14. The Last Honest Night
THE LAST HONEST NIGHT
Seraphine
Maerath came for me at the second hour past midnight and didn’t trouble to dress it up as anything other than what it was.
“The east tower has a guest chamber I keep for convalescents of rank,” she said.
“It’s aired, it’s warm, and the man on the stair owes me his daughter’s life and will see nothing all night.
He’s there already.” Forty years of healer’s authority and not a flicker of apology in her face.
“You have until the bells. I won’t be asked and I won’t answer.
And before you recite the Vow at me, Emissary—I have watched a long row of Untouched do everything the Vow asked and leave this place correct and alone and hollowed to the bone, and I have decided I’ll not watch one more go without a single honest night to her name. Go.”
It was not a cell and it was not furtive, and I understood the choosing of it as a kindness.
Maerath hadn’t given us a corner to be ashamed in.
She’d given us a proper room—a deep hearth banked high and throwing gold across the stone, a wide bed dressed in dark furs, long enough and broad enough that even he would not have to fold himself onto it, the shutters drawn against the Vardh cold and one lamp turned low beside the bed.
A room with dignity in it. Whatever we did here, she had decided, we would not do it as though it were a squalid thing.
He was on his feet when the door closed behind me, and the room I’d thought generous shrank to the size of him.
He stood a clear head and shoulders and more above me—seven feet of him, and the horns above that—his back to the fire, the light running red-gold along shoulders broad as a doorway and catching in the dark sweep of the horns, and the wide bed looked suddenly modest against the sheer fact of him.
I had stood at his side in council rooms for six weeks and let myself forget, daily and on purpose, exactly how much of the world he displaced.
With the door shut and the lamp low and no role left to hold up between us, I couldn’t forget it at all.
I had to tip my head back to find his eyes.
The want I’d filed away so neatly every one of those weeks came up at once and took the breath out of me.
He didn’t move toward me. He never moved first; he’d taught me that across thirty-eight nights at a door—that the crossing would always be mine to make or not make, that whatever I chose he would stand and let me choose it.
He stood now in the firelight with his hands open at his sides and the whole of what he felt bare on his face, and he let me decide whether to cross the room.
I crossed the room.
I set my palms flat to his chest—and reaching up, I came only to the base of his throat, my hands small and pale against the dark furnace breadth of him.
The heat came through like standing too near a forge.
The low sound gathered under his breastbone, that half-growl that lived below speech, and I pressed into it—into the heat and the mass and the held-back enormity of him—and felt every careful inch of my composure begin, quietly, to give along its seams.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. The words rough, his voice gone to gravel, his hands lifting to hover at my shoulders without daring to land.
“I’ve spent fifteen years doing what I should.” I closed my hands in the loose dark cloth of his shirt. “I came here to do one thing I shouldn’t. Stop hovering and put your hands on me.”
He did, and even the landing of his palms undid something I’d thought was safely locked.
One of his hands could very nearly span me from hip to lowest rib; both of them at the curve of my waist made me feel, for the first time in my composed and careful life, genuinely small—and not afraid of it, which was the part that frightened me.
He held me the way he held everything he was afraid of crushing, all that strength leashed down to the touch a careful man gives a thing that breaks.
I had watched him hold a blade and a grievance and his own face with that same iron restraint for six weeks.
Feeling the whole of it turned on the small of my back was another matter entirely.
It made me want to be the one who broke the leash.
I reached up and he bent to meet me, and the kiss was slow and grave, the kiss of a man giving me every chance to think better of it.
I didn’t want to think. I had thought my whole life.
I caught the edge of his lip in my teeth, deliberate, and the growl came up properly this time and the restraint gave a fraction—and I went after that fraction the way a diplomat goes after the single seam in an impossible position.
And then, even then, even with the heat of him climbing through me, I caught my own hand doing what it always did.
Two fingers had gone to the inside of my wrist where it lay against his chest. Reading my pulse.
Taking the measure of my own body, gathering the data, governing the state—the reflex of a girl taught that the first duty of an Untouched is to know precisely what is happening inside her at every moment, and to rule it.
He went still. He’d felt the small movement, and he drew back just far enough to look down at my fingers pressed to my own pulse between us, and I watched him understand it whole, the way he understood everything about me he’d had thirty-eight silent nights to learn.
He took my hand off my wrist and folded it inside his own, where it vanished completely, and held it against his chest where his heart was going hard.
“Not here,” he said. Quiet. Not a command; he never commanded me.
“Whatever room you’re in, you run it. I’ve watched you.
You walk in and you read it and you carry the whole of it in your two hands and you never once set it down.
” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “Set it down. There’s no room here.
There’s no one to be the Emissary for. It’s only me, and I already know what’s underneath. ”
All my life, I have been a woman with an answer ready.
I had none for that. What I had instead was the sudden unbearable understanding that he was right—that I had walked into even this, the one night I’d stolen for myself, already running it, already standing one careful degree outside my own body taking notes.
And I was so tired. Fifteen years tired.
And he was looking at me as though the single thing he wanted in the world was for me to put the exhausting weight of it down and let him carry some of it a while.
So I stopped governing it. I let the careful thing go—not by degrees, the way I did everything, but all at once, the way you finally let go of a rope when your hands have been bleeding on it for hours—and what rose to take its place had no protocol attached and no moon behind it and nothing of the Ardenna anywhere in it.
Only want. Only mine. The first thing in fifteen years I’d reached for purely because I wanted it.
His mouth was at my throat and his hands had found the lacing of my gown, working it loose with a patience that was its own torment, baring my shoulder, the line of my collarbone—he bit gently at my fevered skin, his tongue tracing down to the curve of my breast until I was shaking against his mouth.
The fire pressed heat to one side of me and the heat of him to the other.
When the gown gave and slid he drew back to look, and the look on his face—I had been looked at a great many ways in my life, weighed and assessed and negotiated with, and never once like that, as though the sight of me had stopped his heart and he hadn’t the smallest wish to have it started again.
He lifted me—one arm slid low at my back, and there was no more effort in it than there’d have been in lifting a folded cloak—and laid me into the furs, which were deep and absurdly soft.
The ease of it, of being moved like that by a thing that could as readily have snapped me, went through me as its own dark heat.
He pulled his shirt over his head, and I got my hands at last on the whole bare dark span of him—the breadth of his chest, the heat rolling off him in waves, the heavy slabs of muscle shifting under skin that ran hot as banked coals, twenty years of discipline in the frame and the want fraying clean through it.
He braced himself over me on forearms thicker than my thighs, and the size of him blotted the firelight clean out, the whole vast dark shape of him closing off the room until there was nothing left in the world but the heat and the mass of him above me.
Some low animal part of me I’d never once been introduced to understood exactly how easily that weight could have pinned me to the furs and held me there—and understood, in the same breath, that he never would, that every ounce of it was being measured out and given by the careful fraction.
I drew my nails slowly down the centre of him and felt the shudder move through that enormous frame, and the growl it tore loose, and learned, with something fierce and brand-new in me, how badly I wanted to be the cause of that sound again.
“You have no idea,” he said against my skin, ragged, “what you do to me.”
“Then stop holding back,” I said, “and let me find out.”