Chapter 11 #2
I work it through the same breath he does, and my stomach drops. “There’s only one stand of living wood near enough and old enough to matter.”
“Aye.” He looks up, and past me, out the black window, north, to the dark line of the wildwood at the top of his own land.
“The green’s own trees. I have to go into the green’s own eaves, three days before it collects, and cut the heart of the thing I mean to hold it off with, out of its own living body.
” He huffs something that isn’t a laugh.
“It’s the maddest thing I’ve ever set my hand to.
Walk up to the thing that’s souring the valley and take an axe to its trees.
It’ll feel me do it. It’ll know exactly what I’m cutting it for. ”
“Then you don’t do it alone,” I say, and it comes out with all his own iron in it, borrowed off him, thrown back.
“That’s the arrangement, isn’t it, you great hypocrite.
You reach, I hold. You want to go cutting living wood off a furious god’s own trees, then I’m coming to stand at your back and listen for the moment it stops grieving and starts hunting, same as you haul me out of the ground when I reach too far.
We go together, or the anchor gets built out of dead oak and holds nothing, and I’d sooner risk the trees than watch you die politely under a thing that fell because you were too proud to bring me. ”
He looks at me a long moment, and something in his jaw loosens, and he doesn’t argue it, which is how I know he’s learning me too.
“Tomorrow, then,” he says. “First light. We go up and take what the anchor needs and we don’t linger in it.
” He picks the chisel back up, but he doesn’t cut.
“And tonight I build everything the green wood will join to, so the second I’ve got its heart I can raise the whole of it fast. There’s no time in this for a single wasted hour. ”
He works. I watch. And under the fear of the trees and the god and the three days, there’s the other thing, the one that’s got nothing to do with any of it, building in me all the while.
And I can’t stand it. The wanting. It’s been building under everything for weeks, under the grief and the fear and the cart cut to my boxes and the goose on his boot, and now there’s a working that needs us to say the thing, and a god that’s promised to take me first, and three days, and this enormous stubborn man cutting a joint by lamplight to keep me in a world I’ve spent my whole life refusing to belong to, and I cannot stand one more minute of not.
“Madoc.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t look up. “It’ll want a second brace here if it’s to take a pull from true north, which is where the seam runs, so I—”
“Madoc. Put the chisel down.”
Something in my voice does it. He sets the chisel on the bench, slow, and turns, and looks at me across the lamplit shed with sawdust in the crease of his arm and a question starting in his face, and I cross the floor before I can talk myself into a wagon and out of the county, and I put both my hands flat on his chest, and I tip my whole head back to find him, same as the first night, and I say the truest thing I’ve got.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I tell him.
“And I need you to not be careful about it. You’re careful with everything, it’s the best thing about you, and I need you to not be, just this once, because I’ve been careful my whole life and it’s kept me exactly nowhere, and I would like, one time, to want something all the way and not brace for the leaving. ”
He looks down at me for one long breath. His hands come up and frame my face, both of them, enormous and warm and rough with his trade, and he tips his skull the practiced degree that clears the chipped tusk without either of us saying a word about it, and then he stops being careful.
He kisses me like a man setting down a weight he’s carried too long.
His mouth is warm and sure and there’s nothing tentative left in it, nothing held back or braced against, and one of his hands slides back into my hair and the other spreads wide and warm across the whole of my back and gathers me up into him until I’m on my toes and it still isn’t close enough, and I make a sound against his mouth I’ve never made in my life, and I feel the low answering rumble of it in his chest under my hands.
I’ve been kissed before. On roads, at fairs, quick and forgettable, always with one foot already pointed at the next town.
I have never once been kissed by somebody who built me a cart while I slept and warded his whole house against a god so I could rest and cut a threshold he doesn’t fully believe in on the faith that it might keep me.
I have never been kissed by somebody who chose me first, out loud, in the shape of every careful thing his hands have done for three weeks.
It undoes me. I’ve spent my whole life sure that wanting a place was the fastest road to losing it, and here I am wanting a person with my whole body in a lamplit shed and not one bone of me is bracing for the door.
When we come apart we don’t go far. He rests his forehead against mine, careful of the tusk even now, and we breathe at each other in the sawdust light, both of us wrecked, his thumbs moving slow along my cheekbones like he’s making sure I’m real and staying.
“That wasn’t careful,” he says, low, unsteady.
“No,” I agree, and my voice isn’t steady either. “That was perfect. Ten out of ten. No notes. I’d like several thousand more, please, we can space them out, I’m not unreasonable.”
“Carys.” He says my name plain, and it stops my babbling dead, because there’s a whole weighted thing loaded behind it. “The third piece. What she said. The binding.”
And there it is, the coal in the grass, come inside with us. My heart slams. Because I know what he’s asking, and I know what saying it costs, and every instinct I’ve spent thirty years honing is screaming at me to make a joke and change the subject and be halfway to the Brown Bridge by dawn.
I don’t. I stay. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done standing still.
“I’m scared,” I tell him, into the small space between us, and it comes out shaking.
“Not of the kiss. Of the after. Every single time in my whole life I’ve wanted a place enough to stay, that’s exactly when it stops wanting me back.
That’s the pattern, Madoc, that’s the whole shape of me.
I want, and then I’m gone before they can decide they’re done with me.
And you’re asking me to say a thing out loud that I can’t ever un-say, three days before a god’s promised to take me, and every coward bone I’ve got is telling me to run tonight and save us both the funeral. ”
His hands don’t leave my face. “Then don’t say it tonight,” he says, low and steady, the least romantic and most trustworthy man alive.
“The binding wants the truth of a thing, not a thing said too soon to be true. We’ve got three days.
Say it when it’s true, or don’t say it at all, and we’ll find another road, or we won’t, and either way I’m not letting go of the front of your shirt while there’s a god in those trees with your name in its mouth.
” His forehead presses mine. “I don’t need you to promise me forever in a shed.
I need you to not go over the Brown Bridge in the dark.
That’s all I’m asking. One night at a time.
You’re good at those. You’ve told me so. ”
I laugh, wet, and it turns into something that isn’t quite a sob, and I fist both hands in the front of his shirt and hold on, and I don’t run.
“One night at a time,” I say. “I can do one night.”
“I know you can.” He kisses my forehead, my temple, the corner of my jaw where I’d missed the blood two days back, careful again now, the careful I love, back where it belongs.
“Come to bed. Not the floor tonight. It’s a foolish thing, keeping a whole bed between us with three days left and a god at the door.
Come to bed and let me hold the thing I built the cart for, and we’ll be brave about the rest of it in the morning. ”
So I do. I climb into the bed he built too big for anyone, and he folds himself in behind me, careful of every inch of me, his arm heavy and warm across my middle and his breath slow at the back of my neck, and the anchor stands half-cut in the shed and the god waits in the trees and the high bloom comes on in three days, and none of it can touch the small warm certain fact of a man’s heartbeat steady against my spine.
I don’t sleep much. But I don’t run, either, and for me, tonight, that’s the braver of the two.