Droza
The celebration starts at sundown and takes over the entire harbor.
Corvin has strung lanterns across every dock line and roof edge from the inn to the water’s edge, and the light they throw turns the square amber and gold against the dark.
Brinna has had casks of ale rolled out since midafternoon.
Someone has dragged a pair of fiddle players up onto the steps of the market and they have been sawing away at reels for the better part of two hours.
The noise of it fills the harbor bowl and bounces off the cliff face until the whole town sounds like one living, breathing thing.
I stand in the square with my wings folded and watch all of it.
Selah is near the far dock with Rennic and two of the fishermen whose names I have never bothered to learn. She laughs, and it sounds open and free. She no longer looks like someone being hunted.
She has not looked that way in weeks, and I notice it every time as though it is new information, because it is.
I spent every hour from the moment I woke inside that statue aware of the fear running through the tether like a thread pulled too tight.
That thread is still there. It is warm now instead of sharp, and it carries so much more than fear.
Rennic says something, and she shoves his shoulder. He stumbles sideways with an expression of profound theatrical injury. Across the square, Brinna catches my eye and grins in the specific way she grins when she thinks she is being subtle, which she never is.
I look away from her.
Selah finds me twenty minutes later, appearing at my elbow the way she has learned to do, quiet enough not to startle me, close enough that the tether settles the moment she arrives. She does not say anything at first. She tilts her head toward the water.
“Come with me,” she says as she takes my hand.
The once beaten down watchtower was rebuilt in the weeks since the attack with pale new timber and fresh mortar still pale against the older stone. The stairs are solid under my weight, and we come out onto the platform into the open wind with the celebration noise falling away below us.
Selah leans against the rail and looks out at the sea. I stand behind her. The tether carries something quiet and certain, and after long enough I understand that she brought me up here deliberately, and I let myself understand why.
“Same place,” I say.
“Same place.” She turns to look at me. “Different everything else.”
She is right. The last time we stood in this tower, there were dark elves in the harbor and her hands had not quite stopped shaking. We weren’t sure if we would survive the night.
That uncertainty and fear is gone. There is only the wind, and the lantern glow below, and her looking at me the way she has been looking at like she is waiting for me.
“I don’t feel caught between things anymore,” I tell her. “The way I did. After I woke.” I stop, because I am not good at this kind of language, but she is watching me and waiting, and I owe her honesty. “You gave me something to be present for instead of behind.”
She steps up to me and puts her hand on my chest, over the carved markings that run beneath her palm.
Her fingers trace the edges of the nearest one, slow and deliberate, the way she does when she is paying attention to something rather than simply touching it.
I cover her hand with mine and feel her pulse against my fingers, steady and warm.
“Good,” she says simply.
I pull her in by the hand still pressed to my chest, and she comes without resistance, stepping into me and tipping her face up.
She has been looking at me like this for weeks, and I am still learning what to do with it.
I bring my mouth down to hers and kiss her with all the deliberate patience I have finally learned to allow myself.
She opens for me immediately. Her mouth is warm and soft, and she exhales slowly through her nose as though something she has been holding releases. The tether between us flares.
Her hands slide up my chest and find the edges of my wings. She knows exactly what she is doing. Her fingers press into the joint where the membrane meets the muscle on the left side, slow and firm. The sensation moves through me hard enough that I have to break the kiss to breathe through it.
She makes a quiet sound that is satisfaction. Her eyes are dark in the amber light rising from the harbor below, pupils wide, lips parted and slightly swollen. Her pulse beats visibly at the base of her throat, quick and shallow. I watch it for a moment, then I put my mouth there first.
She moans, and her head tips back against the wall, baring the line of her neck to me fully.
I take my time with it. My mouth moves over her pulse point, down to the jut of her collarbone.
I feel her breathing change with each inch, feel it go from controlled to less managed.
My hands work her clothes loose one at a time, unhurried, my claws careful against each one while my mouth stays occupied at her throat.
Her hands stay tangled in the joint of my wings.
I draw the fabric from her shoulders and bare her to the wind. She shivers, a full-body thing, and I pull back to watch it prickle over her skin.
I bring both palms to her sides, below her ribs, and move them slowly downward. Her breath catches when my hands reach her hips and stop there, thumbs pressing in slightly, and her fingers tighten against the joint of my wings in answer.
“Droza,” she says. Just my name, nothing attached to it, but I hear what she means.
I bring my mouth to her collarbone and begin moving it lower.
At the same time, I carefully lower her to the floor.
Her hands leave my wings and find the ridges of my horns instead, which she knows is worse, and I feel her grip tighten as my mouth moves down the center of her chest. I flick my tongue once over each nipple before moving lower still.
By the time I bring my mouth to the inside of her thigh she has stopped trying to keep her sounds quiet.
Her back is against the wall, her fingers twisted in my horns, and she is not suppressing anything.
Every sensation is doubled by the tether so that I feel her response to each thing I do before she has finished experiencing it.
I take my time here too. Her breath breaks as my tongue explores the tender flesh before gently flicking the pink pearl that waits at the top.
She pulls at me as I insert a finger to her and close my lips around her clit for a gentle suck.
I stay with each sensation long enough to understand it completely before I move to the next.
Her toes curl tighter and tighter before she orgasms, pressing my head into her as she gasps.
I finally rise, bracing myself over her with one arm.
She wraps her legs around me and pulls me in by the back of my neck with both hands.
I enter her slowly, carefully. She lets out a strangled gasp that goes directly into my throat where I am pressed against her.
I stay still for a moment, watching her face, and her eyes open and find mine.
“Don’t you dare be patient right now,” she says, her voice low and wrecked.
I set a pace that gives her everything. She responds to it openly, her hips moving to meet me, her nails dragging first against the stone at her back and then finding my shoulder instead.
The sounds she makes are quiet and continuous and completely involuntary.
The tether is fully open, her pleasure feeding back through it and compounding with mine.
What I feel and what she feels becomes something I stop tracking.
I feel the moment she stops holding anything back.
Her grip on my shoulder tightens until it would matter to something made of softer material than I am.
Her head drops forward against my neck, and she clenches down on me with her face pressed into my skin.
I hold her through all of it, both arms locked around her, her sounds muffled against my throat.
I follow her with my face buried in her hair, her name the only thing in my throat. We go still after, stay exactly as we are, buried against each other.
The wind comes in steadily off the water.
Her breathing slows by degrees, each exhale longer than the last, her palms warm and flat against my chest. I keep both arms around her.
The tether settles into something so quiet it is almost indistinguishable from silence, carrying only the steady warmth of her and the fact that she is here and unafraid.
Both of those things belong to me as I belong to them.
“I’m staying,” she says eventually. “I mean permanently. I’m not leaving Gullhaven.”
“I thought you might,” I tell her.
“You could have said something.”
“You needed to say it yourself.”
She considers that, then settles back against me.
Below, the celebration is still running full and loud, the fiddles going, the voices carrying up the cliff face.
I look out at the dark water and feel none of the dissonance that used to live in the space between this world and the one I woke from.
There is only this harbor, and the town below it, and the woman drowsing against my chest.
I redress her carefully as she is barely half-awake. I carry her back down the cliff path and through the square with her half-asleep against my shoulder, her dark curls loose, one hand curled in the collar of my coat. Brinna spots us from the inn steps and smiles smugly.
The lanterns burn warm and gold across the harbor. Gullhaven is loud and alive around us.
I walk through the middle of it without breaking stride. For the first time since I came back into the world, I do not walk toward or away from anything.
I am already where I intend to remain.