Chapter 15 #2
He’s at the anchor after supper, where he always goes when there’s a thing too big to hold still, cutting a brace by lamplight with his sleeves shoved up and the whole enormous careful length of him bent to the wood.
I stand in the shed door and I watch him a while, and I let myself, for once, not fight the size of what’s in my chest. Then I cross the floor and I take the chisel out of his hand and set it down, same as I did the first time, except this time I’m not scared.
“You’re going to want both hands,” I tell him.
He goes still. His eyes come up to mine, dark gold in the lamp. “Carys.”
“I’ve been careful my whole life about the wanting, and then you went and told a god you’d rather stand in the ice than have me kept safe against my will, and now I’ve got all this wanting and nowhere careful left to put it.
” I get my hands under the hem of his shirt, flat on the warm ridged plane of his stomach, and feel him breathe in sharp.
“So we’re doing it my way tonight. You did it careful and slow and perfect the first time and I’ll want that again a thousand times.
But tonight I want to be the one who does the choosing, out loud, with my hands, because a man who won’t believe he’s chosen ought to get shown as often as told.
Sit down on that bench, Madoc. Let me choose you where you can feel it. ”
He sits. The great stubborn wall of him, sat down on his own workbench because I asked, watching me with his hands loose at his sides and something wrecked and disbelieving in his face, and it’s the most powerful I’ve felt in my whole life, more than any song into any green, the plain enormous power of being wanted back by a man who thought he only got to be useful.
I take my time undressing him. I make him watch me do it.
I put my mouth on every scar I’ve learned in the dark these nights and now get to see, the old ridged war of him, and I tell each one, low, that I’m glad he lived through it to end up in my yard, and he makes a sound low in his chest at that I’ve never pulled out of him before, undone by being tended instead of doing the tending.
His hands come up to me and I take them and put them where I want them and take them away again when I’m not done, and he lets me, he lets me run the whole of it, an orc who could lift me one-handed sitting still under my hands because I asked him to, and it’s the truest trust I’ve ever been handed.
When I finally climb up over him, when I take the size of him slow and careful because careful’s still just physics between us and always will be, I do it with my hands framing his face and my eyes on his, so there’s no mistaking whose choice this is.
I set the pace. I take him at the speed I want and I watch what it does to him, the jaw, the ruined breath, the enormous hands gone gentle on my hips holding and not gripping, letting me have the whole of it my own way, and I lean down with him seated full in me and I say it against his mouth, plain, the nearest to the words I can bear before the bloom.
“I choose this. You. Not the cart. Not the wall. This. Say you hear me.”
“I hear you,” he gets out, wrecked, his forehead dropping to mine, his head turned that half-inch that keeps the tusks off my skin, gentle with me even here. “God help me, I hear you, it’s in me now, I’ll not forget it, I—”
And that’s when the green reaches for me.
It’s soft. It’s terrible. It comes right up through the pleasure, right into the open blown-wide place I’ve let myself become tonight, and it isn’t the cold one and it isn’t quite the Keeper either, it’s the green itself, the whole grieving owed enormous green, and it has found me open and glad and wanting to stay, and it offers.
It offers the thing I have wanted my whole entire life.
Stay, the green says, into the deepest root of me, gentle as gold.
You need never leave again. Come down into the green and be kept, wholly, forever, held so close you will never once wonder if you are wanted.
No road. No leaving. No cold morning bracing to be moved along.
Only kept, and kept, and kept, in the arms of a thing that will never tire of you, never decide it is done with you, never die and leave you alone as the mortal one someday must. Stay in me and be kept forever.
And oh, God help me, for one long terrible breath, I want it.
Because it’s the exact shape of the hole in me.
It’s every road and every strange town and every morning I woke braced to be moved along.
It’s the old keeper dying and leaving me the wagon.
It’s thirty years of wanting a place that would never let me go, and here is a thing offering me exactly that, forever, guaranteed, no risk, no bracing, kept past death and change and every human frailty.
It knows me. It reached into the wide-open wanting of me and found the exact want and named it and offered it, and for one breath I sway toward it like a woman leaning off a high place.
Then Madoc’s hands tighten on my hips. Not to hold me down. To hold me here.
“Carys.” His voice, rough, worried, reading my face gone strange even now, even in this. “You’ve gone somewhere. Come back. Where’d you go.”
And it’s his voice that does it. Not because it’s louder than the green. Because it’s a choice and the green isn’t.
The green offers to keep me. It’s the sweetest cage ever built, and it’s still a cage, a thing that would hold me forever because I’m owed and it’s owed and we’d be even, kept because I’m a debt it means to collect, kept because it wants me, not because it chose me and I chose it back.
And here under my hands is a man who told that same green to its face that he’d rather stand in the ice than keep me against my will.
Who made me stand and do nothing useful so I’d know it was me he wanted.
Who won’t ever hand me the comforting lie.
The green would keep me forever and never once let me choose.
Madoc would let me drive off over the Brown Bridge tomorrow and grieve me the rest of his life rather than cage me, and it’s that, exactly that, the letting-go he’d allow, that makes him the only keeping I’d ever stay for.
“I’m here,” I tell him, and I mean it down to the root, and I feel the green’s offer thin and drain back out of me, refused, and something in it that might, in a thing made of grief, have been almost proud of me.
“I’m here. Something offered me forever and I told it no because forever isn’t a choice and you are.
Now finish this with me, Madoc, I’ve got a point to make to a god about the difference between kept and chosen and I intend to make it with my whole body. ”
He finishes it with me. It’s fierce after that, and close, and true, both of us saying with our hands the thing we’ve sworn to save the words of for the bloom, and when I go over it’s his name in my mouth and not the green’s, my choice and not my debt, and he follows me with his face pressed into my throat and my name broken in his, and the green doesn’t get a scrap of it, because I didn’t give it freely, and freely is the only way anything real ever gets given.
After, I lie sprawled on his chest on a workbench too narrow for either of us, and I laugh, wrecked, because we’ll both have splinters in places splinters have no business being, and he huffs the almost-laugh into my hair, and outside the anchor stands and the green waits and the bloom comes on in two days.
“It offered to keep me forever,” I tell him, when I can. “The green. Just now. Kept, past death, guaranteed. Everything I’ve wanted my whole life.”
His arms go tight. “And you said no.”
“I said no.” I press my ear over his heart, that slow good drum.
“Turns out I don’t want to be kept forever by a thing that never had to choose me.
I want to be chosen every ordinary morning by a man who could leave and doesn’t.
That’s the difference. I didn’t know it was the difference till a god offered me the wrong one.
You’ve made the right one look so good I turned down forever for it, you enormous impossible man, so I hope you know what you’ve done, there’s no getting rid of me now, I chose the harder thing on purpose and I’m keeping it. ”
“Two days,” he says, into my hair. “Say it in the real words in two days, with the green listening, and it’ll hold a valley.”
“I’ll say it in two days.” I close my eyes. “And I’ll mean it so hard the green will have to forgive us just to get us to stop. Now carry me to an actual bed, I’ve made my point but I’ve also got a splinter in my hip and my dignity’s about run out.”
He carries me to bed. I don’t taste the sweetness anymore.
But I’ve got the other sweet thing, the one that’s too new to have been the green’s to take, the one that only started growing in me this season, and it’s in the slow beat of a heart under my ear in the dark, and it’s the only forever I’d ever have wanted anyway, the kind you have to choose again every single morning, the kind that could end and doesn’t, the kind you stay for on purpose.
I stay. Two more days, and then, if we live, all of them. I stay.