CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE #2
Corvin’s tongue came onto my clit and stayed there, flat and slow and then not slow. His hand never came off my throat. “Your clit’s under my tongue and you taste so good I’ve lost the thread of my own sentence.”
He put his fingers back into my cunt while his tongue worked and he hummed something against my clit that had words in it, and I could not hear the words.
Metal all my life, and then a hand, and I was the one who picked the hand.
My heel went up onto his back. My thighs closed on his head. I came with his fingers still in my cunt and his tongue still on my clit and my own pulse going up into his palm.
“That,” he said, from down there. “That noise. That’s mine now. I’m keeping it and it’s the only thing I’ve got left.”
He wiped his mouth on the inside of my thigh, on purpose.
“You’ve got a coat off a dead man,” I said.
“It doesn’t fit.”
He came up over me on the straw and got his trousers open, and I got a hand on his ass and pulled him where I wanted him.
“Say when—”
“Now,” I said, and got a hand on his cock.
His cock went into my cunt in one long push and he read it out into my ear like a ledger he had kept for years and loved.
“There. There’s my cock in your cunt in the Chancellor’s own gallery, twenty feet from his glass, and I want that on my headstone.”
He said cock and cunt the way other men say a place they were born in, and did not look away from my face while he said either.
“You’re a bird,” I said.
“I’m a raven.”
Corvin’s hips stopped moving, which was the only argument he had.
“You’re a bird that’s vain about—”
“Do not finish that. You’ve got my cock in you and you’re improving the joke.”
His cock went deep and slow at first, because he wanted to talk and could not do both, and then he stopped wanting to talk that much.
The glass hummed on the south side. The straw went out from under my back.
His chest came down on my nipples every stroke and they had gone raw, and I pushed up into it.
“Wind’s off the south side. Glass is humming. That’s a change of weather coming and you’re not listening to me.”
Corvin’s hand tightened on my throat, not hard, exactly as hard as I had asked him for.
“You’re measuring the weather. You’re measuring the weather with my hand where it is. I’m going to think about that for eleven hundred years.”
“Harder. I’m not going to break, I’ve had a worse morning than you have.”
He got his other hand under my ass and lifted, and his cock went into my cunt harder, and his mouth stayed at my ear, filthy and continuous and coming apart at the edges.
“You’ve got a cunt like the end of an argument. I’d have said that years ago if I’d been allowed within a yard of you.”
“You weren’t allowed,” I said.
“I’m allowed now. Look where my hand is and look where my cock is.”
His thumb came back onto my clit and my thighs went and I could not stop them going. “You’re beautiful when you go. Your cunt tells me before your face does and I’m watching both.”
Every time his cock went in, his hand moved on my throat, and every time his hand moved on my throat my cunt did something I had no say in.
“Your clit’s going. I can feel your clit going against my thumb and your pussy going with it, and I’m going to be unbearable about this until one of us is dead.”
I heard the crate lid move behind my head and did not look at it. There was a dead man four feet away and I did not look at that either.
“Come on. With my hand on your throat and my cock in you, and I want to feel it move under it—”
I came the second time with my throat under Corvin’s hand and his thumb on my clit and my heels off the ground and my nipples dragging on his chest and my cunt going around his cock, and my own voice came out of that room in a way I have never heard it.
He finished inside me two strokes after that. He did not stop talking, and the last thing he said was not filthy at all.
“I’d have burned it a hundred years earlier if I’d known you were coming.”
Afterward we pulled our clothes back on and lay against the packing straw, the crate at my shoulder and the blue strip under the door. Corvin wore the dead clerk’s coat again. I laced both boots before I reached for mine.
His thumb went on rubbing at the ink, over and over, in the dark.
“Where did they take it?” I said.
Corvin was quiet for a second, which for him is a season.
“It’s twenty feet from your head,” Corvin said. “Third case from the door, white cloth, a little card on it in somebody’s best hand. They’re showing you to the Nine in the morning.”
I found my coat and put it on over the prison linen. Corvin laced the boot I had left unfinished. He did not touch the bandage on my left wrist.
Then we crossed to the third case. The empty place at my throat pulled toward it before I saw the metal. Two arcs on white cloth; the thin seam cut at both sides. They had arranged it like something beautiful.
Corvin tried two of the dead clerk’s keys. The third turned.
The edges warmed against each other when I lifted them. Not joined yet, but remembering the join. I wrapped the pieces in the cloth and put them against my ribs, in the pocket opposite Nettle’s blank.
On the little card Corvin drew a line through my name.
“Not yours to display,” he said.
At the next door Nettle crawled out from under the stand with the pencil still in the lining of her boot. They had taken Vaughn’s knife. They had not thought a child’s pencil worth another search.
“I made a mark when they changed the guard,” she whispered. “Four short ones. Then the long one when he fell asleep.”
Corvin looked at her marks on the underside of the stand. His eyes came up to mine.
“We leave on the long one,” I said.