Tell her the horse says you are welcome
—SAGE
We lie tangled together on the shower floor for hours. Her head rests on my chest, her heartbeat syncing with mine through the bond—even stronger now that she’s accepted Ashán. But it still isn’t sealed, he murmurs.
“Ready to get out, mí’aevúna? I think your skin has officially turned into prunes.”
She winces as she moves closer.
“Sore?”
“I feel like I’ve ridden a horse,” she chuckles, her words still slurred from Ashán’s venya.
Tell her the horse says you are welcome, Ashán rasps. The soreness is temporary. The venya in her blood is not. She will be feeling me for three days.
He is entirely too pleased with himself.
Four, if I’m lucky.
“The horse,” I sigh, “says you’re welcome.”
Her laugh breaks into another wince. And both of us feel the deep ache of everything we have done to her through the bond.
“Let’s go get you some food, Saevúra.”
I gather her against my chest and stand. She squeaks, the movement seating her deeper. Her fingers dig into my sides.
“Sage, you’re still inside me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not—”
“No.”
No, Ashán agrees, with the finality of a door slamming shut.
“You’re going to carry me through the house like this?”
“You cannot walk, mí’aevúna.” I press a kiss to her wet hair and step out of the shower, Nook helpfully swinging the bathroom door wide before I reach it. “And neither of us is willing to leave you yet. This solves both problems.”
“This solves neither problem—”
She is still talking, Ashán observes. The venya must be wearing off. Feed her before she develops opinions.
The stairs are an adventure. Every step jostles her down onto me, and by the fourth one she has stopped arguing and started making small, ruinous sounds into my chest. By the seventh, Ashán is growling and suggesting we stop for maintenance, and by the landing I have to stop and stand very still with my forehead against the wall while both of us remember why we are walking anywhere at all.
“Food,” I repeat, to everyone in this body.
The kitchen is warm with afternoon light. Droot is on the counter beside a bowl of peaches. At the sight of us, his Sun, naked, impaled and wrapped around me like ivy, he pulses through four colors before settling on a red so bright it borders on emergency lighting.
“Not one word, Droot. Or no more snacks.”
He chitters and scampers into the living room.
I cook one-armed. It is not elegant—eggs, toast, the smoked cheese she likes, sliced peaches—with my mate seated on me the entire time, her cheek against my sternum, fingers tracing idle patterns through the leaves over my ribs while the change comes over our body slowly, my form easing back into itself an inch at a time.
I do not want to give it back, Ashán mutters.
I know, I tell him. But she needs to eat, and you don’t know how to cook.
I know how to cook. I have learned what not to do by watching you burn things for the past eight days.
I feed her by hand. Bites of egg and toast, slices of peach held to her lips, her color returning with every swallow. The gold slowly clears from her eyes until the woman looking up at me is sharp again, smiling like she knows something.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She licks peach juice from my thumb. “You’re just very good at this.”
“At cooking?” I chuckle. “Do you remember the peach cobbler?”
“At taking care of us.”
Us. Her, me, and him. The word lands in three places at once.
Once she’s fed and ready, I ease her off of me.
She whimpers at the loss. I nearly undo the entire decision on the spot. The sight that follows stops both of us cold: the slow spill of everything we gave her, pearl and gold swirling together shamelessly, beginning to slip down the inside of her thigh.
Absolutely not, Ashán snarls.
For once, we are in complete agreement.
I lift her onto the counter, lay her back against the cool stone, and hook her knees over my shoulders.
“Sage,” she gasps. “What are you doing?”
“You ate breakfast,” I murmur, lowering my mouth to her. “Let me have mine.”
My tongue passes over her swollen skin, gathering every drop that dared to leave her and pressing it back inside her where it belongs, sealed with a final kiss to her clit that makes her whole body jolt against the counter.
I straighten, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, and help her sit up while she stares at me with her chest heaving.
“Sage?”
“Nothing of ours goes to waste, Saevúra.” I hand her another slice of peach. “House rule.”
New house rule, Ashán amends. Effective immediately. Forever.
“You’re just going to leave me like this?” she murmurs.
“No, ílyen. Of course not. I’m going to go grab you a dress.”
“... Not what I meant.”
I chuckle as I walk up the stairs. I choose a pretty pink dress with tiny white flowers from the closet.
I stop in the bathroom to grab her a towel, and scoop her soaked dress from this morning off the floor.
The moment my fingers touch the fabric, it feels like I’ve been struck in the chest. I lift it to my nose and inhale.
That apple scent from earlier assaults my nose, strongest near her pocket.
I shove my hand inside and my fingers close around a coarse, silver thread.
Sage? Ashán murmurs.
I don’t answer. The thread burns against my palm.
It rode home in her pocket, against her hip, into our house, while we—
Sage. He pushes harder. Go down and ask her before you build the story yourself.
He is right. I hate how often he is right now that he has a voice.
The stairs take a year. The dress hangs forgotten in my other hand, and by the last step the vines along the banister have gone dark at their edges, following me down like smoke.
Eden is perched on the counter’s edge, where I left her, working through the last peach slice. She’s smiling when she looks up, until she sees my face. The smile dies.
“Sage?”
I hold up the thread.
It glints between my fingers, faintly glowing.
“Oh,” she murmurs. “That’s—I found it in the marsh. It was glowing, and I thought it was pretty, so I picked it up. I forgot I even had it.”
“… You forgot.”
“Yes! I heard you scream from all the way out there and I rushed back to bring you the herbs—” She stops mid-sentence, reading my face. “What’s wrong?”
I close my fist around the thread.
“This,” I say, fighting to keep my voice level, “is from him. The male you saw at the marsh. I can smell him on it.” I make myself meet her eyes. “I need you to tell me everything that happened out there. Please.” My hand trembles at my side.
She covers herself with her hands, and guilt bleeds through the bond.
“I didn’t think it was important,” she says quietly. “You were in so much pain and I just—”
“I am not in pain anymore.” I cross the kitchen and stop in front of her, close enough that her knees brush my stomach. “Tell me. Please. After the Horsemen, I need to make sure he’s not a threat.”
She tells me about the hunched figure on the root, talking to no one—to two no-ones. The voices trading places. Three souls in one stitched body, falling apart at the seams.
“Did he see you?” I ask.
“Yes, I tried to help him.” Her arms tighten around herself.
“He was in so much pain, Sage. There were so many wounds. I offered him the hushroot, and told him I could pick more for you, but when I touched his hair, he screamed like I’d burned him and then he was just…
gone. Into the water. The thread was all that was left. ”
She touched him, Ashán says, very quietly.
“He has someone,” she adds. “A woman he loves. He kept saying he wanted to hold her again, but he wouldn’t let her see him.
He asked how she could ever love him, looking the way he does.
” Her eyes come up to mine. “So I told him about you and Ashán. Two souls in one body, and how one of you wouldn’t be my mate without the other. ”
“You told a stranger,” I say slowly, “about our bond.”
“Would you rather have let him think I didn’t have a mate?” she counters.
“I would prefer to demonstrate our mating right in front of him,” Ashán growls.
“Does he know he said that out loud?” she murmurs.
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “If he didn’t, he does now.”
“We will not be demonstrating anything, ever again, if the two of you keep acting like this.” She jumps down from the counter and snatches the towel out of my hand.
She does not mean that, Ashán says.
She might mean that.
… Fix it.
I grab her wrist before she can storm past me, pulling her back into my chest.
“Saevúra, wait—”
“I am wet, sticky, and exhausted,” she says, poking at my chest with a peach-stained finger. “And I just spent ten minutes being held hostage on a counter because you two couldn’t handle a piece of string.”
Tell her she is radiant when she is angry, Ashán urges.
Do not, I warn him. I look down at her, softening my grip on her waist. “I’m sorry. We’re… protective. Dangerously so. But you came back to us, and you brought the hushroot, and I am being a fool.”
She narrows her eyes, but the tightness around her mouth softens. “And your accomplice?”
Tell her I am also a fool, Ashán grumbles. A very hungry, very sorry fool.
“He says he is also a fool,” I relay. “A very sorry one.”
She studies me for a long moment, her finger still pressed into my chest.
“Fine. I forgive you.” She steps back and stretches. “I’m going to shower off and then—”
“No.” The word comes out of both of us at once.
Eden raises an eyebrow. “No?”
“There is an unknown male in our marsh,” I say, very reasonably, “and you want to wash us off of you?”
“I want to wash the sticky off of me—”
“The sticky,” I say, “is the point.”
The sticky is the entire point, Ashán agrees. Every drop of it. He will smell us on her from across the meadow and know exactly what she is and exactly whose.
“You’re serious.” She looks between my purple eye, and Ashán’s flickering dark one. “You want me marinating in the two of you like a territorial casserole?”