33. Corrine
CORRINE
The bonfire in the square is the first I've stood near in years without some animal part of me planning the way out. Someone's daughter keeps feeding it cedar, and the sparks climb toward a sky gone plum-dark. I hold a cup of spiced wine going cold in my hands and let the heat reach my face.
They built the festival around the survivors.
Not a victory—no one here is fool enough to call it that—but a counting of who's left, which is all I've ever fully trusted.
Human fiddlers and a dark elf with a hand-drum have found a rhythm neither of their people taught them.
Children who don't remember the war chase each other under the trestle tables.
An old woman from a crossing presses a second honey cake on me and won't hear refusal, so I eat it, because turning down kindness is a habit I'm trying to set down.
Leoric is across the square, cornered. The mason and the well-digger who fought over the cistern in autumn have pinned him between them again, arguing about a grain store, and they've decided he should settle it.
He keeps issuing something that sounds like a command and they keep talking over him, and when the well-digger laughs and claps his good shoulder, Leoric holds stillness like he hasn't worked out what to do with being liked.
I watch him longer than I mean to. Peace has been harder on him than any pass we crossed bleeding.
Battle had rules he could read asleep. A festival has none.
He learned the language of rooms built to make people kneel, and now he's learning the one where a child hands him a carved horse and wants nothing back except for him to hold it carefully.
He's getting better at it. Slower than he'd like.
He still rises before light to walk a perimeter that doesn't need walking, and I let him.
Isolde appears with a refill I didn't request. "You're looking at your dark elf like he hung the stars."
"I'm making sure he doesn't court-martial the well-digger."
"Mm." She follows my gaze, unconvinced and not bothering to hide it.
Near the ale, Theren stands upright, lung healed enough that he's resumed insulting people at full volume.
He catches me looking and lifts his cup half an inch—the most fondness he allows himself, which from him reads almost like a poem.
Leoric works himself loose near the second round of songs and crosses toward me, and the crowd opens for him without flinching now. He stops close. The flames lay gold along his face, and I take it in the way I'd take in our own hearth at home.
"You watched me suffer," he points out.
"You volunteered. Nobody conscripted you to arbitrate barley."
"Drogan did. He claims it's good for morale." The corner of his mouth moves. "Mine or theirs, he wouldn't specify."
"Come home." I leave my cup on the table. "Before someone asks you to bless a goat."
The climb is uphill and quiet, the music thinning behind us until there's only our boots and the wind off the ridge that no longer carries anything worth bracing for.
The little house we've borrowed waits at the top.
He stands aside for me from habit, then comes in close at my back, and I'm warm from the wine, the walk and the plain fact of him.
He reaches for the lamp. I catch his wrist before the flint.
"Leave it. The moon's doing fine."
It is—pouring silver across the floorboards, finding the bed we hauled up here ourselves and argued about the placement of for an afternoon.
He turns his hand in my grip so our fingers tangle, and I tug him after me without urgency.
That's the strangeness I keep relearning.
No patrol. No dawn we have to outrun. Only the long, unhurried permission of being allowed to take our time.
I get the lacing of his shirt undone and laugh at myself when my fingers fumble the third tie.
"Wine," I offer, by way of excuse.
"Mm. I'll allow it." He finishes it for me, then catches the hem of mine and lifts, and I raise my arms like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, because it is now.
When the moonlight finds him, I don't reach for it with the old careful reverence.
I press my mouth to him and feel him exhale and his arm comes around the small of my back and pulls me flush.
He's slow with his hands tonight. He maps me, fingers sliding the length of my spine, thumb tracing the old blade-mark at my hip he's traced a hundred times and apparently intends to trace a hundred more.
"You're stalling," I murmur against his throat.
"I'm savoring." He tips my chin up and kisses me, deep and patient, and when I bite his lip just to hear what he does with it he huffs a sound that's almost a laugh into my mouth, and it registers everywhere.
He walks me backward to the bed, and I push him down and follow, settling over him, and I just look.
The scars I once couldn't see past have become a country I've memorized.
I lean and set my lips to the worst ridge along his side, where the skin has no feeling at its center, and he watches me do it with an openness that still undoes me—a man who spent years sleeping in armor, letting me put my mouth wherever I please.
His hands find my thighs, then higher, and the slow buildup turns my breath ragged before he's done much of anything at all.
He knows me now. Knows the exact press that makes me forget what I was saying.
Two fingers slide into me while I'm braced over him, and I roll my hips down to meet them, chasing the rhythm he sets.
He watches my face the whole time—certain of where and how.
Then his other hand spreads warm over the curve of me and pulls me closer, his thumb finding my clit, working slow circles until I'm slick around his fingers and losing the thread of anything but this.
He doesn't hurry it. He keeps that pressure steady, curls his fingers just so, and the wave gathers low and tight until it breaks—my back arching, a sound torn out of me that I don't bother to swallow, my whole body clenching around his hand while he holds me through every aftershock.I'm still trembling when I reach for him, too far gone to wait.
When I finally take him in, he stills beneath me and lets me set every part of the pace, his fingers laced tight with mine on the mattress.
I move, and he meets me, and there's laughter threaded through it—at the blanket I keep kicking, at the wince when my knee finds a bad spot, at the way he murmurs my name like a complaint and a prayer at once.
The pleasure builds in unhurried waves, no edge of fear underneath it, no sense that will charge us for this.
When I tip toward the brink he sits up to hold me through it, chest to chest, his mouth at my throat, his arms a steadiness I've stopped expecting to be taken away.
I come apart against him again slowly and whole, and he follows with my name pressed into my hair, both of us shaking.
We lie tangled, my cheek over the burned plane of his chest, his heart loud and unguarded under my ear. He drags a blanket over us with one foot and gives up halfway, and I just giggle.
"The well-digger," he murmurs eventually, drowsy, "wants the grain store moved forty feet south."
"Tell him no in the morning."
"I intend to." His hand moves slow through my hair. "Loudly."
I huff against his skin and feel his quiet rumble in answer.
Outside, the bonfire in the square has burned down to embers, throwing a low red glow against the windows.
I watch it without my pulse changing. For years fire meant the worst night of my life—the heat, the screaming, the thing I could never put out.
Tonight it's just light dying gently over people who chose to sit beside each other, and warmth gathered in the chest of the man whose ruin I once caused and now hold every night.
The two things still both belong to me. They've just stopped fighting for the same ground.
Leoric's breathing has gone deep and even, his arm heavy across my back. He's asleep before the perimeter can call him, which it won't tonight, because there's nothing left out there hunting us, and somewhere in the months between then and now his body finally agreed to believe it.
I press my palm flat over his heart and feel it carry on, steady, alive, the proof that I survived something and so did he and we did it badly enough to find each other on the other side. I close my eyes. In all the years I can count I can remember, I'm not counting anything at all.