CHAPTER SIX
?
SEREN
Thursday afternoon, Vaughn took me through the Winter Gate under his own escort. We left our horses at the eastern cairn. Ilyan’s coat stayed on the tower chair; I had my own brown wool over my shirt and leather breeches, and the wind got through all three.
I had one knee down in the needle-mat at the spoor board when Vaughn said my name into the back of my hair. He stood close enough that I had the word on my neck before I had it in my ear. The fog had been standing in the black pine since noon.
“Seren.”
The cut lane ran six feet wide, east to west, out of sight in either direction.
Two fingers went in under the collar and let the cold at my throat. “Give me a minute. The board’s talking.”
The board is scratched shale set into the second cairn. I put my face down near the crust.
“Four hounds, two hours old, working west. There’s a man on foot behind them and he’s tired—he’s been putting his weight on the same side all the way down this lane.”
Vaughn’s hand settled on the top stone of the cairn and stayed there. “You can read that off a board.”
“I can read what he ate.”
“Then read the rest of it.”
“Mutton, and something turned that he ate anyway. He’s on short rations and he’s carrying more than a handler carries, so there’s somebody else’s kit on him as well as his own. The kit is what’s putting him on the one side.”
He turned his head and I got the eyes. Winter-blue, and the fog behind him took the last of the color out of them. “Two men on my line, then.”
“One man, and one man’s worth of somebody off the lane watching him work. The wind’s out of the north and it’s falling off. It’ll be nothing by dark, and they’ll get twice the scent off this mat once it drops.”
“Four hounds is not a patrol.”
“Not with a handler on foot behind them,” I said. “A patrol runs the hounds out ahead and the handler rides. This one’s walking so he can keep them off a line he doesn’t want broken.”
“It’s a survey, Warden, and they’re a mile inside the line. Hounds don’t come a mile into the Winter Court’s own ground for the exercise. They’re not casting. They’ve been given something to find.”
He waited, which is worse, and out in the deadfall the trunks shifted with no wind.
“Me,” I said. “A fae nose is worse than a hound’s and they didn’t send one. They sent four hounds and a tired man, because a hound doesn’t care what a writ says. It cares about what’s been put under its nose.”
His hand came off the stone and opened. “That’s the Council. That’s not a mistake and it isn’t a patrol.”
“If they’ve had my scent off the tally shed and put it on a board in Vaeloth, then every line I’ve walked in nineteen years, every crossing I’ve ever—”
“They won’t get that far.”
I thought of Bel gripping the cart rail. Somebody had chosen him from a list and gone home to supper afterward. The man behind these hounds would do the same to me unless I gave him a reason to turn.
Vaughn put himself between me and the west end of the lane by standing, not by stepping. “A hound reads you as claimed, it turns and takes it to the Court. It doesn’t take it to them.”
“And how does a hound read that?”
“It smells me on you. All of it. That’s what’s happening.”
“All of it,” I said. “My throat. My wrist. My cunt.”
The leash hung on his belt. He didn’t look down at it and he took it between two fingers anyway. “All three.”
“That’s leash law,” I said. “It isn’t a spell and it isn’t a favor, and I know the difference between a wall and a wall somebody built out of me.”
“It’s what a hound’s trained to do. The law makes the rest of it.”
I came up off my knee. “I’m not your mate.”
“A hound can’t read a bond.” He said it the way he says the weather. “It reads a scent.”
?
Vaughn took me off the lane and into the deadfall at dusk. It is half an acre of black pine thrown down across itself, and the needles under it lie a foot deep and hollow under weight. The fog lifted while we walked in.
The floor was all shadow-holes, and the tangle smelled of broken heartwood, sweet and raw, with mushroom under it.
The root-plate at the west end stands upright and holds stones eleven feet off the ground. I have never seen it drop one.
“Take your coat off,” Vaughn said.
“No.”
Bark came away under my hand in a plate the size of my palm. “There’s a cairn forty feet that way and a lane out of here at both ends, and thirty miles of it back to Ravensgate, and I know every foot of this wood better than you do.”
“You do.”
“So it’s my legs and my boots and my nose, and there’s nothing in this wood with a hand on me.”
“No. There isn’t.”
That was true, and I stayed where I was.
I took the whole cold wood in through my nose in one pull, and there was nothing in it to smell except him.
“You’re shaking and it isn’t the cold.”
“Yes, Warden.”
He took a handful of my hair at the nape and tipped my face up to his. “Don’t call me that. Not out here.”
He came at me from below the jaw, never above it. His mouth went on the side of my throat over the pulse and above the collar, and he pinned my back into the wood.
“No,” I said, and there was no air behind it. My body disagreed with me at the board.
“You’ve said no with your mouth all night. Say it once with the rest of you and I’ll stop.”
I didn’t.
I wanted it. I have wanted it for three years and I have been calling the wanting a refusal, and I hated how much of it was true, with his teeth at my throat, and my hands came up off the bark and went into his hair.
He got my coat off my shoulders and threw it down into the needles for me to lie on. He pushed my shirt open and off my arms, and the cold had my nipples.
His belt went into the needles with my leash on it, and his coat, and his shirt, and my breeches down over my boots, and one boot off and gone into the dark.
The collar stayed where it is.
His hand came flat on my sternum first, over the three bonds, and held there. “This is happening now.”
Then my breasts, both hands, and my nipples between his fingers until my spine came off the wood. He worked one nipple and then the other nipple and he did not hurry either of them.
“Your pussy’s so wet it’s on my hand. You were wet at the line.”
His hand went down between my thighs and opened my folds, and two fingers went into my cunt and his thumb found my clit, and my hips went forward without asking me first.
“Your cunt was wet at the board and you knew it there.”
That was the first time I lost it. His fingers were still in my pussy and his thumb was working my clit and my hips were doing something I had not decided on.
“Good girl.”
His mouth came down off my throat and onto my nipples, one and then the other, and then he went down onto his knees in the needles and put his mouth on my pussy and his tongue on my clit.
“Your clit’s swollen. You’re going to come on my mouth.”
“Stop,” I said.
He didn’t stop. His fingers went back in and his tongue kept working my clit, and he knew what I meant, because I said it with my hand holding the back of his head down against my cunt. “You feel that on your clit. You’ve stopped reading the wood.”
I came on his mouth with his tongue still on my clit, the root-plate against my spine and eleven feet of black stone hanging in the air over me.
Then he got me up off it. One of my legs came over his arm, his cock came into his hand, and he pushed the girth of it into my cunt in one movement and did not stop halfway.
His arm came up under my knee. “Take my cock.”
His shaft was in me to the last of it, his hand had my nipple, my shoulders were on the wood, and his mouth was in my hair.
“Your cunt’s tight. It takes my cock anyway.”
“You’re mine now.”
He never said it again. He put it into the air the way he puts a cairn into the ground.
“Your cunt takes every inch of my cock. It always would have.”
He turned me and put me down on my knees in the needles with my coat under my hands, and his hand spread flat on the back of my neck below the collar. “Knees apart. My cock’s going in to the root of it.”
Then his cock went into my cunt from behind and the pace went past anything a person could keep count of. “You’re so wet my cock goes in without asking. That’s you, not me.”
“I’m not stopping.”
“Vaughn—”
That is the first time I ever said his name. I have called him Warden for three years, and it came out of me in a deadfall with his cock in my cunt, and it has never gone back.
His hand stayed on my neck. His other hand came under, took a nipple, and found my clit and did not let go of it, and my thighs went, and my mouth said things I didn’t hear myself say.
“Your clit’s under my hand. Come on my cock.”
“Don’t stop.”
I stopped tracking. The hounds, the wind, the lane, the whole board gone dark at once, and that is the largest thing that has ever happened to me.
His hand left my clit for my hip and his cock went in to the root of it and stayed. “You’ll feel my cock in the morning.”
“I’m coming in you,” he said, against my shoulder, and did not say another word.
I went down on the needles under him and stayed down, with his come running out of my cunt, my clit still going, and my one bare foot out in the cold.
?
The first flakes came through the gap in the trunks, dry as sand. It was full night in the deadfall, and Vaughn had not moved off the needles since.
Then Vaughn shifted, an arm’s length from my face.
It went through him from the spine outward. A great wolf, black, with a gray ruff thick across the shoulder, and the eyes did not change at all. I put my hand out and touched him.
The wolf put his mouth over my throat. It was not a man’s mouth. Teeth down the whole side of my neck, and breath, and the warmth of the collar between us, and then the inside of my left wrist, and then the hollow under my jaw, and he took his time over every one of them.
I watched the whole thing. My hand was steady in the ruff.
My hand was not steady when I thought about walking back up that lane tomorrow with this in me. I wanted it anyway.
“Throat, collar, wrist, jaw,” I said. “You missed my cunt.”
The wolf went back into a man between one breath and the next, and sat with his forearms across his knees. “I didn’t miss it.”
“No. You’ve done me like a boundary cairn.”
“The cairns work.”
I could feel where his cock had been every time I moved, and my cunt and my clit ached with it. “They do. That’s most of what I like about them.”
“How much of it does a hound need?”
He didn’t look at me. “Every mark. Throat first, then the wrist. The rest of it holds those two up.”
I set the heel of my hand on the collar and pushed it up and let it drop back. “Will they turn?”
“They’ll turn. And then somebody in Vaeloth reads what turned them, and that’s tomorrow’s.”
“And the man on foot? He’ll have it off the mat before the hounds do.”
Vaughn went still. “He’ll read it and he’ll go home.”
“You could have told me at the board,” I said. “You had a mile of lane to do it in.”
“You’d have walked out of the wood.”
“I’d have argued the whole mile and let you anyway, and you knew it, and you didn’t want to spend the mile.”
He had decided what my scent was for while I knelt at a board reading it out to him. He didn’t ask. I found out when the wolf started at my throat.
He turned his face out into the deadfall and said nothing about that at all.
I found my shirt and pulled it on. The missing boot had lodged under a trunk. Vaughn reached it before I did, shook the needles out, and put it beside my foot. I got my breeches and both boots on while he gathered his clothes.
He took the wolf once more, dressed this time, and came close enough to press the last mark beneath my jaw. I had one hand in the ruff when the light changed.
The moon went down behind the west end of the lane.
It took him out mid-mark. He had his mouth back at the hollow under my jaw, and the wolf went out of him all at once, no warning in it and no dignity, and he came off me and down onto both knees.
He is fourteen hundred winters old and I had never heard him breathe like that.
“Vaughn.”
He didn’t answer. The breath went in and out of him wrong, and the trunks over our heads shifted with nothing in the wood to move them.
“There’s no blood on you and nothing’s opened. I’ve had my nose on you since the kennel yard and there’s no wound in this, so it’s something they did to you, or it’s something you—”
I stopped.
“Your hands are open,” I said. “You open your hands when you’re angry. You’re not angry, so I’m reading you wrong, and I don’t read wrong.”
He tightened the belt he had put on before the shift, my leash still fastened to it, and he gave me nothing.
“Vaughn,” I said, into a wood with the moon gone out of it. “What happens to you at moonset?”
He reached for the root-plate and missed it. I got under his arm before he could try again.
“Lean,” I said.
For the first time since I had known him, Vaughn Ironmere did what I told him without an argument. We walked back to the horses that way.