Chapter 33 #2
A shadow falls across my face. Releasing the water’s magic, I crouch deeper in the water, hands crossed over my chest. Then I whip around to face the bank.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Chyr has his back turned. “Lorcan was worried you’ve been gone a long time.” His voice sounds thick and hoarse.
A boot scuffs against stone, and I can’t tell exactly where. Shadow’s ear flicks, then settles. Chyr’s breath roughens. Mine does, too.
I want to test what I feel about him, examine my conflicting emotions the way I studied the warmth and the chill of the water.
“I was thinking,” I say. “I’ll come back inside.”
“No need, but I’ll sit just around the corner to be sure you’re safe.”
I picture Chyr as the young man left alone to face his father’s betrayal, people whispering, judging him, his own uncle trapping him with rings of oaths. No one to comfort him.
“Do you want to come in?” I ask.
His shoulders go still, as if he’s stopped breathing. “After you’re done?”
“No. Now.”
“Nothing has changed, Flora. You must know how I feel, but I’ve betrayed you.”
“I hate the others.”
“Exactly what every man wants to hear. Anyway, they’ll know—”
“They’ll survive.”
He turns slowly. “Is this fear or anger? Or punishment?”
“It’s desire. My body is the only thing I control. The only thing that’s mine to give away, share, or keep to myself. What we do now has nothing to do with tomorrow. Nothing except this moment.”
I lie back and let the water float my legs out from underneath me, baring my breasts and stomach to the sun.
Closing my eyes, I listen to the water ebb and flow, trying not to wonder what Chyr is doing, what he will choose.
Then I feel the water eddying around him as he lowers himself into the pool and walks towards me.
He stops before our bodies touch. I arch my back, my hair streaming behind me as I lift myself back onto my feet.
His breath catches, and I soak in the sight of him: the broad planes of his chest, the width of his shoulders, the need in his eyes. The scar of his healing wound has faded even more. Less of it is violently red. My fingers ache to trace it, to make sure the healing is real.
I want to touch every inch of him with my lips, my tongue, my fingers, until I’ve committed all of him to memory. Until I’ve made him feel as wanted and beautiful as he made me feel before who we’re being forced to become got in our way.
His fingers tremble as the back of his hand brushes my cheek. “Do you have any idea how magnificent you are?” he whispers.
“I’d rather be fierce,” I whisper.
“You could never be anything less.”
“Tell me what you want, Chyr. Can we steal half an hour for ourselves and pretend that we have choices?”
“I’d give anything to pretend our circumstances are different.
You know about my oaths and the reasons I couldn’t tell you who I was.
But the truest reason I didn’t tell you is this: when I was dying, I couldn’t bear the thought of you looking at me with hatred or disgust. I believed those moments with you would be all I would ever have.
My last chance to have someone see me for myself.
And I needed your kindness, your warmth.
If I was going to die, I wanted that to carry with me, because I didn’t even know how much I’d missed having that in my life until you offered it to me.
You filled an emptiness in me. Gave me a gift I’d been searching for all along without knowing what to call it.
Something that wasn’t for Tirnaeve or my uncle or the Riders but only for myself. ”
It’s the admission of a child who grew up lonely in a cold, cruel home.
My heart breaks for him all over again, and I rise on my toes and tangle my hands in his hair, pulling his face down so I can kiss him, claim him.
Not as a consort or a king but for him. For the child he was and the man he made himself.
For the way he’s fighting—because I believe, I have to believe, he is.
I kiss Chyr with every bit of the hunger I am feeling, and he drinks it in like I’m offering him water after days of thirst. His hands slide down my back, over the curves of my bottom, across my thighs.
He lifts me until I wrap my legs around his waist, low enough to feel the hard length of him where I’m most sensitive to pressure.
He walks towards the rock at the edge of the pool, then sets me on my feet and bends me backwards until my spine lies against the sun-warmed stone.
Pushing my legs apart, he steps between them.
The contrast—silky water and skin against hard rock and muscle, fire and heat against the cold—brings my every nerve to life.
A shudder runs through me. I trail the edge of a nail down the hollow of Chyr’s throat, down the carved muscles of his chest, around one flat nipple, then the other. He trembles again, his pupils dark in eyes that burn with fire.
His next kiss is a question. He tastes of temptation and sin. My tongue answers him, sliding over his. I nip his lip, and he smiles.
“Fight or share?” he asks. “What can I give you?”
“A fight I can win,” I breathe.
“Then pay attention, Fierceness. Eyes on me.”
He catches both my wrists in one hand and stretches my arms above my head. The position lifts my breasts, forces me to trust, to surrender. Rock grates my knuckles; the sting turns bright. I lift to meet it.
His tongue traces my jaw, then slides down my throat, lower, lower.
The movement is slow. He pauses, his gaze searing into mine. “More?”
I moan, because words won’t come.
His hand slides down, palm splayed over my ribs, my stomach. Lower. His calluses are rough, like the rock behind me. The sun is warm on my face, and the water is cool and yielding.
“Good?” he asks, his thumb circling. “Too much?”
That hand and the things he’s doing with it. The way his fingers curve inside me, the way his thumb moves.
“Good,” I whisper. “So good.”
My hips buck towards him. My breath shortens. I twist my wrists—not to escape, but to reach him, to take his head between my hands, to lift higher or pull him where I need him most.
But he doesn’t set me free.
“You’re still in control,” he says. “Tell me to stop. Tell me to be gentle. Tell me what you want. Anything.”
I shake my head. I don’t want gentle.
What do I want? I want to rewrite history, that’s what I need. What we all need.
Chyr sheathes himself inside me, pushes in slow enough to make me feel the stretch, fast enough to steal my breath, shaking me to my core.
He isn’t sweet or tender, not like the last time.
His magic isn’t warm; it’s fire followed by a breath of cold, a hundred points of pressure pulsing and driving and pounding while his tongue glides between my breasts and down to trace the outline of his fingers across my stomach.
The magic is wild, and his tongue is maddeningly thorough until it’s almost too much to bear.
The pressure builds.
Chyr moves faster, harder, his gaze locked on mine.
I shatter, pleasure rushing through me in wave after wave. It’s too much, and I try to retreat. He holds me like he’ll never let go. And I tip over the edge again—climbing, falling, floating.
I feel Chyr’s heat, his weight. The stone is rough against my back, the wind cooling the sweat and water along my skin, the sun reaching down in fingers as thin and sharp as needles to ignite fire somewhere deep inside me.
I lose myself in all of it, allow myself to drift until I’m not sure where I stop and the earth and sky begin.
Chyr thrusts harder, and I climb one peak after another. Then he spills himself into me, and I plummet off the edge of the world, determined to change the very shape of it. To reforge it into something new.
The water hushes to a silver whisper, and sweetness rises from the yellow furze and damp wool drying on the bank. In the distance, smoke is rising.
Whatever the rules of the Compact were more than 1,600 years ago when it was written, they seem less clear than what I’ve always believed.
I refuse to accept there’s no solution. Surely the gods wouldn’t be so cruel?
Why would the Cailleach mark a Maiden after 400 years and give me no chance to help my people or myself?
Somehow, I will find a way to bend the rules into a shape that gives us justice.
The thought that doing so might require me to choose one of the other Riders is one I firmly push aside. After Chyr, how could I bear it?