CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
?
SEREN
Ilyan Frost was kneeling in the straw of a stone byre off the Salt Road with Vaughn’s right hand open in both of his, and he said my name without once looking up from it.
“Seren. There’s a lantern on that nail, and I can’t see what I’m doing.”
I got it down and held it where he needed it.
“It’s nothing,” Vaughn said.
“And it isn’t,” Ilyan said.
Rain on slate with no gutter. It came off the eaves in ropes and did not vary all night.
Cow-warmth and wet stone, last year’s hay gone sweet under it, and wet ash from a fire somebody built and left.
The stone manger ran the length of the wall with water standing in it, and it had not frozen. It was the only thing in that byre that was not cold.
Four empty stalls and one cow.
“A line in a book in Vaeloth that says an instrument failed.” Corvin was up on the manger edge, boots off the floor. “Clerks read a line like that and they don’t sit on it—they send for somebody senior, and the ones they send for enjoy the work.”
“Who enjoys it?” I said.
Corvin turned his thumb against the ink on his forefinger.
“Somebody I’d rather not have to describe to you in a barn.”
“You’ve described worse in worse places.”
“I have, and I’ll do it again inside a week, and tonight you’re getting manners instead. I’d take the manners.”
“What’s behind us?” he said.
“Nothing on the road since we came off it. There’s a fox in the wall three fields down, and a man’s horse two miles north that hasn’t moved since we passed it, and I don’t like that.”
“You don’t like it.”
“It’s tied. A tied horse in this rain means a man on foot, and a man on foot in this rain is watching something.”
“There. That.” Corvin pointed at me with a stalk of straw. “That’s why we ride tonight.”
“He’s watching a snare line. He’s been there since before the sleet quit, and if he wanted us he’d have moved when we left the road.”
“...well. That’s a good deal less exciting.”
Ilyan had his head down over the knuckles.
“Close it,” I said.
“I’ve closed worse than that on worse men.”
“The hand is fine,” Vaughn said.
Four words. Everybody in that byre heard the shape of them, including the cow.
“We ride at first light.”
“We ride now, Warden.” Corvin came off the manger. “There’s a record going south tonight on the road we’re lying beside, and every hour on this straw is an hour it gains on us.”
“The horses are done.”
“The horses are done and she’s been up since four, and I know all of that.” Both his hands had got busy. “I’d sooner put her on a road at midnight than on a road at noon behind a Council relay. That’s why you’re spending four words at a time on me.”
“The road at midnight has ditches,” Vaughn said.
“It also has nobody on it, and that’s my whole argument, and you’ve made it for me.”
“She sleeps.”
“That isn’t an argument, Warden, that’s a decree with a saddle on it—”
Vaughn’s hands opened at his sides and stayed open.
“She sleeps.”
Nobody asked me. Nobody has since I was nine. That is the arrangement I live in, and once a week it puts a hand on the back of my neck.
“I’m here, and I’m awake,” I said.
“You’re here. You’re always here. It’s the most restful thing about you.” Corvin sat back down on the stone. “And there’s a cow.”
“There is,” I said.
“I want it on the record that I’ve slept in worse, but never with a cow staring at me.”
“She’s a cow, Corvin.”
“She’s a witness. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between a quiet old age and a hearing.”
“She’s in calf and she’s been fed on turnips,” I said. “That’s my report. Put it in the ledger.”
“You can smell that she’s in calf.”
“I can smell what you ate on Tuesday. The cow’s the easy one.”
Corvin laughed in a wet byre at midnight, and the cow did not care for it.
Ilyan wound linen over the knuckles and sat back on his heels. The horn light reached the edge of the straw and no further.
“Songkeeper,” Corvin said. “Two knuckles.”
“Two knuckles,” Ilyan said.
“On a man who heals like weather, and you’ve had it in your hands since two this afternoon. I’ve seen you put a man’s lung back in him by supper.”
“I’ve had it in my hands since two this afternoon.” Ilyan got up and turned the burned forearm in against his ribs. “It’ll close when it closes.”
“You used to do it before I could finish complaining,” Corvin said.
“Before.” Ilyan pressed his thumb against the edge of the clean linen. “Not tonight.”
The word sat between them. Corvin looked down at the empty space beside Ilyan’s saddle roll and, for once, did not ask a question to which he would be refused an answer.
“That’s the second thing you’ve said tonight that isn’t an answer, and I’m counting them—”
“Then count.”
“I’ll count. I count everything, it’s the only reason any of us is alive, and one day you’ll thank me and I’ll have died of the waiting.”
That was all anybody got.
“Take the horses down,” Vaughn said.
“I’m taking the horses. I’m standing under an eave in the rain, alone, while everyone else enjoys the barn, and I’d like it itemized. Songkeeper—leave the door. She counts them and it saves her the trouble.”
“I always leave it,” Ilyan said.
Vaughn and Corvin went down the byre and out under the eave. Vaughn came past on the door side without appearing to choose it, and stood between me and the night.
Ilyan left it open.
?
Ilyan put his burned forearm in the unfrozen water and left it there, and said nothing. The door he had left open let the rain in along the floor.
I have been careful with Ilyan Frost for three years. He never made me say why.
So I gave him the true thing instead.
“I can find anything alive inside thirty miles. Through stone, through water, through weather. I found a boy in the Rimewood under four feet of snow and I’d never met him.”
“I know what you can do,” he said.
“I’ve never found you. Not once, in three years. You could stand the other side of that wall and I’d have to look with my eyes, like everybody else.”
“And what would you do with me if you could?”
“Everything I can’t find gets taken.” My voice came out flat and I let it. “That’s the whole of my experience of it. So I’ve spent three years arranging not to be alone with you in a room.”
“I’d worked that out for myself.”
“I know you had.”
The heat came up under my sternum and went straight down, my nipples tightening under the shirt, and my cunt was heavy before I had finished a sentence about tracking.
He took the lantern off me and set it on the manger.
Then the back of his hand came up under my jaw, from below.
This time he kept it where he wanted it.
“Your hands are shaking. And you’re not cold. Do you know why?”
I did not answer. He hadn’t left a place for one to go.
He got the coat off my shoulders, his coat, mine since the shale cut, and did not ask.
“There’s nothing on me anybody wants to look at.”
He went on looking at me.
I put my hand over the front of my throat, the way I have since I was nine, and he took my wrist down and held it against my hip.
My shirt went. Everything under it went.
Bare to the boot tops in a stone byre with a cow forty feet away, and Ilyan Frost was still in his shirt and breeches.
The cold got at my nipples and drew them up hard. His thumb went across one nipple and then the other, and my pussy clenched on nothing.
Then he took the lantern down to the floor, where it lit me from the nipples down and left him in the dark.
He looked at my cunt in that light for a while before he touched it.
“You’ve never let anybody look this long, have you? Gorgeous, and you’d deny it.”
His hands are forge-hot. They have been every time, through gloves, through sleeves.
He put his palm flat on my belly and left it long past the point where a palm means anything, the heel of it above my pussy, and the rope of burn on his left forearm dragged across my ribs.
Then his hand went onto my cunt, and he made a sound in his chest, one, and that was all he said about what he found.
Two fingers in me. The heel of his hand on my clit.
He was unhurried in a way that stopped being kindness inside a minute.
My clit was swollen against the heel of his hand and nothing got faster.
“Is that where?”
It was where. I got my forehead onto his shoulder, and he brought my face back up into the light.
I cannot put the next minutes in order. My back was against stone and then it was not. His fingers came out of my pussy slick to the second knuckle, and my hips had started working without asking me.
He put a third finger in me and kept my clit under his thumb, and my pussy was open on his hand and nothing modest was left in that byre.
“Is your cunt always so tight, or is it me? How long have you been holding that?”
I came on his hand with my mouth open and no sound out of it, and my cunt pulled on his fingers with his thumb on my clit, and the collar dragged at my neck and I did not care.
His mouth came in under my jaw, below, never above. Throat. Collarbone. My breasts, then my nipples. One nipple and then the other, teeth barely in it, and my pussy pulling on nothing, until my hands were in the straw with nothing to hold.
Then he took a very long time getting to my clit.
“Ilyan.”
He went lower by an inch.
“Ilyan—”
His mouth on my cunt. His tongue flat on my clit, and then not flat. His hands came under my ass and held me against his mouth.
His tongue went into me and came back up to my clit and stayed there, my pussy running down his chin.
“And you’ve been holding your breath since I put my mouth on your cunt. What have you been holding it for?”
I could not have told him. My heels were off the ground, my nipples aching, my fingers in his hair, and I was making a noise I have never made in nineteen years.
He closed his lips on my clit and would not let go, and his mouth was full of me, and he did not stop when I bucked.
The second one took me apart.
I came against his mouth with his tongue still on my clit, and it went on and went on, and I stopped being a woman with a name on a writ, and I could not get the rest of it back.
I lay in the straw with my chest going and my clit beating, and nothing in that byre explained itself to me.
?
Ilyan came up over me and drew the coat he had taken off me under my shoulders, off the cold floor, which I noticed only later.
Bare, then. He had been dressed until then.
His cock against my thigh, then his cock dragging through my pussy, then notched at my cunt, and he did not push. He waited with his forehead on mine.
Then he put one hand under the back of my neck and took the weight of the collar off it.
Nineteen years, and no hand on me had ever lifted that weight—not Rhodry’s, not Vaughn’s—and he did it without a word, the way a man moves a cup off a table edge.
He put his cock into my cunt while he was doing it.
“You keep waiting for me to ask. I already know the answer. I’m waiting for you to hear yourself say it.”
I said nothing at all, and he was right, and his cock was in me to the root and my whole spine came up off the straw.
He held there. His cock was as deep in me as it could go and he would not move.
“Your cunt’s so tight I can feel your pulse. Did you know?”
“I can’t—”
He did not answer that either.
Then he moved, and it was slow, and slow was worse. His cock went the whole way in and the whole way back. His hand stayed under my neck.
I got my heels around the backs of his thighs and pulled, and he let me pull, and his cock did not go faster.
My nipples dragged on his chest and my clit found him at the top of every stroke, and he had arranged both, and never said so.
“That’s twice you’ve turned your face out of the light, and twice you’ve come back to it. What are you looking for out there?”
“Nothing—”
I lost the thread again. My hands were on his back, then in the straw, then on the manger stone.
“You’re wet to your thighs and you’ve said four words since the others went outside. Which of the two am I meant to believe?”
“Both.”
His cock dragged out slow and went back to the root and I clenched on it, and I heard myself, and it did not sound like me.
“Do you know what your cunt does when you stop fighting? It’s stunning.”
“Seren.”
He said my name once the entire time, and it did not sound like a man asking for anything.
He came in my cunt and I was still going when he did, and his cock jerked twice, and I do not know which of us made which sound.
Afterward I shook. It was not cold in that straw and I shook anyway, hands and jaw and thighs and a sore nipple.
He kept the hand under my neck the whole time. His cock was still in me and I was moving in small pulls around it, my clit riding him, and he stayed until that stopped.
The cow shifted in her stall and settled. The water in the manger went on not freezing.
“Would you rather I put the lantern out?”
“No. Leave it.”
I am going to let all three of them believe I have chosen nothing, for as long as they let me, because saying the other thing out loud costs more than I have. It is a coward’s arithmetic and I would do it again in the morning.
His burned arm lay across me, and the lantern burned down to a thread, and the thread held.
Before the lantern died I found my shirt in the straw and dressed, slowly. I gave him back his coat and moved Rhodry’s note into the inside pocket of my own. Ilyan folded a dry strip around the small cut on my right palm. Nothing shone; nothing closed by magic. His hands were careful anyway.