Chapter 6 Kintsugi #2
Mordaunt’s lips crept past her inner wrist. His eyes traced a trajectory upwards, to her shoulder, her neck, her mouth. As though every bit of her was a line towards this final goal. As though veneration and want were the same thing.
Aurienne felt the return of her blush. She regretted her bravado. She had imperilled her own peace.
She withdrew her hand. Mordaunt released her gradually; their fingers parted in a long caress.
“You mustn’t grant such permissions lightly.” Mordaunt stared in the direction of Aurienne’s neck. “It gives me hopes of a different kind.”
“That was quite a kiss,” said Aurienne.
“Your hands are healing me. I will kiss them as much as I’m permitted.” Mordaunt slid out of his reverie. His eyes hardened into the usual look, bright and mocking. “Another crime of passion. But I know you’ll forgive me.”
“Oh?”
“You’re a safe flirt.”
“Am I?”
“Foolproof.”
Aurienne withheld a rueful laugh. “You’ve no idea how foolproof.”
“Tell me the tale,” said Mordaunt.
“No. The telling must involve wine and tears, and I don’t wish to cry.”
“Very well,” said Mordaunt. “We should sleep—if you can manage to sleep next to me.”
“There probably aren’t many safer places for me to be,” said Aurienne.
Mordaunt looked a combination of confused and pleased. She gave him a quick smile.
He blinked at her and said, “Did you know that you’ve got a dimple?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
“And?”
“It’s…” Mordaunt looked as though a dozen words passed over his tongue. He settled on “pleasing.”
“Is it enough to make you admit I’m prettier than you?” asked Aurienne.
There was a swift, gorgeous laugh. Mordaunt pushed a hand into his hair. “Fairhrim. You’re asking me to set aside my ego.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Aurienne. “Thank you for finally admitting it.”
“It took me too long to see the truth.” Mordaunt’s mouth laughed still, but there was something serious in his eyes, something almost sad.
“You mustn’t be sad,” said Aurienne. “You can still be pretty, just not prettiest.”
“You’re better than me in every way that matters.”
“You’ve got an unknown psychotropic drug in your system.”
“I’ll happily blame it for any stupid things I say or do.”
Aurienne wanted to say Likewise, but was overpowered by a wide, irresistible yawn.
She and Mordaunt pushed their straw-filled pillows into some semblance of a shape. They settled upon their respective sides of the bed and faced away from each other.
Sleep was tinged by mournful dreams of the oak and the Druids.
Aurienne awoke in the night to a low fire in the hearth and a heavy arm across her hips.
She and Mordaunt had slid into each other as they slept.
Her back was against his chest; her head rested on his arm.
She wished to pin responsibility on him for this state of affairs, but having cracked open an eye, she found that she was in the middle of the bed as much as he was, and therefore equally to blame.
Was he awake or asleep? His breathing came calm and regular against her neck. Aurienne sought her panic, her revulsion. A Fyren was holding her.
The feelings did not come. She was comfortable. She was safe.
A hundred years hence, none of this will matter.
She did not move away from him. It might have been the lingering effect of the drug, but for once in her life, Aurienne neither questioned nor analysed. Held in Mordaunt’s arms, she simply existed.
Firelight gleamed upon the walls and caught at the hairs on Mordaunt’s forearm.
Sun-dried grass scented the air. The moment was a breather, an interval without demand or obligation, hidden away, protected.
It was the freedom of seclusion, of all anxieties and duties set aside to be dealt with another time. It was a new sort of being together.
Aurienne felt herself on the verge of some wild, uncompassed course. Felt that swell of exhilaration that comes with going beyond where one is meant to be.
She and Mordaunt had been drawn to each other in sleep—by the oddness of the unconscious, by the strange logic of souls.
The healer in the arms of a killer, the sinner entangled with the saint.
They lay as two halves of a whole, fragments held together in a new form, and it was wrong yet right, and so it was ugly-beautiful.
A Haelan and a Fyren lying together. Proof indisputable that magic existed.
She found, in his arms, the strangeness of belonging.
Mordaunt shifted. His tācn was briefly visible. The hellhound was a perfect symmetry of eye socket and curved horn and bone.
Firelight could make the foulest things beautiful.
Mordaunt’s hand closed. Now he lay beside her as a man and nothing more.
A log in the hearth fell. Mordaunt stirred.
He had been asleep, then. Aurienne heard a soft inhale; the breathing against her neck stopped.
She shifted onto her back. He looked at her with an eye of grey and an eye of white and a face seamed with the scars of past suffering. He didn’t lift his arm off her.
They did not move, but their shadows quivered against the rough walls, stretched and gleamed, splintered and came together amid salvos of firelight.
Minutes passed like hours in this place of altered time.
Aurienne enjoyed the details. The slow way Mordaunt ran his eyes over her face, as though he, too, savoured, and drank her in.
Her wrist against his forearm and the poetry of skin against skin.
The way the fire cast its warmth across them in fractured gold, in broken lines of light.
The fire signified. It Meant. As did the shadows of the birds on the moor, as did the rain’s calligraphies.
If she looked a little away, a little beyond, with eyes unfocused, the meanings were there, uncertain, darting, erasing and rewriting themselves.
Every flicker on Mordaunt’s face and upon Aurienne’s skin unveiled a bit of their story: hate and tenderness, romance and folly, push and pull, something ancient and yet fire-new.
Was it telling or foretelling?
The world grew billowy and vague. Aurienne watched the fire cast its restless dreams upon the ceiling. The advance, the retreat, the shadow, and the light.