CHAPTER FOURTEEN
?
SEREN
My riding breeches were drying by the forge. I had borrowed a wool skirt from the laundry and put my own shirt and belt over it. The skirt caught under my boot twice on Corvin’s stair. I was in a temper before I reached his door.
The rain had been on the thaw since dark and every yard at Hollow Ash was mud to the ankle, and I had one hand on the latch when Corvin Ash said my name.
“Seren. Two flights, in that, at eleven at night. Shut the door—the board squeaks and I like knowing.”
He was sitting on the edge of his own desk, which is where he sits.
Candles burned behind him at a dozen heights. Ink on three fingers. The black ledger lying open under his left hand.
He shut it while he was still talking, put his palm flat on the cover and left it there, and Corvin’s hands do not do that.
I pushed the door to with my heel. The third board went off under my weight like a plucked string.
“I’m not staying.”
“You’re not staying. Nobody’s ever stayed. It’s the most restful thing about you.” He was smiling with the lower half of his face only. “Sit down. Don’t sit down. Stand there dripping on my floor and let me look at you, which is the one I’d have picked.”
Twenty feet by fourteen. One window, shuttered and barred. Two doors, one of them to the inner room, and my chin moved with the count.
“You’re counting my doors,” Corvin said.
“You’ve got two.”
“I’ve got two, and one of them goes nowhere but a bed, and I’d like it on the record that you brought it up and I didn’t.”
Rain came off the buttery roof in a sheet and hit the mud in one long tearing sound.
“I came to ask you something,” I said. “Then I’m going back down.”
“You came to ask me something.” He rubbed at the ink on his thumb. “Ask. I’ve read more Council paper than any fae breathing.”
The room smelled of oak-gall ink and candle smoke and, under it, wax gone sweetish.
“What do nine seats live on?”
Corvin’s hands got busy. He took the pen knife off the blotter, turned it over, set the edge against his thumbnail, and did not look up.
“Ask me anything else and I’ll answer it twice.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s not an answer. It’s the shape of one, and if you had the sense the Rimewood gave a stoat you’d take the shape and go to bed.” The knife came around again in his fingers. “I don’t know.”
Corvin had said that to me once before, in the tower. Corvin says a confident wrong thing and lets you find it out in the morning.
“You know.”
“I don’t—” He set the knife down flat on the wood, which was worse than the turning. “That was a lie, and you’re the one person I don’t spend them on, so here’s the true thing instead, and you’ll like it less.”
Something under my sternum went hot and low and stayed there.
“I’ve got something in my own hand about your throat and I’m not giving it to you tonight, and you can hate that, and I’d still not give it to you.”
“It’s on my neck,” I said. “Whatever it is. It’s been on my neck since I was nine.”
“It’s on your neck. Yes.”
“Then don’t—”
My hands had come up. Two fingers wedged in under the metal and a breath dragged in behind them, and again, and again, and on the third time the rest of the sentence stopped in my mouth and I did not go back for it.
Corvin stopped talking.
One breath. I have known him three years and never had a silence off him.
He looked at my hands. Then at my face.
He did not make it better and he did not talk over it, and he did not look away either, which is a different thing and I had nowhere to put it.
Then he came off the desk.
I had the wall behind my shoulders before I decided to put it there. The plaster was cold through my shirt. The squeaking board was under my right heel and said so.
Corvin did not touch me. He stood inside the reach of my arms with both hands at his sides and talked.
“You walked up here in the rain to tell me you’re not staying. Say the whole sentence. I’m enormously patient about things I’m getting anyway.”
“I came to talk.”
“You came to talk. We’ve talked.” He tipped his head. “Now I’m going to tell you what happens, in order, because you like order and I like watching you get given it.”
“That coat comes off you, and the belt after it, and the shirt open. Then my hand goes up under your skirt and two fingers into your cunt and my thumb on your clit until you come standing up against my wall with that board going under your heel.”
“That’s a long list for a man who hasn’t—”
“Then I take you through there and put my mouth on your cunt until you’ve forgotten what you came up here for.
Then my cock, twice, and my cock again in the morning if the rain holds.
And you’ll be telling me you’re not staying the whole time, and I’ll believe you, and we’ll both enjoy that enormously. ”
My voice had gone down a third and rough at the back of it and I heard it happen.
“There,” Corvin said. “There it is. That’s what my mouth does to your voice, and you’ve no idea you’re doing it, and I’ve had three years of hearing it in corridors.”
He took the coat off my shoulders. He didn’t ask, and he did not hurry. The belt after, the buckle loud in a room with nothing but rain in it, then his inked fingers working the ties of my shirt open from the throat down.
“Look at you. Look at what you’ve been carrying under wool all winter while I sat across a table being witty about the weather.”
My shirt hung open. Candlelight at a dozen heights got at my breasts from four directions and none of them agreed. My nipples had gone tight.
My arm came up to cover myself. Corvin took the wrist out of the air and pinned it back against the plaster. He did not ask, and I left it where he put it.
“No. Keep your hand where I put it. There. That’s all I want off you tonight and I’m going to be insufferable about having got it.”
“Stop.”
“Your nipples have gone hard enough to see from the desk. Your thighs opened about half an inch when I said the word cunt and they haven’t shut, and I’m not going to be the one who mentions that twice.” He looked down and took his time. “Beautiful. That isn’t flattery, it’s a report.”
I did not shut them. My clit was beating already, with nothing on it.
Corvin put his mouth on my throat below the jaw, never above it, then lower, and his tongue went over my nipple slow enough that my hips came off the wall. Then the other nipple, wet and cold after.
“So good. Your nipples give you away and your voice gives you away and now your hips have gone and done it, and that’s three.”
His hand went up under my skirt and stopped short of my cunt, palm flat on my thigh, thumb working the inside.
Then two fingers into my cunt. My breath went out of me in one piece and something in my throat made a noise I had never heard, and his thumb found my clit and stayed on it, and the board under my heel went off and off and off.
“That’s it. Your cunt’s telling me the truth, your mouth’s been lying all night, and your clit doesn’t lie at all, which is why my thumb’s staying on it.”
The candles slid sideways. I lost the order of it somewhere.
I could not have said afterward how long his thumb was on my clit, or when my hand got into the front of his shirt, and I have put a two-hour-old trail together off a wet board with a hundred men walking on it.
I came standing up with my head back against the plaster and Corvin’s fingers knuckle-deep in my pussy, and the sound that came out of me at the end turned into something else.
I laughed.
“That’s not—what is that.”
“That’s the sound.” He had gone very quiet with his hands and not at all with his mouth. “Three years I’ve been guessing at that sound and I got it wrong every single time.”
?
The inner room was smaller and darker and the rain louder, and I do not remember the doorway. Corvin had me through it before I decided to go.
Corvin put me on my back on the bed and put his teeth on the side of my breast, hard enough that I found it there the next day, and then his tongue on my nipple until I had a fistful of blanket. He did the second nipple with his teeth.
“Perfect. Say what you like about the collar. The rest of you is mine and I’m keeping it.”
Then down, with my thighs over his shoulders and his mouth on my cunt, so the talking came up through me as much as through my ears.
His tongue on my clit, flat and slow. Two fingers curled up inside my pussy, finding the place and staying on it.
“There—that’s it. Your clit’s got no manners at all and I have never liked you better. Get a hand in my hair and hold my mouth on your clit and stop being polite about this.”
The second one took longer and was worse. It came up through my clit and my thighs and my belly into my ribs, and I heard myself from across the room.
He came up my body with his mouth wet off my pussy and his hands under me.
“Look at you. There’s nothing in this house worth what you are on your back in the dark, and I have read the inventory.”
Then his cock in my cunt, buried in one go, and my breath stopped in my chest.
One hand fisted in my hair at the nape, close to the scalp. The other under my hip, working me down onto his cock at whatever pace he wanted.
“You feel that. That’s my cock in your cunt and my cock is the only honest thing in this building tonight.”
I got my heels into the backs of his thighs and pulled, and his chest dragged over my nipples. My body answered that one. It was not a decision.
Then Corvin took me by the hip and the hair and turned me over, got me onto my knees with my face down in my own forearm, and put his cock back in me from behind in one stroke.
“Say my name like it costs you something. I want to hear what I’m worth.”
“Corvin,” I said into my own forearm.
“Again. Say it the way you said it against the wall.”
“Corvin—”
His hand came off my hip and flattened on my belly and pulled me back onto his cock, and his other hand went between my legs and stayed on my clit, and the bed frame took it up and I had my teeth in my own arm.
“There. That’s the price and it’s cheap at twice it.” The hand on my belly spread wider. “Your cunt’s got an opinion about my name and I want it in writing.”
He was still talking when it turned. I felt it go through his cock first.
“I’m coming in your cunt. Say it now.”
“Corvin. Corvin—”
He said my name back into the space between my shoulder blades while he did it, and it came out broken in the middle for the first time all night. Afterward he stayed where he was, with his cock still in my cunt, which is his own kind of quiet.
When he moved off me the candles had burned down to four heights.
Two black thumbprints on the inside of my left thigh, where his hand had held me.
Oak-gall ink, off his nails, gone into the skin.
I looked at them a while. They did not come off under my thumb and I stopped trying.
I watched Corvin reach for a clean corner of the sheet to wipe the ink from my thigh. His hand stopped when I put mine over it. The marks could stay until morning. So could he, if I was brave enough to say it.
?
At half past midnight somebody came up the two flights and knocked, and the squeaking board gave him away four feet out. Corvin was off the bed with his shirt on before I got upright.
“Blade. Word from the hall.”
“Word from the hall. At this hour.” He got the coat off the floor. “Go on, then.”
“The High Chancellor asks the Warden of the Hunt to the treaty room. Four o’clock this afternoon.”
“Four o’clock. Four o’clock, today, and he picked the hour on purpose, and I’d bet both hands he read it somewhere.” Corvin had the black ledger inside the coat before it was on him. “Thank you. Go to bed. Don’t tell anybody you came up here and I’ll never mention that you did.”
“Blade.”
The stair took the steward back down. Two doors between us and the yard, both locked at dusk, and Sarn’s man had crossed a shut household at half past midnight like a man walking his own.
I sat up with the blanket over my knees. My shirt was open, my nipples out, and I did nothing about it.
“He’s been a guest inside these walls since the thaw wind,” I said.
“He’s been a guest inside these walls since the thaw wind, and he’s had a man on that stair for most of it, and I’ve known since he arrived and done nothing, because a mouse you can see is worth two you can’t.
” Corvin was at the door. “Sleep here. The bed’s better than yours and I won’t be back before dawn. ”
“Corvin. What’s in the ledger.”
His two fingers came to rest on the door frame, and he stopped.
“I lied to you tonight. For one sentence. I don’t get to call that nothing.”
“I heard you.”
“And I’m still not telling you everything.”