18. The Last Night
THE LAST NIGHT
Seraphine
They took the Seal from me an hour before sunset, and by the time the light went gold across the Vardh I was a woman without a name for what she was.
I had been the Emissary for fifteen years.
Before that a student, and before that a clever, frightened girl, and at every stage there had been a word for me, a place I fit, a role with edges I could feel in the dark.
They took the last of those words in the chapter-house, and I walked out into the cold corridor as nothing the Order had a name for—not Untouched, not Emissary, not Seraphine of the Third Seal.
Just Seraphine. Only that. A woman of an old line, unmade, with a homecoming in her blood the Order had broken her for and would never let her speak of.
I should have felt the loss of it more than I did.
I had braced for grief, and the grief was there, real, enormous, waiting for me somewhere I’d get to later.
But walking out of that room with nothing left to be, what I felt first, before the grief could reach me, was the strangest thing—lightness.
There was no wall to hold, because there was no longer anything behind it that needed defending.
There was no role to perform, because there was no one left for me to be.
They had taken everything the Order gave me, and discovered, too late for either of us, that everything the Order gave me had also been everything the Order used to hold me—and that a woman with nothing left to lose is the one creature their whole careful structure has no instrument for.
I was to leave at first light. That was the shape of mercy the Order extended a disgraced ex-Emissary—not a cell, not a public shaming, only a quiet escort at dawn to carry me back down the mountain and out of Vordaan and into whatever a woman becomes when she is no longer the thing she spent her life being.
They did not tell me where. I don’t think they knew.
I don’t think there is a place in their keeping for what I am now.
I think they meant to set me down somewhere quiet and let the problem of me solve itself.
One night. I had one night left in Vordaan, and there was no longer a single rule anywhere in two peoples that could keep me from spending it where I wanted to spend it.
? ? ?
He came to me at the second hour past dark.
There was no Maerath this time, no borrowed tower, no man on the stair sworn to see nothing.
There didn’t need to be. The Vow that had forbidden us was a thing I no longer fell under; they had stripped me of the oath when they stripped me of the Seal—and the bitter joke of it, the one I could almost have laughed at, was that the Order had spent fifteen years and the whole of my life keeping me Untouched, and had, in the unmaking of me, finally set me free to be otherwise.
So when the knock came at my own door, in my own emptied chambers, with my life packed into two cases against the wall, I crossed the room and opened it myself, and there was no part of me anywhere reading my own pulse.
He filled the doorway. He always filled the doorway—seven feet of him and the horns above that, having to stoop to come through, the dark of him and the heat of him and the careful, held enormity of him that I had spent a month starving for.
He stood there a moment, looking down at me with everything he felt bare on his face, because there was no longer any reason for either of us to hide a single thing.
We knew, each of us, what the other had done.
He had stood in his hall and sworn I’d never loved him, to free me.
I had stood in mine and refused it, to keep faith with him.
We had each spent everything we had trying to save the other, and we had both, magnificently, uselessly, failed—and we stood in the doorway of my emptied rooms with the wreck of both our lives around us, and the failure was the most honest thing that had ever been between us, and I reached up and took a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and he came.
The first time I went to him, in Maerath’s borrowed tower, I had set my control down like a woman finally laying aside a weight she’d carried too long.
This was not that. This time there was no control left to set down—they’d taken it with the Seal—and what was underneath it, what had been underneath it all along, came up with nothing in front of it at all.
I had spent one stolen night being brave.
Tonight I was neither. Tonight I was only his, and grieving, and free, and starving, and I let him see the whole of it.
He kissed me like a man learning by heart a thing he was about to lose, slow and deep and unhurried even now, even with the dawn coming for us—and I pulled him into the room and kicked the door shut and got my hands under his shirt to the furnace heat of him, and the low sound came up out of his chest, and I chased it.
There was no patience left in me to match his.
I’d had a month of patience and a lifetime of it before that, and I was done.
I got the shirt off him and put my mouth to the dark heat of his chest, to the heavy muscle that moved under skin that ran hot as banked coals, and felt the shudder go through all that enormous frame, and wanted, with a fierceness that would once have frightened me, to be the undoing of him the way he was about to be the undoing of me.
He let me. That was the thing that turned my knees—all that size, all that strength, seven feet of horned warrior who could have moved me anywhere he wished with one hand, and he let me set the pace.
Let me push him down onto the narrow chaste bed that had been the Emissary’s and was about to be nothing of the kind.
Let me climb over him and take his face in my hands and kiss him until we were both past breathing.
And then he stopped letting me, and the leash I’d felt him hold for a month slipped, and he rolled me under him in one motion that drove the air out of me and reminded my whole body, all at once, of the sheer scale of what I’d taken into my bed.
His mouth went everywhere. He undressed me slowly even now, even desperate, baring me by degrees and setting his mouth to each new place as he went—the turn of my shoulder, the line of my collarbone, lower, his teeth grazing the soft skin of my breast and his tongue easing the sting until I arched up off the bed with a sound I didn’t recognise as mine.
His hand covered my other breast entirely—hot, huge, unhurried—and I pressed up into his palm and heard myself ask, plainly, shamelessly, for exactly what I wanted, in words the chapter-house would have stripped me twice over for.
The fire threw his shadow huge across the ceiling, the horns, the breadth of him, and I lay under all of it and felt small and unafraid and wholly wanted.
He learned me the way he learned everything, completely, his enormous careful hands mapping every place that made me shake, until I was past words, past pride, saying things in a voice stripped raw of training, the voice the Order had spent fifteen years schooling out of me and would never have the chance to school out of me again.
When he settled lower and put his mouth to the heat of me I came apart almost at once—a month of starving, a day of grief, the whole of it breaking over me—and he held me through it with his huge hands spanning my hips, gentling me down and then, without mercy, beginning again—slower, deeper, deliberate—until I’d come apart a second time, sobbing his name into the dark, and was shaking and reaching for him, needing the rest of him, needing the weight and the fullness and the whole leashed enormity of him over me and in me before the dawn could take it away for good.
He came up over me and I felt him against me, thick and heavy, and this time there was no doubt in me at all, only want so total it had burned the fear clean off.
He braced above me and the whole dark mountain of him closed out the firelight, and I pulled him down, and he came into me slow—even now, even desperate, that same terrible care—easing into me by degrees, giving me the stretch and the fullness an inch at a time until I’d taken the whole of him and lay stunned around the size of him, full past anything I had words for, both arms locked around the vast dark span of his shoulders.
“I know,” he said against my throat, wrecked, because I must have made some sound.
“I know. Slowly.” And he moved, deep and slow and devastating, the size of him making itself felt in every stroke—and this time it was I who broke the pace, hands fisted in his mane, asking for more, closer, harder, all the words I had never in my life let out of my mouth.
And for the first time, at the end of everything, he gave it to me—the leash slipped by his own choice, the careful fraction finally spent whole—and the held power of him came down into rhythm after rhythm that shook the narrow bed and shook me and would have frightened the woman I’d been a season ago, and set the woman I was now alight.
Even then he was careful. Even unleashed, some deepest part of him stood guard over me, and I felt both at once—the storm, and the hand on the storm—and I held on to the one creature in two worlds I had given everything to keep and could not keep, and let it be true, all of it, with nothing held anywhere back.