CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
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SEREN
The first thing that morning was Corvin’s voice off the lip of the split in the bark, saying my name to find out whether I was awake.
“Seren. Seren Vale. It’s nine in the morning and you’re famous.”
The outrider had gone on to Ravensgate before dawn. Ilyan had tested the glass against all three men. The ordinary glow was unchanged. Around each rim ran one completed thread with its far end missing from view. Mine.
The glass could not see through my collar. It could show anyone who tested my men which way their bond led. Our hiding place was still clear—I had read thirty miles of wood before I closed my eyes again—but the next checkpoint would not be.
Real sunlight came through the lightning seam and lay in a bar across my ribs through the open front of Ilyan’s shirt. The trunk was warm, and there was ash on my lips.
Ilyan’s hand was flat on my belly and had been there a while.
I did not have to turn my head to find Vaughn. He was out at the cold clamp north of the trunk, and I knew it the way I know where a wind is going.
It told me where they were.
I put my fingers there without deciding to.
“Three. They’re all still there,” I said, and left my fingers where they were.
“Three,” Corvin said. “Three, and I checked twice in the night, which I’m told is normal behavior.”
“Does it show?” I said. “The three of them. If somebody looked at me on a road, would they see it?”
“Not a thing,” Ilyan said.
“You’d see it from Vaeloth,” Corvin said. “You’ve been lit up like a feast day since the moment you opened your eyes, and I’ve been enjoying it enormously.”
I laughed, and it went across my ribs like a kick. Ilyan did not laugh, and off Ilyan Frost that is the same thing.
They are not going anywhere. I have had one mark on me since I was nine and somebody else chose it. These I counted with my own hand.
Vaughn came in through the split with water and did not sit down.
There were two things to sit on. A stump seat that could see the opening, and a saddle with its back to it.
Vaughn took the saddle.
“You’ve got the wrong chair again.”
“It’s the chair I’m sitting in,” Vaughn said.
Nobody said anything else about it. Nobody ever has.
Ilyan had been up since first light and there was food, and he put a piece into my hands without offering.
“You’re not hungry, are you,” Ilyan said.
“No.”
I ate it standing up, fast, and Corvin ate standing too and talked so nobody had to watch me do it.
He talked about the fog, the charcoal burner who cut this clamp, the felling axes outside, and a man in Vaeloth who owes him money.
“You’re a pigeon with a good tailor,” I said.
“That’s the wrong bird,” Vaughn said. “A raven’s bigger and it doesn’t flock.”
Corvin put both hands over his heart.
“Thank you. Genuinely. That’s the first help I’ve had in three years.”
“Don’t get comfortable. He’ll tell you a stag isn’t a predator next.”
“A stag is a predator,” Vaughn said.
“And a stag’s a predator when the food runs out. Ask anybody who’s been kicked,” Ilyan said.
He did not look up from the fire, which is where he keeps his reputation for gentleness.
“You’ve been eating moss for nine hundred winters,” Corvin said, “and now you’d like us frightened of you.”
“I’d like you to sit down when I’m carrying a kettle.”
Vaughn got up with the water can. Corvin took the vacant saddle and put both palms up.
“That’s the most menacing thing anybody’s said in this tree, and I’ve been threatened by professionals.”
“You’ve all got opinions about deer and I’ve got the only nose in this tree,” I said.
“Then rule on it,” Corvin said. “Go on. She rules on it, that’s the end of it, and I’ll take it to my grave.”
“He’s a predator, and he’s slow about it, and that’s why he’s still alive,” I said.
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The shirt was Ilyan’s, and the trunk floor was warm under me. I had put it on before sleeping, and one side of the hem was caught beneath my hip.
Ilyan took it off over my head, slowly, and the bar of morning through the seam went across my breasts and my nipples went hard in it.
“You were awake before I started, weren’t you,” Ilyan said.
I turned my face into the bar of morning instead. Ilyan’s fingers came between the lips of my cunt from behind and found my clit, and I was wet before I was properly awake, and the sound that came out of me was not one I had decided on.
Corvin got his breeches off without appearing to stand up. Vaughn’s shirt landed on the root beyond the fire.
“Look at you. Look at the state of the Winter Court, this is a disgrace, and I want it on the record that I started it.”
“You didn’t start anything,” I said.
“I said her name. That’s a start.”
He was up on the lip of the split with his knees apart and no intention of helping.
“You said her name at a woman who hadn’t got her eyes open.”
“And she opened them, and here we are, and I’d do it again in the same voice.”
Ilyan’s fingers worked slow circles over my clit and did not go faster when I moved. He waits for the answer he has already got.
“And you want it slower than that,” Ilyan said.
I said something. It was not a word.
“Look at what he’s doing to you. Look at what you’re doing about it, which is nothing at all, which is the correct answer.”
Corvin took my wrist and put my hand on Corvin’s cock, and closed my fingers round it himself, and did not ask whether I wanted it there.
“There it is. That’s the whole strategy of the Blade of the Winter Court, and it took me eleven hundred winters to arrive at it.”
Vaughn’s hand went flat on the back of my neck under the collar, thumb along the seam, holding and not pressing. His other hand came under my jaw from below.
Ilyan’s mouth went between my shoulder blades and then round onto one nipple and then the other, his fingers never off my clit, and my hips came up off the floor toward him without asking me anything.
“Your cunt’s so tight, isn’t it. It always is in the morning.”
Vaughn’s hand came off my neck and down over my breast, and his palm dragged across the nipple once and stopped.
“You feel like that all the way down.”
Vaughn’s thumb stayed on my nipple. Ilyan’s fingers were in my cunt, his knuckle riding my clit, and my own hand was on Corvin’s cock, and I could not have told anybody what any part of me was doing.
Corvin’s mouth came onto my mouth still talking into it, which should not work and does.
Then I put my mouth on Corvin’s cock, unhurried, and Corvin got four words into a sentence and lost the rest of it.
His cock was heavy on my tongue and everything he had been building all morning went out of him.
There was a silence of two seconds. Ilyan looked up from the fire. Nobody in that trunk breathed.
“I want it on the record that I lost my train of thought, once, and it was entirely your fault, and it’s never happening again—oh, it’s happening again.”
Ilyan came into my cunt first, from behind, slow, Ilyan’s hand spread wide on my hip and his thumb in the hollow of it. He went in to the root and stopped there and let me have it, my nipples dragging on the warm floor.
“That’s better, isn’t it. That’s mine, isn’t it.”
I got my knees under me and worked my pussy back onto him, and Ilyan let me set it for a while and then took it off me again.
Every time Ilyan’s cock went to the root of my cunt the three marks under my sternum warmed at once, which is new and which nobody warned me about.
I lost the thread there. I know I made noise. I do not know what I said or whether it was words.
He moved in me the way he does everything, once and completely, and then again.
I came the first time with his fingers on my clit, my face against the warm floor, and Ilyan’s other hand under my sternum over the three marks.
Ilyan finished inside me and made almost no sound.
“He’s done, he’s said nothing about it, and in a minute he’s going to get up and see to the fire, and I want everyone to understand that this man is a menace.”
“The kettle’s boiling,” Ilyan said.
“The kettle’s boiling. There it is. There he goes.”
“You’ve got the whole Winter Court in a burnt tree and you’re using it properly, and honestly, I’ve never been prouder of anybody.”
Then Vaughn on the stump seat, and me astride him, and Vaughn’s cock going into my cunt slowly because of the angle and because he does not hurry. Vaughn’s hands closed on my ribs, thumbs on my nipples, and stayed there.
“Stay right there. You’re mine in the daylight too,” Vaughn said against my throat.
Corvin sat down on the lip of the split with his own cock in his hand and gave a running account.
“That’s it. You’ve had him in your head since the long yard and now you’ve got him in your cunt, and I want all of it later, in order, with the parts you’d be embarrassed about.”
“Quiet.”
“Never.”
He said almost nothing for a long time after that. His mouth went under my jaw, onto my throat, onto one nipple and across to the other, and I felt my own pulse against his teeth.
“Your cunt’s so wet.”
Vaughn’s cock filled me to the top of my cunt and stayed there while I ground my clit down on him, and Vaughn did not move at all.
I came the second time on Vaughn’s cock with my nipples raw under his thumbs, my hands in the ruff of his hair and the collar warm against his palm.
“You’re keeping me. Say nothing.”
He finished inside me as deep as he goes, and those were the three words he said against my skin, and I have kept them.
Then Corvin got me onto my back on the floor of the trunk, warm from the fire under the char, and his cock went into my cunt with one hand spread out over the three marks under my sternum.
“That’s perfect. That’s mine and it’s genuinely perfect and I’d like everyone to look at what she’s doing—”
“Nobody’s looking at anything.”
“They’re all looking. Every one of them. I’m looking.”
Vaughn had gone out for wood and come back without either of us hearing him.
He set the wood down and closed a hand round my ankle. His other hand stayed at his own side, nowhere near Corvin. They came to me. They had never gone to each other.
“You’ve got my cock and both my hands and my whole attention, which is more than the Nine Thrones have ever had off me.”
“Both hands,” I said.
“Both hands, both hands—take them, they’re yours, and I’m going to be insufferable about this for—”
“You’re insufferable now,” I said.
“I’m building. I’m building toward something.”
He got his other hand under me and drove his cock up into my cunt and talked me through it.
His thumb found my clit while he was moving in me and I came the third time with my heels off the floor, my nipples hard, and Corvin’s name in my mouth and no plan of any kind.
Corvin finished inside me and did not stop talking through it.
And then he did stop. For four whole seconds, Corvin Ash went quiet, and the silence left me listening for his next breath, and I was the one who caused it.
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Afterward was warm floor and sunlight and nobody saying anything that meant anything, Corvin included.
Ilyan put his coat over me. It smelled of char and of the fire he had fed since first light, and my nipples ached in the cold bar of the seam.
I lay there sore and full and lit up from the inside of my cunt to the roots of my hair, and I thought a thing I would not have said out loud a week ago.
A glass laid on any of them lights now. The threads let me feel my men even when a road, a wall, or Ilyan’s missing scent hid them from me.
I am glad of it. I have never once been the one who could not be left, and I am not walking that back.
“The collar hides what’s in you. It’s never going to hide what’s in us,” Ilyan said.
He had tested the outrider’s glass after midnight and again at first light.
“A seeker-glass reads what a body can hold. Yours reads a dull half-blood who could hold nothing, and it always will, and that hasn’t changed and won’t.”
“And you three?” I said.
“A mate-thread going off to somewhere the glass can’t see,” Ilyan said.
“How long have you been sure?”
“Since first light. I wanted to be sure before I put it in front of you, and I’m sure.”
Corvin’s hands went to the ledger inside his coat and did not take it out.
“A thread’s got a direction, hasn’t it. They’ll read us and walk up it.”
So they stop hunting a woman. They start reading her men, and they walk up the line to me.
“Then we’re not staying here,” Vaughn said.
“We’re absolutely staying here, because the alternative’s three lit windows walking up a road in daylight, and I say that as one of the windows.”
“North over the deadfall or south to the line, and both of those are open ground, and a lit window in a tree beats a lit window on a—”
“We move at dark,” Vaughn said.
“That’s—fine. That’s fine, that’s sensible, I hate it, and I’d like it noted that I hate it.”
Corvin lost that one. Neither of them looked at me while they settled where I would be at dark. He talked faster after it, and the flat of his hand went to his sternum.
“He should be back by now.”
“Who is?” I said.
“The second rider, the one I put on the Ravensgate road before dawn, for Nettle and Rhodry, on my own horse, because it’s the fastest thing in the Rimewood.”
I was already up on my knees at the seam. I had been watching the sled track all morning.
Something was coming up it through the needle-mat, walking, slow.
I knew the smell of it before the shape came out of the pines, and I knew what was not on it, and my hands went open at my sides.
“That’s my horse,” Corvin said. “That’s my horse, and there’s nobody on it.”