Ship of Spells

Chapter 40 The Captain’s Cabin #3

The breath caught in my throat as he spun me from the wall and carried me to the shattered transom like I was an armful of books.

With a hand under my head, he laid me down among the wreckage in the open moonslight of the bay.

Cold winds swept up from below, and the water lapped against the shattered hull.

One wrong move and we’d tumble over the side, and I realized that it was the rush. The danger, the thrill.

He knelt over me now, his hair falling across his shoulders and hiding his face, and he spread me onto the fractured floorboards over papers and maps.

There was a half bottle of wine at his knees, and he snatched it, grabbed the cork in his teeth, and spat it out over the bay.

He held it out to me, but I shook my head, wanting to watch him drink.

He raised it to his lips, and I followed the ripples of his throat as it went down.

He dropped the bottle through the hole in the stern, and I heard it splash into the waters below.

He leaned down and kissed me again. I savoured the wine secondhand, the sugar of the cherry and the tannins on his tongue.

Oh, the feast. I could drink him dry.

He leaned back again, and I bit my lip as he lifted my hips, unwinding the tattered sash with the gold and green threads.

I relished his touch as he moved me, unwound me, slid it from my body to fold it carefully on the boards.

He spread his fingers on my collar, and I arched my back, pushing into his hand and offering more.

Slowly, he drew lines between my breasts, down my tunic, past the drawstrings of my breeches.

Like the wings of butterflies, the sensations fluttered up my throat and behind my ears.

He whispered an incant, and, with a ripple of pattern, my tunic was gone.

“The wonder of rune,” he said, and he slid his hands lower to grip my thighs. I thrilled at the tingle and rush as the spell raced down my legs. In a heartbeat, my breeches and boots turned to char. I lay beneath him, open and free.

I was comfortable with my body. It was power for me, even with runescars covering every inch of skin. I grinned wryly when he sat back for a moment, eyes filled with wonder as if seeing a woman for the very first time.

He’d been a priest, so maybe it was.

He reached a hand down to my breast, touched me gently as though I might break.

The scars gleamed with magik under his fingers, lighting up his face like the glow of a hundred tiny, flickering embers.

But I clapped my own hand over his, pressed him over my heart, and I thrilled at the little hum in his throat.

I squeezed and kneaded with his fingers until his breathing quickened, and eagerly, he brought his second hand to the task.

“My turn,” I said, and I reached up to grab his bloody tunic in my fist and grinned.

It, too, flashed and sizzled, then was gone in a rush, but I gasped at the sight of his chest. It was raked with red, and I remembered that only hours ago, he’d been whipped, though the wounds had closed and pulsed faintly with the glow of my healing magik.

“The cat…”

“Not the cat,” he said quietly. “A Rhi’Ahr athyl. Much worse.”

“We don’t—”

He touched a finger to my lips and shook his head.

“Ni allath. Pain and pleasure. Edges of the same blade.”

And he brought my hand up to his chest, hissing slightly at the touch as he pressed my palm over his heart.

There were just so many scars, some fresh, most not so, and I explored the history of his body with my fingertips.

He purred with pleasure now, hummed with pain as I ran my hands across his broad chest, his ribs, the ripples of his hard belly.

I followed the ridges over his hip bone with my thumbs, traced the lines as they narrowed.

I reached the edge of his breeches and paused, meeting his eyes before I went further.

He blinked like a lazy cat, so I tugged at the drawstrings, and the linen fell away.

I bit my lip, impressed.

“Good?” I asked.

He grinned.

I touched him now, and he closed his eyes as I let my hands find their way. I rubbed my thumbs along the corded veins, ran my palms along his length. He released a sharp breath as the Aro’el scar hummed across his crown.

Forge, I could’ve taken him, all of him, right then and there, devoured him with my lips and teeth and tongue, but I didn’t know the last time he’d been touched like this.

These were my waters, and I couldn’t rush him.

He had to chart his own course. So, I lay back, brushing my fingers along his thighs as I went.

“Good?” I asked again.

“Sil, mira,” he said.

I smiled and arched my back once more, offering him everything.

He lowered himself down, his hair spilling across his forehead as he started with kisses.

But soon, the kisses caught fire, and he began to consume my chin and my throat and my shoulders and my breasts like I was the feast now, and he the starving man.

My hands slipped through his hair, down his back.

He was so beautiful, a blade of steel, an ocean lord, and I wanted to feel all of him on me.

I wanted his weight to crush me into the boards.

I wanted to own him in my belly, on my skin, with my rune, and I hooked a leg around him, drawing him in to my warmth.

He slipped a hand under my head while the other slid down my side, caressing my hip and lifting my thigh.

I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensations as he took his time exploring my body.

I grinned to myself as I felt him press in, then away, tentative at first but growing stronger.

Parting the deep like a curtain as he pushed himself in.

My thighs rejoiced to take him, yearned when he pulled away.

He was finding a rhythm, ebbing and flowing like an ocean tide, like the pitch and yaw of a gathering storm.

He moved slowly, and I moved with him, rocking my hips to meet him, but he teased me with his body, and I ached at his restraint.

I’d been patient. I’d been good. But I wanted him rough and wanted him now.

I was a wretched, wretched woman.

“Now,” I panted. “Now.”

“Are you certain, my Aro’el?”

Oh suns, so sweet. But I didn’t want sweet.

I wanted salt. I wanted storms.

He smiled like a knife and rammed himself home.

I cried out, and he laughed, pushing deep, sliding deeper, stronger, shoving himself into me until I cried out again and again. I lifted my thighs to swallow him.

“Yes,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “Good.”

“Good?” He grinned as he struck again.

“So good!”

I pulled him deeper still. He met me readily, his hands wylde, his lunges wylder, beating like a breaker or a distant drum.

I didn’t want to close my eyes. I wanted to see him, but the waves were coming.

I’d waited so long, and I wanted surrender.

I wanted to drown. He’d found his rhythm, and this time, I would dance.

The meeting of our hips, the friction of our bellies.

The soft and the hard, the rough and the smooth.

He grabbed my shoulders, and we rolled, and suddenly I was over the side, my head flung back through the hole in the floor.

I clutched his arms, but he had me firm, and he pounded me fast, my hair whipping over the abyss, my cries frosting with the coldness of the sea.

We rolled again, and he grinned down at me, our bodies damp and glistening in the moonslight.

“My wylde runechaser,” he panted.

Hels, he was enjoying this.

“Fog me, yes.”

“I will.”

He leaned down to kiss me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. There was no chimeric, now.

There was no rune. There was only a man and a woman in a shattered cabin on the sea.

Slow and deep, and my head arched back. I closed my eyes, twisting my fist in his hair, clawing his steely shoulders as they strained and bunched.

Finding the rhythm and making it burn. Rougher, harder, deeper, faster, mounting a Dreadwall of our own.

Rougher, harder, deeper, faster, and I abandoned all thoughts to the feverish rhythm.

Higher and further I went, lifting out of myself as the waves began to hit, and I cried out, soaring into the moonslight, over the bergs, over the volcano that spewed cinnamon, until my spine arched and the colors popped and my fingers curled as I held him to me, held him in me, and his shudders sent me all the way over the Dreadwall.

I flew like a raven. I flew with a winter hawk.

Suns, it was a good long flight.

My body bucked once, twice, three times as I came down, wringing out the last embers of pleasure like waves after a storm. I sank into the floorboards, body spent, breath ragged, surfing the eddies that rippled and rolled.

Rise and fall.

Ebb and swell.

There was a cool breeze on my cheek, and I turned my face to look at the bay. It was so very beautiful, and I drank it in. Tomorrow, everything would change.

I lay there, thinking of my previous life, before I’d seen the Ship of Spells.

Fogging had always been a mercenary thing, quick and rough and satisfying enough.

I was always gone before the suns, never wanting to face the longing hearts or cutting eyes of my lovers.

But Forge, this was different. He was different, and I didn’t want to leave at all.

Or maybe I was the one that was different now.

He was stretched beside me, propped on one elbow, tracing the talon scars along my collarbone with a finger. They were part of the rune pattern, and they lit up under his touch.

“I gave you these,” he said.

“They’re part of my story, now,” I said.

His hair had fallen into his eyes, and I reached up to slide it to the side. Forge, it was soft, like strands of Braithian silk.

“What does Kier mean?” I asked, and he smiled down at me.

“Moon,” he said.

“And Gavriel?”

He thought a moment.

“Woven, or weaver.”

“Moon Weaver,” I said.

“Honor Aro’el,” he said.

I smiled, feeling satisfied and content. I had no words for how nice this was.

“It has been a while for me,” he said, idly tracing more rune patterns down my arm. “I was afraid I had forgotten the homani way.”

“The what?”

“The homani way, yes? This was not the Rhi’Ahr way, but I think I remembered the steps.”

“Wait.” I pushed up on my elbows now, unable to stop the grin from splitting my face. “There’s another way to fog?”

“The Rhi’Ahr way,” he said. “Highly superior.”

“Sister Moons in the heavens,” I said. “I’m not given to imaginings, but…”

“Oh, it is beyond imagination.”

I was sure my mouth hung open as I tried to imagine. Oh, I tried.

He rolled over and rose to his feet, stretching like a cat in the moonslight, forcing me to savor every line and every angle of his lean, hard, scarred body. He twisted his rune-bright wrist, and his arm became the wing. He held it out, marveling at each feather and tine.

“Glorious,” he said.

I bit my lip. He was glorious, indeed, and my heart ached at the sight. I wanted more now than a rough-and-tumble fog in the dark. I wanted to fall asleep in his arms and wake up to fog again in the morning. I wanted him to stay, and I wanted not to run.

Another flick of his fingers and his uniform rippled into place, right down to the boots, vest, and the naval blue.

“Are you going to the Cloudgate?” I asked, knowing his answer and fearing it all the same.

“I am,” he said. “There are fifty or more Rhi’Ahr to kill before dawn.”

And he turned back to me.

“I will meet you in the Heart of the Cloud,” he said. “The home of House WoodRaven.”

“I don’t know the way,” I said quietly.

“You will know, Aro’el,” he said. “You are the map.”

He lowered himself to one knee beside me and reached out to cup my cheek, smooth the dark hair from my forehead.

“But be wary,” he said. “Be wise.”

“Beloved,” I said.

Fog.

Why did I say that? It just rolled off my tongue because of her. Too deep. Too soon.

No crab shell to keep me safe.

Idiot.

But he kissed me, long and slow and tender and strong. I closed my eyes and stifled my whimpers, wishing it would never end, knowing it would never last.

He rose to his feet, swung an arm, and suddenly, he was the hawk once again. It was so fast, so fluid, no cracking of bone, no creaking of skin, and I wondered if I would ever become that skilled. It was poetry and pattern, and once, I’d longed for it more than anything in my life.

Now, I longed for something very different.

He launched out over the water and disappeared swiftly into the night.

I looked down at my own naked, chimeric-marked body.

“Forge,” I grumbled. “How the hels do I spin clothes?”

I rolled to my knees and began the hunt.