me about it before his father came to fetch him, and we agreed to meet on new-moon nights, as often as we could. ”
“So the cabin magic was meant for him?” Sage guesses.
“I didn’t learn to cast a homecoming spell till I was sixteen.
By then, I was trusted to stay away from the temple overnight.
I’d sneak extra provisions with me—a half-emptied wine jug, another sack of potatoes and onions, a dry log—to reset the spell for the next trip.
The magic only lasts so long as the components do, as you found out.
But it was long enough to keep us warm and fed for a night, so we’d no need to chop wood or fix a pot.
We could tend to…other matters.” Somehow, Wren’s blush deepens further, until her cheeks nearly match her hair. “Much as it seems you two did.”
Araphi grins cheekily at Sage.
As happens worryingly often these days when she looks at the bard, Sage feels like a cup brimming over.
She reaches out to take Araphi’s hand atop the bar counter (nothing more than a pine plank propped over barrels) and squeezes tight for lack of proper words.
“So where is Jasper not-a-friend now?” she asks Wren instead.
Her flushed cheeks fade as she stares down into the depths of her mug.
“There was one moon I couldn’t make it. Momma was laid up at home with a sickness, and they couldn’t spare me so long.
When I went down to the cabin the next new moon, I found a letter.
He was going down into the kingdom, to Shearwater.
He wanted to find a big ship to sail on, see lands outside our little valley.
Jasper planned to petition them at Briarwall to let him through the gate.
Convince them he wasn’t a threat; that he wanted to be of service to the kingdom and the crown.
” Wren’s lips tug into a sneer. “That’s the only way they’ll let us through—if they decide we can be of use to them, whatever that means.
And only then if you catch them in a good mood.
Helps if you have something to offer, and they’re especially bored.
He was always a good storyteller. Like you.
” She nods at Araphi. “He said I ought to come when I could. To head for the ports and ask about him, as that’s where he intended to go.
That’s when I started begging—convinced my mothers to leave the temple for Arkney.
At least we weren’t alone anymore. But that was four years ago, and I… I haven’t made it south just yet.”
Araphi frowns. “Why not?” she asks, whisper-soft.
“Well. This is home, isn’t it? Not the rooms or the roofs or the things in between, but the people.
My mothers. The little ones. This jackwagon.
” She toasts fondly to the bartender, who scowls by the fermenting barrels.
“I think of leaving them, and I expect it would be like cutting out my heart and leaving that behind too. You know that feeling?”
Sage swallows, now staring down into her own drink rather than letting her gaze wander to meet Araphi’s. If it did, then everything inside her that’s too much to contain would surely spill over, and how would she ever put it back again?
In late winter, Sage, for the first time since childhood, plants a seed with the expectation of watching it sprout.