CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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SEREN
Five days later the northern Rimewood was under hard frost. The patrols had pushed us off the relay road twice; a washed-out crossing cost another day.
We reached the charcoal burners’ oak half a day from Ravensgate with our horses stumbling.
There were nineteen days left by the deadline the herald had read to Vaughn.
“Seren. In. It’s warm in the trunk.” Vaughn said it out of the dark inside the burnt oak, flat, and I came in out of the night with the frozen ground ringing under my boots.
Corvin went on with what he was saying into the dark of the trunk as though I had been standing there all along. “—and I’d have said so at the time, if anybody had asked me, which nobody did, Seren, ever, in eleven hundred years.”
“Seren.” Ilyan said it last and quietest, from the far curve of the trunk, and he did not close the split in the bark behind me.
I counted the ways out of a hollow tree. One.
The fire drew up that split with a whistle. Char that had never washed out of the wood sat on my lips, the trunk held its heat like a bread oven, and outside there was a big frost and black pine for thirty miles with nothing warm in it.
Firelight stood in a column between the four of us. Everything above shoulder height was dark.
“The horse,” Corvin said. “That’s where we were. She rides mine in the morning.”
“She rides mine,” Vaughn said.
He had my saddle on his horse before I came in off the frost. He was not proposing it. He was telling the tree where it already was.
The remount I had taken at Marrow was lame from the last crossing. My own mare was still in the innkeeper’s care. Vaughn had moved the saddle while I read the pines for a clear way north.
Hesk had brought forty of the Hunt back north to guard our escape road. Three hundred and sixty remained in the Gullet. One of his outriders had found us at the last crossing and ridden ahead to check the clearing.
“Yours is a siege engine with opinions.”
“He reads frost.” Vaughn said it without looking away from Corvin. “You’d take her down the sled track and lose the line at the second bend.”
My tracking leash hung off his belt in the firelight, where he’d hung it in front of a Council herald without asking.
“I’ve never lost a line in my life.”
“Marrow,” Vaughn said.
“I mislaid a line at Marrow. I recovered it inside the hour and the recovery’s in the ledger, which is a system—”
“It isn’t a system,” Ilyan said.
Corvin turned his whole body around.
“It’s nine centuries of a system.”
“It’s nine centuries of your handwriting in bad light.”
“That’s what a system is.”
“Does yours tell you where a thing is before you’ve looked, or after?” Ilyan said.
“After. Before is prophecy and I’ve never claimed—”
“Then it’s a diary.”
“It’s a diary with teeth in it.”
I let them have one more round. The trunk was warm and I hadn’t heard them laugh since Marrow.
“I’m the better tracker. That’s not an argument, it’s a measurement.”
“That’s true,” Vaughn said.
“That’s true,” Corvin said. “She says it like it’s the weather. Fine. Take the point, take the frost, take my horse anyway, he’s better looking than either of you.”
“A stag would take the point,” Ilyan said.
“A stag is prey.”
“A stag is a predator,” Vaughn said.
“It eats grass.”
“So do I, in a bad winter.”
Corvin put both hands over his face. Ilyan laughed without making any noise.
Then I put my back against the char, looked into the fire, and said the rest of it, which none of them had asked for.
“Half a day’s ride from here there’s a blank cut to a twelve-year-old’s throat, sitting on a shelf.”
Corvin’s hands stopped moving.
“Nettle’s twelve. The blank’s cut, so the collar’s ordered, so the quota’s short. I watched a man repaint that board in the tally shed. He did the tens first and the units after, which means he had the number before he had the brush.”
“Seren—”
“Cold Harrow was paid for me. Nineteen years ago. I know the sum and the number on the receipt. Now there are four more names on its roll, two of them children.”
Vaughn’s eyes came off the fire. “Rhodry cut the blank?”
“Rhodry files what he’s handed. Somebody in that shed handed it to him.”
“Name.”
“I don’t have a name. I’ve got a brush stroke, a short quota, and a shelf I can walk to before the light goes.”
“That’s a hard board to read in a warm tree,” Corvin said. “Somebody stop me. I’m about to be funny about it.”
Nobody stopped him. Nobody laughed either.
“Nobody’s laughing. That’s fine. I’ve had worse rooms.”
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I stood up off the trunk floor into the column of light where all three could see my face.
Something went in my ears like a bird shut in a flue, and I had to take the trunk’s air in one pull before any of it came out.
“I’m asking. Not for a place to sleep or another day. Listen to it properly.”
“You don’t have to make it a shield, you know, it can just be a—”
“It isn’t a shield. I’m not offering you that.”
I looked at Corvin until his mouth shut, which took a while and cost him something.
“Court-held is a side effect. I’d want this in a year with no Writ of Severance in it, no Council, no board in the tally shed and nobody’s quota short.”
Ilyan didn’t move at all. He is the one thing in the world I can’t read.
“I’m not choosing. The whole world has made me choose since I was nine years old, and tonight I am keeping all three of you.”
The fire whistled up the split. Nobody answered for a beat and a half. I didn’t soften it and I didn’t look away.
“I want all three of you. Tonight, and finished, and not for the paper.”
“Finished,” Corvin said. “You’ve heard what finished does to the price on you, you’ve heard it from me, and I want it on the record that I—”
“And the old entry may outrank the Court-held shield,” he added. “The registry calls it suspended, but there is an activation sheet I have not seen. I won’t promise you safety on a missing page.”
“I heard you,” I said. “This isn’t about you making me safe by morning. I want to know whether you want a life with me.”
“I know what it makes me worth to them. I’m asking anyway.”
Vaughn crossed half the trunk in one movement and stopped inside my air.
“Yes.” Nothing in his voice moved. “You’re mine from tonight. Say it looking at me.”
I said it looking at him, my chin coming up on its own, my throat closing and opening again before the words got through.
“Yes—and yes, and yes, and I’ve been saying yes for three years with my mouth shut, which isn’t what this mouth is for.”
“Three years,” Corvin went on, “of watching you eat standing up, and refereeing a tree full of fae, and being told no by the only person I’ve ever wanted to hand everything to, and you pick tonight. A burnt oak. Acorn shell. A frost on. It’s perfect and I hate how perfect it is.”
“You’re sure of it, aren’t you.” Ilyan wasn’t asking. He never is.
“Then it’s all three of you, and I’m all three of yours, and I’ll swear that anywhere anybody wants to hear it.”
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Vaughn crossed the trunk floor first. He set his palm flat on my sternum, over the three mate-bonds, and left it there while he spoke against my temple.
“You asked. You’re getting all of it.”
Ilyan came at me from below the jaw and put the back of his hand to my throat before he said anything. His burned left forearm lay warm along my collarbone.
Corvin didn’t touch me. Corvin talked. “Look at you. Look at you, standing in a burnt tree having done the bravest arithmetic in the north, and mine, and mine, and I intend to be unbearable about it—”
I got a fistful of Corvin’s shirt and pulled, and after that he did not let go of me.
Corvin’s hands found the laces at my back and had them open in three pulls. He stripped the shirt off my arms. Ilyan lifted the wool over my head.
My breasts came up into the heat off the fire, nipples gone tight in it. Ilyan’s thumb went across one nipple, once, and my breath left me on the wrong beat entirely.
Vaughn went down on one knee and took my breeches over my hips and off my feet, one boot at a time. He did not ask and he did not look up.
Corvin’s hands came round and took a nipple in each. Vaughn’s bandaged right hand closed over my ass, the two open knuckles hard through the linen, and I felt exactly how little he cared what it cost.
Firelight on the flat of my belly. Firelight on the dark hair between my thighs. My pussy was wet enough that I could feel the cold of the air on it.
“Her cunt’s wet,” Vaughn said, against my hip, like a man reading a track.
Vaughn’s fingers went between the lips of my cunt and stayed. Then two of them were inside me and my whole spine gave up its argument.
Corvin’s thumb found my clit. “There. There it is. You’re soaking, you’re shaking, and you’re still running the arithmetic—put it down, put it down, I’ll hold the numbers.”
Ilyan’s palm went flat between my shoulder blades. His other hand closed round my breast, thumb rolling the nipple, and he said nothing for a long time.
Vaughn’s fingers came out of my pussy wet to the second knuckle and went back into my cunt slower, and Corvin’s thumb never broke its circle on my clit.
“Say it once more so I can hear what I’m about to belong to,” Corvin said, into my ear, with his thumb never leaving my clit.
I got half of it out and lost the rest.
I came on Vaughn’s fingers with Corvin’s mouth at my ear and my cunt shutting on both knuckles.
The whistle in the bark went away and came back.
My knees were somewhere else, my clit under Corvin’s thumb, my hands shut on his collar, and there was a sound in the tree that I understood afterward had been mine.
“That’s the sound. That’s the one I’m keeping. Don’t you dare stop.”
Ilyan’s mouth closed on one nipple and then the other, then went down my ribs one at a time, like he was counting them for later.
“Is that where you wanted my mouth?”
Corvin took me down onto the packed shell and put his mouth on my cunt. His tongue was inside me and then flat and slow on my clit, and he talked into me the whole time, so that I felt the words before I heard them. My own hand shut on a nipple.
Ilyan’s mouth came back up to my other nipple while Corvin’s tongue worked my clit, and I had a fistful of Vaughn’s cock with no idea when I’d taken it.
Vaughn’s mouth was under my jaw and on the tendon of my throat. His teeth were on it.
Then my mouth on Vaughn’s cock, my hand round the base of it, his hand in my hair and not pushing. Corvin’s cock was in my other hand. Ilyan held my hips off the floor, his thumb back on my clit, so I could take more of Vaughn than my neck would give me.
Vaughn first. He turned me onto the shell and put his cock into my cunt from behind, all at once, and his palm came round onto my sternum and stayed flat there for every stroke.
Corvin’s cock went back into my mouth. Ilyan’s fingers stayed on my clit, my nipples dragging the shell every time Vaughn moved me.
Vaughn’s cock was the whole width of me and he said so, once, against my shoulder, and did not slow to let me agree.
“Mine,” Vaughn said into my shoulder. “Every part I’m holding, and the rest of it after.” My clit was swollen under Ilyan’s fingers and my nipples were hard enough to ache in the fire heat.
Somewhere in the middle of it I thought that in an hour I would be worth more than the whole Winter Court, that I had been cheap for nineteen years, and that I liked the number I had made of myself. I let it stay.
Vaughn came inside my cunt and said four words against the back of my neck.
“You’re mine. It’s done.”
Something came up under my sternum, slightly left of the bone, and took weight like a rope taking a load.
Corvin’s coat came off his back and Ilyan knelt onto it, and not once did either man’s hand go near the other. Every hand in that tree was for me alone.
Then Ilyan under me on the coat, his cock inside my cunt, my knees either side of his hips, his hands on my waist, moving me, almost silent.
Ilyan’s cock filled my cunt differently and he watched my face find that out. Vaughn’s palm stayed flat on my sternum from behind, Corvin had my hair wound round one fist and a nipple in the other, and neither of them came off me for a second.
“You’re so tight round me, aren’t you.”
I came on Ilyan’s cock with his brown eyes open the whole time.
“That’s mine in you now, isn’t it.”
The second came up beside the first, the rope took a second load, and Ilyan’s hands never left my waist.
Then Corvin, my back against the warm inside of the trunk, his cock in my cunt, his mouth going without one pause in it. Vaughn’s bandaged right hand was under my knee, Ilyan’s mouth was on my nipple, and there were three men on me and no part of me deciding anything.
“Look at you. Look at you, you beautiful, ruinous, impossible woman, you’ve gone and kept all three of us, and I’m going to talk about this for a thousand years—”
Corvin’s cock, his hands under my thighs, his mouth at my jaw, my clit dragging at the top of every stroke, and my cunt taking every word out of him as though the words were part of it.
I came on Corvin’s cock with the char under my shoulders, and he came inside my cunt talking straight through it, and the third came up under my sternum while he was still going.
I put my fingers under the bone in the firelight and counted. Three. A finger’s width to the left, warm, raised, and none of them ever went away again. Nobody could sell me now at any price, and I wanted the man who had priced me at nine years old to know it.
Ilyan’s ear was against my chest, over the marks, and he had gone quiet in the way that means he is hearing something the rest of us cannot.
“It hides what’s in you. It doesn’t hide anything in us.”
Nobody had time to do anything with that.
I was pulling my shirt back on when our outrider called from the clearing. Vaughn took his coat and went to the split. The man carried a pocket seeker taken from an abandoned Council post; Corvin had asked him to check it against a known full-blood before he brought it in.
“Warden,” a voice said from outside the firelight. “The glass has lit round the rim. There’s a new thread on it, and it’s yours.”