CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
?
SEREN
Four days of drifting snow closed the moor ford. We tried it twice and brought the horses back with ice up their legs. By Tuesday evening the outriders had found a northern drovers’ crossing that would hold. Thirteen days remained, or that was what every person in the tower believed.
Vaughn Ironmere stood on the cracked flag in the middle of the top room, rocking it under his boot heel the way he always does, and he said my name across the firelight before I was through the door.
“Seren. Come in or shut it, you’re bleeding the fire out.”
I came in along the wall. The door stood wide behind me, because Ilyan came up last and Ilyan does not close doors.
One door. I counted it with my chin going down, and I counted it again.
The tower is gray granite five feet thick and stays cold at midsummer, and tonight there was too much fire in it.
Green logs. The resin popped out of them in wet cracks, the wind pulled a long note over the chimney.
Vaughn had the wrong chair, its back to the open stair. I took the other, and the fire had both our faces.
Corvin sat on the table edge, working the ink off his thumb with his forefinger.
Ilyan dropped his coat over the back of my chair. I had been rubbing my neck. Neither of us said so.
A plate for me and a second for the room, bread broken and meat cut small: Ilyan had done it on the stair.
“You don’t want this.”
“I don’t.” I took the plate out of Ilyan’s hand, ate with my shoulder to the wall, and finished every scrap.
Corvin came off the table and ate beside me, talking the whole time.
“A stag eats leaves. Leaves. I’ve watched him do it—”
“A stag opens a man from the hip to the collarbone.” Vaughn said it to the fire.
“It’s a grazing animal. I’ve been one the whole time. I’d know.”
“Nine hundred years of salad and windfall apples, and he’s standing there telling us he’s a wolf’s problem—”
“He isn’t a wolf’s problem. He’s a hedge with a grudge, and I’d say so to his face, and I am saying so to his face.”
All three of them looked at me. I took my time over the bread.
“He’s a predator when he’s angry and a lawn when he isn’t. Next.” Corvin made the noise of a man shot in a doorway. Ilyan studied the ceiling. Vaughn ate nothing, said nothing, and lost.
Vaughn’s hand went to the leash at his belt and closed on it.
“You go north in the morning. Nettle rides with you.”
Nobody moved, and nobody asked me anything.
“And what gets the two of them over the moor ford?”
Ilyan asks the quiet ones.
“They go by the northern drovers’ crossing. Hesk’s men tested it at noon. There’s no glass on it.”
That was half of what he had said a breath before, given up without a word. Ilyan never thanks him when he has won me something.
“Past the ford, past the northern toll, past every clerk between here and the coast—fine. Fine. It’s not the worst plan he’s had this month, and I’ve had to live inside some of the others.”
Corvin agrees warmly and at length, which is how he answers a different question than the one asked. Vaughn never named what he meant to trust past the glasses, and I took that for a choice.
Something went tight and low under the three marks and stayed. I could carry the gap. I could not hear him decline to fill it.
Boots on the stair, two floors down and climbing. I had them placed before the first word: Rhodry walks on the outside of the left foot.
“Just your mark, Warden, that’s all I’m after, I’ll not keep you.”
Vaughn crossed the room and opened the door enough for a tally book and no more.
The tally book went through and came back with the Warden’s mark wet on the season’s page. Rhodry never came in.
Ilyan took Vaughn’s right hand in both of his and turned the knuckles to the light.
The new skin is shiny, a shade paler than the rest. It moved when the fingers moved, and moved well.
“It closed by itself,” Ilyan said. “Slowly.”
“I noticed,” Vaughn said.
Ilyan kept looking at the thin new skin. His hands could still give heat. They could not give back what a body had lost, and he had stopped pretending the difference was only a bad night.
Ilyan held on to it after there was anything left to look at.
“You’ve been holding his hand for a while now.”
Corvin was back on the table edge, one boot on the cracked flag, rocking it.
“As bedside manner goes it’s thorough, it’s tender, it’s—are you going to kiss it, or are the rest of us going to sit here and pretend we can’t see you doing it—”
“It’s the only part of him that’s ever asked for help.” Ilyan laughed once, low in his chest. Vaughn looked into the fire, and Corvin, for the first time in eleven hundred winters, had nothing.
?
The joking stopped the way it did when Corvin decided it would, in that hot stone room with its one door and the night still to go.
Corvin’s hands went dead on the table edge and his mouth kept going, which in any other room is the last thing a man sees.
“I’ve carried a question up these stairs for three years and I’m putting it down tonight, because if I don’t put it down here I’ll put it down somewhere worse, and none of us wants that.”
A green log let go with a crack like something dropped on slate.
“If you had to keep one of us. Go on. Which one?”
Firelight from the jaw up on all three of them. Ilyan did not move. Vaughn let the fire do all the moving.
The flag under Corvin’s boot had gone quiet and I had not heard it go.
I got as far as the breath in front of the word.
“Don’t answer that. If you answer that, one of us has to be the one you didn’t say.”
Corvin took it back himself, faster than the others could have, and nobody made me finish.
Vaughn sat with his hand open on his knee and did not repeat it.
“Your hands are cold again. Are they always cold up here, or is it the stone?”
“It’s the stone.” I gave Ilyan my hands, and Ilyan put them under the burned side of his left forearm, where the scar has no feeling and everything around it runs hot.
Vaughn took the leash off his belt between two fingers, without looking down, and set it on the table by the cold plate.
Then Vaughn stood and came at me from under the jaw, never from above.
I had both hands in Vaughn’s shirt before he finished standing up.
“I’ve been sitting here since the bell wanting exactly this, and I’m not going to be polite about it.”
?
Vaughn’s mouth came in under my jaw and stayed, and the room went down to the size of that.
Ilyan’s hands closed on my waist from behind, thumbs either side of my spine, and Corvin did not stop talking all night.
“Look at you. You came up those stairs with your chin out like a clerk with a grievance, and now Vaughn’s mouth is on your throat and your nipples are up through three shirts, and I’ve counted them twice—”
“Two shirts.” I got the first one off myself.
“Two shirts, which is one more shirt than those nipples have ever needed. Beautiful.”
Vaughn opened my shirt with the right hand, the healed one, and the new skin dragged over both nipples on the way down and I watched it go.
Ilyan knelt behind me and took my boots off, both hands to each ankle.
“Nipples hard.” Vaughn said it into the hollow under my jaw. “That’s mine, and it’s not the cold. You’ve wanted this since the stair.”
“Undershirt, belt—no. Wrong. The belt went first, and I’m never wrong about a belt. Those nipples have been the best argument in this tower since the fire was lit.”
Corvin got the belt wrong on purpose, and I would have said so if Ilyan’s hands had not come up my thighs.
“Get your mouth on my nipples and stop reviewing them.”
“She wants the mouth. I’ll do both nipples and I’ll do the second one badly, so we have to have this conversation twice—”
Ilyan’s fingers went into my cunt slowly, two of them, and his thumb came onto my clit and sat there without moving, which is worse than moving.
“That’s the face. Ilyan’s got two fingers in your cunt and a thumb on your clit and hasn’t moved in a hundred count, and you’ve stopped finishing your sentences, and I’d trade the ledger for the noise you just made—”
“So wet.” Vaughn said it flat against my mouth, the way he states a thing while it is happening. “That’s my cunt on Ilyan’s fingers and my clit under his thumb. When they come out, it goes onto my cock.”
Ilyan’s thumb moved on my clit, once. My knees went, and Vaughn took the whole weight of me without a word, one arm under my ribs, and Ilyan’s fingers stayed in my cunt with the thumb back on my clit.
I lost the room there. The door, the count of it, the note off the chimney—gone.
Corvin’s mouth closed over one nipple and kept talking around it, and his tongue went round the other nipple and stayed longer.
“Perfect. This one’s harder than the other one. It always is. I keep a ledger—”
“You don’t.” I pulled Corvin’s mouth back onto the nipple by the hair.
“I keep a ledger on everything. Ask me about your nipples in a freeze and I’ll give you columns and years and a note in the margin about the cold—”
Vaughn’s mouth went down my throat below the collar, his teeth closed on my shoulder blade, and his hand closed on a nipple.
Then Ilyan put me on the table edge and his mouth on my pussy, and his tongue went flat and slow across my clit.
“Does your clit like the flat of it better than the tip?”
“Both. Don’t stop.” I had a fist in Ilyan’s hair.
“Is this the one that makes you stop breathing?”
Ilyan took his mouth off my cunt to ask it and put it straight back.
My hips came up off the table and put my clit in Ilyan’s mouth, and I went a second time with Corvin’s voice above me.
Vaughn took me down onto the furs, my back to his chest, facing out at the door and the stair-head, and did not say why.
Vaughn’s cock went into my cunt by degrees. Vaughn’s hand spread flat and low on my belly and held me down onto his cock, and I got both hands into his hair.
“You’ve got my cock to the root. Take it. That’s it. Good girl.”
Then Vaughn stopped.
Corvin’s mouth came off my nipple in the middle of a word. Ilyan’s thumb went still against me; his other hand rested on my knee.
Vaughn stayed all the way up in me and moved nothing at all.
“You stopped counting the door.”
I had. I had lost it under Ilyan’s mouth and not gone back for it, and only one man in that room counts the way I count.
“Every room you walk into, I have the doors before you get your coat off. I never said so. I’m saying it now because you stopped, and I want you to know who you stopped for.”
Vaughn turned my face until the one door was in front of it.
“It’s mine tonight. Put it down.”
Vaughn finished with his hand flat on my belly. I stayed against him until his breathing settled, and then Corvin held out his hand.
Something went out of my back that had been in it since I was nine.
Then Corvin had me up on the table, face to face, my ankles crossed at the small of Corvin’s back and Corvin’s cock in my cunt to the root.
Vaughn watched from the furs with a fist around his own cock. Every hand in that room was on me or on the man it belonged to, and I noticed, and I liked it.
“You’ve got that look—the one where you’re about to correct somebody’s arithmetic—and I’m going to fuck it right off your face and put it back on and do it again, because I’ve got all night and no better use for it.”
He did it. Corvin’s hands came under my hips and dragged me down onto Corvin’s cock, thumb on my clit, and I got no arithmetic done at all.
“Your cunt’s squeezing my cock like you’re settling an account, and you’re mine, and I want it on the record that I’ve never been happier than I am on this table—”
Corvin finished second, his voice breaking on my name. Ilyan took my weight when Corvin drew back.
Ilyan came last and slowest. Ilyan’s cock went in a half inch at a time, and Ilyan’s palm went flat under my sternum on the three marks and stayed, and that is the one that undoes me.
“Does your cunt know it’s me? It knows who it belongs to before you do. And if I go slower than that, does it get worse?”
“Yes.” I said it against Ilyan’s ear.
“Then it gets worse.”
I came on Ilyan’s cock with Corvin’s teeth in my shoulder and Vaughn’s mouth at my neck, and it did not line up with anybody and nobody tidied it.
Ilyan finished last, his palm flat on the marks.
The hearth went down to the color of the inside of a shell. Ilyan pulled his coat over as much of us as it would cover and none of himself.
The second plate went round cold, and the bread was better cold.
Ilyan turned the back of his hand against my jaw first, which is what he does instead of clearing his throat.
“Your hands are warm.”
“They’re your fault.”
Corvin talked himself to sleep, from the drovers’ road to a defense of ravens, slower and stupider, ending in the furs at my hip.
“...best cunt in the northern marches, and I’d put my name to that in front of the Nine, and I’ve got the ledger to prove—”
Then nothing out of Corvin, which happens twice a year.
Vaughn did not sleep. He lay on his back with one arm over my ribs, his breathing getting longer instead of faster.
All four of us had rocked that cracked flag tonight, and nobody said a word about it.
Vaughn’s head came up before there was anything to hear. He reached for his breeches; the others were already moving. By the time he had his coat on, the leash was back on his belt.
“That’s the yard horn.”
The horn went up off the long yard, three and then three again, and Vaughn was already standing.