29. Chapter 29 #3
The word settled through me, low and certain.
“Safe,” I answered. Then, because safety was no longer only the absence of danger, I turned in his arms and kissed him. “And I want you.”
He went very still.
Daska had been underneath and around all of it—lifting me when my muscles failed, finding water, reading every flicker of strain before I had to name it. He gave so easily that it would have been possible to let his care become invisible. I wouldn’t.
I pushed gently at his shoulder until he lay back in the furs. Then I climbed over him on unsteady knees.
Tau made an appreciative sound. Rivik silenced him with a hand over his mouth.
Daska didn’t look away from me. “You’re tired.”
“I am.” I set my palms against his chest. His heart beat hard beneath one of them. “I’m also choosing.”
His hands came to my waist, broad and warm, but he didn’t guide me. He let me lower myself onto him at my own pace, pausing when my oversensitive body protested, taking him deeper when the ache softened into pleasure.
There was nothing hurried in Daska. No demand that I climb towards another peak. He held me while I moved, and when my thighs began to shake, Rivik’s hands steadied my hips from behind. Tau knelt close enough for me to brace one hand on his shoulder.
All three of them carried some part of my weight.
Daska’s gaze never left mine.
“Still safe?”
I bent to kiss him. “Still mine?”
His breath caught. “Always.”
I moved over him slowly, surrounded by Rivik’s heat at my back and Tau’s hand curled around mine.
Pleasure returned differently this time—not a sharp climb towards breaking, but a deep warmth that gathered with every stroke.
Daska touched my face as if he could scarcely believe I was above him, wanting him, taking what he offered without apology.
That was what finally undid me.
I came with his name against his mouth. Rivik held me upright when my arms failed; Tau pressed a kiss to my knuckles; Daska wrapped both arms around me and followed with one low, shaken sound.
For a long time, none of us moved.
I lay sprawled across Daska’s chest with Rivik fitted along my back and Tau draped over our legs, too many limbs beneath too many furs. Someone’s hair was in my mouth. Tau complained that Rivik’s knee was crushing a royal organ. Rivik told him the loss would improve his judgement.
I laughed until my sore muscles protested.
Then Daska’s hand moved slowly down my spine, and the shelter quieted around us.
Each of them had been wholly himself: Tau’s joy, Rivik’s consuming devotion, Daska’s steady care. Yet none of them had taken me away from the others. I hadn’t been divided among them. I had been allowed to grow large enough to hold every part of what they gave me.
I had spent my life accepting less than I needed and calling it gratitude. Here, twenty-five thousand years from everyone who had taught me love came with a ration and a reckoning, I let three good men give me more.
Every hand. Every mouth. Every murmured word.
And for once, I didn’t brace for the bill.
* * *
At first I thought it was only the happiness, the enormous feeling pressing up under my breastbone with nowhere to go.
Then I understood it was the other thing.
The borrowed weight I carried, the thing that eased when I was loved and clenched when I was guilty, had begun to do something it had never done before.
It strained and pulled, a hard insistent pressure low in my chest that reached, as it had reached toward the killing river all those months ago, except there was no river here; there was only the ground.
It reached toward the ground.
I lay very still in the warm tangle of my sleeping men, pressed my free hand flat to my sternum, and felt it thrum there, insistent, wrong, worse than it had ever been, a pressure that made it hard to lie still and harder to breathe, as though what I carried had woken to something the rest of me couldn't hear yet and was trying to climb out of me toward it.
I thought about waking Daska, and came within a breath of it.
Then Rivik's arm tightened over me in his sleep, and Tau hummed his wordless tune, and Daska's heart kept its slow sure rhythm beneath my cheek.
I didn't want to break it, this one perfect night, the peak of everything, the most whole I had ever been or ever would be, so I stayed still.
I breathed through the pressure as I'd watched Daska breathe patients through pain, telling myself it was only feeling, only the too-muchness of a heart filled past its capacity for the first time in its life, and I held my family close and let them sleep.
The pressure built through the small hours, and no sleep came for me at all.
I lay in the gold-dying dark and held the three of them and felt the thing in my chest strain harder toward the ground beneath us, and somewhere out past the warm hide walls the dogs began, very softly, to whine, first one, then another, then the whole settlement's worth of them, a low uneasy chorus rising in the dark that had no cause I could name.
The horses in their pen shifted and stamped; a lion, somewhere, coughed and would not settle.
The whole animal world of the pride was waking uneasy in the blackest hour before dawn.
The thing in my chest was screaming now, silent and enormous, reaching down and down toward something vast and wrong turning over in the deep earth.
I understood, at last, what it was reaching for. I understood it a heartbeat before it came, in the awful ringing stillness that fell over the whole settlement at once, every dog going silent in the same instant, every animal freezing, the air itself gone tight and waiting.
I had time to tighten my arms around Daska; I had time to whisper his name.
Then the ground beneath us all drew a breath thirty thousand years deep, and the world came apart before the dawn.