CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
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SEREN
“Seren. Come and sit down. You’ve been standing since noon.”
Vaughn Ironmere said it from a bench thirty feet off, across a hall with nine standards down the middle and no seats at all.
I was standing on the scar where the ninth one used to stand, in stone a different color from the stone around it.
Eight in the evening, frost coming up the white stone behind him, and the hall smelled of nothing.
Somebody had carried two chairs up and set them by the bench.
Vaughn went to the wrong chair. Fourteen hundred winters of doing it, and he could not pull it out, and stood with his bound forearms at his sides.
I pulled it out and sat in it myself, with my back to the north door and both hands loose.
Nobody in that hall said a word about it. Nobody ever has.
“Nine standards, eight Courts, and one of them’s brought two—which is either an insult or a spare, and I’ve decided it’s an insult.”
“It’s a spare. Their first one’s wet.”
“That is worse,” Corvin said, after a while. “That’s much worse, and I’d like it struck from the record, and I’d like everybody to stop being better at this than me.”
The benches had come up too, and they were full. The Court of the Shelf sat on one side with no Chancellor. Rhodry at the end of a bench with Bel Arrowood, Nettle with her heels going against the wood.
Ottoline Crane stood at the back by the wall and did not leave.
Corvin stood at my shoulder and read each line low enough for me to take it before the hall did.
I gave the names back to the room, newest first. He did not shorten an entry.
I did not let anyone interrupt it. We had spent the morning on that roll, and by evening the people in it were no longer a list somebody could put away.
“And if we strike it, who runs the halls?” said a woman under the third standard. “Somebody has to.”
“Nobody,” I said. “That’s what struck means.”
“There are instruments down there worth a Court, and there are records. Somebody keeps records or nobody knows anything, and two of us haven’t signed and won’t sign to a hall with nobody in it.”
“Then don’t sign. The names have been heard. Those entries are evidence now, not a claim on anybody’s body, and if you want the halls kept you’ll be keeping them on your own name and not on mine.”
“My mate gives the names,” Vaughn said. “Everybody stands for it.”
On the table before me lay the four amended terms, copies for the Courts and copies for the people who had come out of the cells.
Beside them was Hesk’s saddle flap. The names of the riders who turned back were still on it.
Their wages stood beside the names of the dead, and the pensions would come from the Warden’s stores before a lord of the Court ate his winter rent.
Nine Courts’ worth of them stood, and the two who had not signed stood too, which I noticed and so did Corvin.
I put the bond-hook down on the scarred floor in front of the standards and left it.
“One more thing,” Vaughn said. “The treaty’s gone. I burned it. Four hundred years of it, in his face, and my marches have been open ever since.”
The hall took it like cold water.
“And you’d do it again,” said a voice off the Shelf’s bench.
“I’d do it again.”
“He would.” Corvin came off the wall. “He’d do it twice, and he’d want the second one on a better table, and he’d make me carry it down the stairs.”
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The small room off the ring had one bench, one hearth, and a door that barred from the inside. I took Vaughn into it.
It came home to him there.
I felt it arrive before he did, because I have been the road it came down. Something with weight went out of my chest into his, and his shoulders went back against the wall.
Then nothing. It kept arriving, nothing in it.
Four hundred years dead. I made myself think the number.
He went to his knees. He has no hands. He could not brace, and I got under him and took the weight against my throat.
His eyes stayed open the whole time, winter-blue, and nothing behind them for a long while.
“It’s her,” Vaughn said. “There’s nothing in it.”
“I know,” I said.
“There’s nothing in it.”
“I know. I’ve got you and I’m not putting you down.”
There is no fixing it. I did not try, and nothing after was worth what it cost him.
Ilyan came in and shut the door, Corvin behind him. Neither spoke, which Corvin has done twice in eleven hundred years.
Here is what I thought on that floor, with him coming apart on me.
I thought: there is a part of him I can never reach. I had known that before he told me her name. Knowing it did not stop the small frightened thing in me from counting what he had loved first.
“I’m afraid I’m second,” I said. It came out before I could make it less ugly. “Not to a woman who can choose anything now. To the part of your life I can’t know.”
Vaughn lowered his head until his forehead touched mine. “Sirel was not a place I kept for somebody else to fill. Neither are you.”
“And do you want to be put down,” Ilyan said, “or held?”
“Held,” said Vaughn. “By her. I’m not putting one piece of it down before morning.”
When he came back to me, I took his face between my hands. I did not try to make the grief go. I stayed until he could stand with it.
Then I found the seam at my own throat. The graft had gone quiet. No stolen life moved through it now; the warmth left in the metal was its own.
The seam opened under my thumbs.
For the first time since I was nine, nothing waited at my neck when I swallowed.
I put the collar into Ilyan’s hands. “Keep the metal. Not the shape.”
He closed his fingers around it and did not ask what I meant yet.
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Three weeks later, we were still in Vaeloth, in a room whose door I could bar from the inside. Hesk held the road north while the former prisoners chose where to go. Nobody was being loaded onto a cart because a clerk had finished with them.
The dressings came off Vaughn’s forearms that morning. The wounds had closed. His hands had not returned, and no one kept promising that they would. Corvin’s left arm remained in a sling. Ilyan could warm a room by sitting close to the fire; he could not pretend to hear every bond in it any more.
My wrist would scar. I could lace my own boots again. That evening I shut the door myself, not because I was trapped behind it, but because the rest of the world could manage one night without us.
Ilyan brought blankets and a plate from the kitchen. Corvin barred the door one-handed and leaned back against it. Vaughn stood close enough that I could feel his warmth at my shoulder.
Vaughn’s mouth came down beside my ear.
“Stay in this room tonight.”
“Yes, Warden.”
He stopped breathing for a second. Nineteen years of that coming out of me when I was frightened, and this time I handed it to him, and he knew the difference before the second word was out.
Ilyan built a fire in the little hearth and put a plate down at my left hand.
“You’ve eaten everything I’ve put in front of you for three years.”
“I know.”
“And will you pretend again tomorrow?”
“Obviously,” I said, and ate it standing up.
Vaughn sat on the bench with his knees apart and I stood between them, and he came at me from below the jaw the way all three have since the day I flinched.
Vaughn’s mouth went on my throat, his teeth after it. The flat of one bound forearm came across my back and held me against him by weight, because weight is what he has, and my whole spine let go at once.
My nipples drew up hard under the shirt before his mouth got anywhere near a nipple, and I heard the noise I made about it.
“That was fast.”
“It’s been three years. Don’t say anything clever about it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I said.
He could not undress me. I did it myself, fast, because it was faster.
Then I got his belt open and his coat and the laces of his breeches, and Vaughn’s cock came up into my hand already hard, and he was as quick about it as I was. The leash stayed on the belt. The belt went on the floor.
Ilyan took my boots off, one and then the other, his thumb in the hollow of each ankle.
Corvin got his own laces open one-handed and complained the entire time.
“Eleven hundred years and I’ve never had to get my own cock out of my own breeches with one arm strapped across my chest, and I want it understood that this is not my best work—”
“Nobody’s watching you,” Vaughn said.
Corvin’s good hand stopped dead on the last lace, which in that man is worse than shouting.
“She is. She counts everything, it’s the worst habit anybody in this room has, and I include the man with no—”
Vaughn turned his head toward him and not his body.
“Fine. Noted. Struck. Here’s what I’m not striking, though, and that’s that I’ve had my own cock in my own hand thinking about this exact floor for three years, and there isn’t a person here who can prove otherwise.”
Corvin’s fingers went into my cunt, two and then three, and the heel of his hand came down on my clit with them.
“Wet. You’re wet down to your thighs and I’ve barely got started—no, don’t close them. Open. There. There. Three fingers in your cunt and you’re taking them like it’s nothing, and it isn’t nothing, and you and I both know exactly how much practice you’ve had at this in your own head.”
Ilyan’s thumb came onto my clit from the side, unhurried, the way that man does everything, and Ilyan’s mouth went down onto a nipple and stayed shut.
Vaughn’s forearm came across my hips and pinned them by mass. I put my palm flat on the bound end of it and did not flinch, and he watched me not flinch.
Vaughn’s teeth closed on the inside of my thigh an inch off my pussy and stayed shut there, and his tongue came up over my clit once and went.
Then Vaughn’s mouth was on my cunt and his tongue was on my clit and the order of things stopped being available to me.
“Sit on my mouth. That’s what I’ve got left and it’s enough.”
“You won’t be able to breathe like—”
“Sit on my mouth.”
I did.
“Your cunt’s wet through. I can taste it from here. Good girl—slower.”
“I can’t go slower.”
“Your clit comes up under my tongue when I do that. I’m going to do it again.”
Slower. Vaughn’s tongue flat on my clit and then not flat at all, and Ilyan’s hand spread over my belly holding me down onto his mouth.
“Look at you—a Warden’s tongue on your clit and you’re counting the doors. I love that. I’m going to fuck it out of you in about a minute.”
Corvin’s teeth on one nipple, and Vaughn’s tongue back on my clit, and then Corvin’s mouth on the other nipple, and I could not have told a hall under seal which arrived first.
My thighs shook hard enough to move the bench across the stone.
I came on Vaughn’s tongue with both hands in his hair, and a sound came out of my throat that I have never heard before.
Then I was over him with my pussy slick from his mouth and my clit still going. I put Vaughn’s cock in my cunt with my own hand, because he could not, and went down onto it in one and held.
“That’s yours to do. Do it.”
I did it. He is a great deal to take in one and I took it in one anyway, and his forearm came across the small of my back. “You feel my cock all the way in and you put it there yourself.”
“That’s the whole of him and you took it off a standing start—do it again, and slower, because I want to watch his cock go into your cunt an inch at a time and I’d like a chair brought up for it.”
Corvin had his good hand on himself and Ilyan had one on my nipple, and neither of them was touching the man under me, and neither ever has.
“Again. All the way down.”
“Your cunt’s gripping. That’s it. Harder.”
Vaughn’s cock went hard up into my cunt one last time, and he came inside me with his forehead down against my sternum and four words I am not writing down.
Then I was on my knees on the coats with Corvin behind me and his hand on my hip, and Corvin’s cock went into my cunt slow, and then not slow at all, and filled it to the back and stopped there.
“Wetter than that. There—that’s the noise your cunt makes. That’s the one I’ve been chasing for three years and I’d like it again.”
He got it again. Corvin’s hand dragged me back onto him, then came off my hip and found a nipple, and his mouth went the whole time at the back of my neck where the collar used to be.
I came on Corvin’s cock with my face in the crook of my own arm.
“There she goes—there—that one’s mine, that’s my cock you’re doing that on, and I don’t care what anybody in this room wants to say about it afterward—”
He finished inside my cunt and talked through his own.
Ilyan was last and slowest. On my side, facing me, his cock going in so slowly I could feel every part of it arrive, his burned forearm under my head, his mouth on the nipple nearest him.
“Is that where you wanted it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’ve stopped breathing. Is that my hand on your clit, or is it his?”
“Yours.”
He was the whole way into my cunt with his thumb on my clit, and he kept me there like that a while. “Are you always so tight around a cock you picked yourself, or is that new?”
“And is it better slow? You’ve never in three years let anybody take anything slow.”
“It’s better slow.”
Ilyan’s thumb went back onto my clit, and he stayed unhurried, and my nipples went tight against his chest, and I came a third time with almost no noise in it.
Ilyan’s mouth on my mouth. He finished with his forehead against mine and made no sound at all.
“Say it again. Slower,” Vaughn said out of the dark, and I did, and he had me do it twice more after that.
Afterward the frost went on working on the white stone outside, loud in a room where nobody was talking.
“I love you,” I said. “All three of you. I’m saying it first so none of you has to go first.”
“I love you,” Vaughn said. “I’ve known since the yard. You’re mine, and you were mine before either of us put a word on it.”
He had no hand to turn my chin with, so he moved the whole of himself instead and got his face in front of mine.
“And you are not second. Not one hour I ever gave you had been anybody else’s first, and I’m not saying it twice.”
“I’d have gone first,” said Corvin. “I’d have gone first three years ago and I’ve had it in my mouth every day since, and you’ve cost me the only race I was ever going to win.”
“I love you,” Corvin said, and let the words stand without making a joke out of them. “That was the part I kept thinking you could hear in everything else.”
“And I love you,” Ilyan said. “There. No question for you to answer first.”
Nettle was asleep in Rhodry’s room across the passage, the fire had got down to its bones, and I lay on a stone floor between three men, all awake. Three men, every one of them mine, and not one of them ranked.
“I was born owned. I am going to die kept, and I chose every hand that keeps me.”
Nobody answered it. I kept still.
In the morning I picked his belt up and buckled it round him.
I hung the leash back on his belt myself, because he couldn’t, and he asked nothing about whose it was.
The metal clasp was gone. I had cut it from the braid that afternoon. He could carry the leather we both remembered; nobody would ever clip it to my throat again.