CHAPTER NINE
?
SEREN
The north stair at Hollow Ash carries every footstep up to the Warden’s door, so I had announced myself for thirty steps, and Vaughn Ironmere had thirty steps to decide whether to be in the room when I got there.
I got the door shut behind me and one boot off before he said it.
“Seren.”
He was in the inner doorway. He had made no sound getting there.
The door at my back was not locked, and he has never mentioned that it isn’t.
Bare board under my foot, no rush and no rug, cold on purpose, because he will not have loose coverings on a floor he might fight on. The whole place smelled of cold ash and wet wool.
“You didn’t answer me in the hall.”
“No.”
“There were thirteen of the Hunt under that roof,” I said. “Eight at the low trestle, four along the wall by the screen, and Hesk on the end with nobody either side of him, which he hates. I counted it twice going down and once coming back, and I’m not wrong about a number.”
Vaughn came out of the doorway and stopped inside arm’s reach of me. “Come here. Take your coat off.”
“That’s not a number.”
“No.”
I got the second boot off and stood in my socks, which is not a position anybody bargains from.
“Your Court spent supper deciding out loud whether to hand me to the Council,” I said. “Half of them were bored while they did it. One of them wanted to know who last put a hand on my collar, and there wasn’t an answer anywhere in that hall, and there isn’t one in me either.”
“Take your coat off,” he said again.
There was no question anywhere in it. I took it off and put it on the chair by the door, and I did that because I wanted to.
“Vantry can count as well as I can,” I said. “He looked down that trestle at thirteen men and then he looked at my throat, and he’ll have the arithmetic done before breakfast, and when he’s done it he’ll do it out loud in front of everybody, because that’s what he did today.”
“He can count.”
“Thirteen men. That’s what’s standing between me and a Council writ tonight, and however many hundred you won’t talk about, and I can’t smell one of them from here, and I can smell a bond dying at thirty miles.”
“Fourteen.” He was back in the doorway without a sound. “You’re counting me out.”
He crossed the room and came at me from below the jaw and never above it.
His right hand went flat on my sternum, over the three bonds, and stayed there. He did nothing else with it.
“I’m not asking you to be brave. I’m telling you that you don’t have to be. Not in this room.”
The backs of my legs went out from under the idea of standing. My breath went in and did not come out for a count of three, and my hand had shut on his wrist without instruction from me.
I did not answer him. I have not answered him yet.
?
Vaughn took my shirt off over my head, one arm and then the other, and laid it on the chair. He did not ask.
Then my breeches. Then he went down on one knee on the cold board and took my socks off with his hand around my ankle, and when he stood up his cock was hard against my belly and he did nothing about it.
His own shirt came off. Then the belt, with my leash buckled on it where I had put it, and he laid it on the chair where I could see it.
The collar stayed on. The collar always stays on.
He got a handful of my hair at the back and turned my face up. “This is the slow one. I’m taking all night.”
His mouth went onto my throat under the jaw and stayed there a long while. His hand came up and took my breast and his fingers found the nipple and worked it, unhurried, until both nipples were hard and my whole spine folded forward into him.
His mouth did not come off my throat. “Your cunt’s so wet. You’ve been wet since the hall.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
He put two fingers against my cunt, brought them up between us, and looked at me while he did it.
“I know it. I had my hand on your cunt.”
Both nipples between his fingers then, rolling them, and my cunt going with every roll and my clit with it. I heard the sound I made from somewhere outside my own head and I would not have sworn it was mine.
“Your nipples go hard before the rest of you does. They always have.”
His hand left my nipples and went down over my belly, and then his fingers were in my cunt, two of them, slow, and his thumb settled onto my clit and did not go fast and did not go anywhere else. My pussy was soaked and moving on his hand.
“Vaughn—”
“Good girl.”
My thighs went and his thumb never left my clit.
“Two fingers in your cunt and my thumb on your clit,” he said against my ear. “That’s all it takes, and it always was.”
He kept the arm across my back, his thumb on my clit, and changed nothing until I came standing on a bare board floor with my face in his shoulder.
“That’s once,” he said. “My thumb stays on your clit and my fingers stay where they are.”
Then he put me on the bed, put his mouth on my cunt and both hands on my nipples.
His tongue went onto my clit, two fingers still inside my cunt and a nipple still under his thumb, and he did not change one thing he was doing when I came the second time with my heels dug into the blanket.
“Vaughn.”
He answered it with his tongue still on me. “My tongue’s on your clit. I’m not moving off it until you come on my mouth.”
I said his name and he did not stop, and he was right that I did not want him to. I should not have wanted it that badly and his bed was a poor place to learn it.
“Don’t stop. Don’t—”
“That’s twice. I’ve got two fingers in your pussy and your clit under my tongue, and I’m keeping both there.”
He came up over me on his forearms, either side of my head, face to face, which the Rimewood was not. My leg went over his hip and I put it there myself. He held there against my pussy and did not go in.
His cock went into my cunt in one long push.
“There. That’s my whole cock in you.”
“My cock’s in your cunt to the hilt,” Vaughn said. “You feel like nothing else alive. Nothing ever has.”
Slower than I wanted, and he knew the difference and kept the slow one anyway. Every time I got my heels into the bed and tried to take the pace off him, his hand left my nipple, flattened on my sternum, and held me down.
Then he turned me onto my side and stayed behind me, his cock in me the whole way through the turn, one hand spread over the three bonds and the other down between my thighs on my clit again.
The hand over my sternum shifted to my breast. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.”
The pace stayed slow long past the point where I would have begged, if begging had been a thing I could assemble. His cock went in and out of my cunt at the speed he had chosen and no other.
And somewhere in that the room went.
I could not have told anybody which room I was in, or how many doors it had, and I have counted the doors of every room I have entered since I was nine.
His mouth was on the back of my neck under the collar and his hand did not come off my clit.
I thought, with his cock moving in me and the rest of me gone: I would let him keep this collar locked on my throat for the rest of my life to keep this room. I would let the Council write down whatever it liked about a fae Warden and a half-blood bitch and I would put my own hand to it.
I knew what he was and I stayed.
“I’ve got you. My cock’s not going anywhere.”
“I can’t—”
His mouth came off my neck and went back onto it lower down. “Good girl.”
“Vaughn, I can’t, it’s too—”
“You can.” He put his hand flat over my mouth and took it away again, and his cock did not change its pace by a hair. “Your clit’s swollen under my fingers. That’s three coming and I’m taking it.”
“I’m not giving you back.”
He said it against my skin, once. He did not repeat it and he has never explained it.
His mouth went to the back of my neck, under the collar. “Coming in your cunt.”
My whole body seized on his cock before there was a word for any of it in my head. My clit went off under his fingers, my hands shut in the blanket, my mouth came open on a sound with no shape.
He stayed where he was. “You’re still coming on my cock. I’m staying in you until you’ve finished.”
Afterward we ended up on the floor with our backs against the bed, because there was one blanket and it was on me. His cock was half hard against my hip and my nipples would not come down.
“Fourteen hundred winters and one blanket.”
“It’s a good blanket.”
“There’s never been food in this room,” I said. “One shutter, one chair, one hearth nobody lights, and a floor that would take the skin off a knee. You’re the second man of this Court and you sleep on a board.”
“I don’t eat up here,” Vaughn said.
“Where do you eat?”
“Downstairs. With the dogs under the table.”
I got a thumb under the lower edge of the collar and turned it a quarter inch off the skin.
“You could have a rug,” I said. “Somebody would carry one up those stairs tonight and never tell a soul, and all you’d have to do is stand there and not say anything, and standing there not saying anything is the thing you’re best at in the world.”
“I don’t want one.”
“That isn’t the same as not needing one.”
“It’s the same to me.”
“Your lords spent the fish course deciding whether I’m a mate or a kennel animal,” I said. “They’d have taken a vote if the plates had come slower.”
“They can’t vote on you,” Vaughn said.
“They think they can, and there were nine of them, and I counted.”
“They’re wrong,” Vaughn said, the way he says weather.
“Does a stag count as a predator?”
“No. It eats grass.”
I waited. He added nothing.
“It has six points on its head and it’s taller than you are.”
“It’s a grass eater.”
“Ilyan put a man through a door with it once,” I said.
“With grass?”
“With the antlers, Vaughn.”
“It’s a grass eater with a temper.” He has been immovable about this for three years.
Then he slept, the way he does everything, once and completely.
I did not, because I had come up that stair meaning to be awake at moonset and see what it takes out of a man who cannot hold the wolf past it.
Moonset came. Nothing happened. He had not taken the wolf, and whatever the change cost him could not tear him back out of a shape he was not wearing. I had come looking for an answer. I had found another question.
Then, asleep, he said a name.
He said it once, whole and clean, in the voice of a man calling into a room he knew was empty. Sirel. It was a woman’s name and it was not mine.
Something in me wanted to wake him and make him give me the name again with his eyes open.
I put my hand flat on his chest and did not wake him.
?
The north stair took a stranger’s weight and handed it up to us a dozen heartbeats early. Vaughn was awake and off the floor between one heartbeat and the next, pulling on his breeches and buckling the belt with my leash on it, and I had my shirt over my head.
We both count. We have never discussed it.
He put paper on the chair and wrote standing up, bent to it, not looking at me. Four lines. He folded it, pressed his thumb into the wax, and opened the door the width of his own shoulder and no wider.
“Ride it tonight. Hand it to Rhodry and nobody else.”
Boots went back down the stair. I never saw a face or a hand, and the stair let me hear every step of him go.
“What’s in it?”
“Nobody puts a glass on your collar. No kennel man, no Council man, nobody at all.”
Cold came down my arms before there was a thought behind it. There was nothing in that room’s air but ash and snow and him.
“Why?” I said.
“It’s an order. It doesn’t need one.”
“A glass went over me on Tuesday.”
“Over you. Not against the seam. Keep that difference, Seren.”
“I’ve worn this since I was nine and no glass has ever touched the seam,” I said. “I was told that’s ordinary. Tonight a Warden of the Hunt sends a man sixty miles north in the dark to keep it ordinary, and he won’t tell me what he’s keeping it ordinary for.”
“No.”
“A man with a glass is a man looking for something to sever. If there’s a thing in this collar that a glass would show him, I’ll take it off the man whose belt my leash is on before I take it off the woman who runs the Unmaking.”
Vaughn Ironmere looked at the shutter and not at me, and said nothing.
So I asked him the other one.
“Vaughn. Where’s the rest of the Hunt?”
“The Gullet,” Vaughn said. “Four hundred men. I sent them before the herald was off my ground, and the Court doesn’t know.”