Chapter 5
Reilly
Gareth’s letter had a wax seal that cost more than our last sack of sugar.
Idony set it on the council table like it might bite. Marshall stood behind his chair instead of sitting. Edward took the back wall, arms folded, trying to look like he wasn’t counting every word. I sat because a Luna who stands through Hillsford paper looks like she is already in a fight.
I broke the seal.
The handwriting was clean. Gareth wrote like a man who had never had to reuse a page.
He sent his father’s regards. He noted the late levy with concern, not accusation.
He said Hillsford was prepared to be generous.
He used protection four times. He used wedding once, near the end, as if it were a date we had already agreed on and only needed to ink.
Before the next moon, he wrote. My father believes a date will settle the western cut and spare Landers Ridge any further confusion about where its friends stand. I look forward to sharing a hall with you, Reilly. You have carried yours alone long enough.
I read that last line twice. The heat in my belly, which had been a low grind since I left the horse, rolled up hard enough that I had to put the paper down or crease it.
“Well,” Idony said.
“He wants a date,” I said.
“He wants the hall,” Marshall said. “The date is how he walks in without raising a banner.”
Edward’s voice came from the wall. “If you say no, what do they do.”
“Raise the levy,” Idony said. “Slow the grain. Put more men on the cut and call it friendship. If you say no twice, they stop calling it friendship.”
I reached for the water and drank. It sat in my mouth.
Under the table I was already wet. Not a little.
The kind that had gone through underwear and was going to show if I sat here long enough.
Owen was closer than he had been at dawn.
I could feel him east-of-west, fixed, waiting.
The bond did not give me a picture. It gave me heat and the press of a body that was not in the room.
My clit throbbed against the seam of my pants in a slow, stupid beat.
I crossed my legs. The pressure made my breath catch.
Marshall glanced at me and then at the letter, which was decent of him.
“The next moon is fourteen days,” Idony said. “If we send nothing, he will take silence as stalling. If we send a date, we start moving furniture for a man who already talks like he lives here.”
“I’m not marrying Gareth Hills in fourteen days.”
“I didn’t say you should.” Idony tapped the page. “I said he wrote fourteen days. What do you want me to write back.”
I wanted her to write that Gareth could put his date in his mouth and choke on it.
I wanted to get under this table and put my hand in my pants and finish the thing that had been sitting in me since the dream.
I wanted Owen Tillson out of the trees I could feel him in so I could stop smelling a man who was not here.
“Write that the date is not set,” I said. “Write that the levy will be short this cycle because the south pasture is down and we are not going to starve our own to make Hillsford’s books look clean. Write it polite.”
“Polite will buy you a week,” Marshall said. “Maybe two.”
“Then buy it.”
Silence. The hall stove ticked. Someone in the kitchen dropped a lid and cursed.
My left nipple scraped the binding when I breathed in and I had to look at the letter again to keep my face still.
I could remember Gareth’s mouth from the last time he had come in person, two winters ago, smiling at my throat like he could already smell a claim.
He had not touched me. He had not needed to. He had looked at me like a hall.
He would smell Owen on me now. Even after three years. The bond had that kind of stink if you knew what to look for. Gareth knew.
“There’s the other paper,” Marshall said.
He didn’t pick it up. He didn’t need to. The contract copy was still on the side table where I had left it. Owen Tillson. Western range. Free company. I felt my cunt clench around nothing when Marshall said other paper, which was so raw I almost laughed.
Idony did not look at the contract. She looked at me. “If you postpone Gareth and host a Tillson problem on the same week, Alexander will call it an insult.”
“I’m not hosting anyone.”
“His prints are at the marker,” Marshall said. “Scouts came back while you were on the horse. Eight, maybe nine. Held the trees. Didn’t cross. One of them is him. They didn’t have to get close enough to see his face. They could smell the bond from the turn.”
Edward pushed off the wall. “He’s here.”
“He’s at the river,” I said. “That’s not the same as here.”
It was close enough that my body had stopped caring about the difference. The heat rolled again, thicker. I felt myself drip. I had to shift on the chair and the wet sound was small and I still heard it. If Idony heard it she had the manners of forty years on a council and did not show it.
“How long,” Marshall said.
I looked at him.
He didn’t flinch. “How long are you going to keep postponing Hillsford and pretending the west cut isn’t sitting on a man you rejected. I’m not asking as your friend. I’m asking as the person who has to stand in the yard if Gareth brings too many wolves and Tillson decides the marker is a door.”
“As long as it keeps this pack eating.”
“That’s not a number.”
“I don’t have a number.”
Edward said, quiet, “Does he want in.”
“He wanted in three years ago,” Idony said. “She said the rite. The question is what he wants now, with a company at his back and Hillsford on the ledger.”
I knew what his body wanted. I had known it on the cabin floor and I knew it now, with the bond pulled tight as a belt. He was hard. I could feel that, which was obscene in a room with my brother in it. I kept my eyes on the letter and my hands on the table edge.
“I’ll go to the marker,” I said.
Marshall’s mouth went flat. “Not alone.”
“You and two rifles. He doesn’t come up the hill. We talk contract if there’s a contract. We talk the cut if that’s all it is. Then he leaves.”
“And if it isn’t all it is,” Idony said.
Then I was going to stand three feet from Owen Tillson with wet underwear and a Hillsford wedding date in my pocket and try to remember the words I had said in the yard.
“Then I say no again,” I said.
No one liked that. No one argued it to my face. Edward looked like he wanted to and then looked at my wrapped wrist and shut his mouth. He had heard me in the night. He knew whose name came out of me when I was not in this chair.
Idony drew the reply paper toward her. “I’ll write Gareth. You should read it before it goes.”
“I trust you to be polite.”
“I didn’t ask if you trusted me. I asked you to read it. If this goes bad I want your eyes on the sentence they hang us with.”
Fair. I nodded. She started writing. The scratch of the pen was loud. Marshall asked Edward to go see that the scouts ate. Edward didn’t want to leave. I tipped my head at the door and he went, jaw tight.
When it was the three of us, Marshall said, “You’re in heat.”
Not a question.
“It’s not a season,” I said. “It’s the bond.”
“I don’t care what you call it. You can’t sit a council like this if Gareth walks in. He will smell it. He will smell who.”
“He’s not walking in today.”
“He’s fourteen days from trying.”
I stood up. That was a mistake. The wet had gone through. I felt it on my inner thighs when I moved. I pulled my shirt down like that would do anything. “Write the letter. I’ll read it in an hour. I need a minute.”
Marshall looked at the door to my rooms, then at me. “Take more than a minute. And don’t go to the marker like this. If you get on a horse right now you’re going to do something in the trees you can’t put in a report.”
“I asked for an hour. Not advice about trees.”
He shut up. Idony did not look up from the page. I walked out of the hall with my spine straight and my pants stuck to me and the bond pointing at the river like a dare.
I locked my door.
I didn’t make it to the bath.
I put my back on the wood and opened my belt and shoved my hand down, under the waistband, under the wet cloth, two fingers straight onto my clit.
I jerked at the contact. I was swollen. Slippery.
I rubbed hard circles and clapped my other hand over my mouth and thought of Gareth’s letter and then thought of Owen waiting in the trees with that letter still on my table, which was worse, which was what I needed.
I pushed two fingers inside myself and the heel of my hand stayed on my clit and I fucked my hand standing up, knees bent, boots still on.
I would have to look at him in an hour. Or two.
Or tonight. I would have to say contract and cut and no.
I put a third finger in and stretched and it still wasn’t him.
I pinched my clit between two fingers and pulled just enough to sting and my hips kicked the door.
Someone walked past in the corridor. I held still, fingers buried, dripping onto my hand, and did not breathe until the steps were gone.
I went to the bed because my legs were going.
Pants down to mid-thigh. Binding yanked under my tits so I could get at them.
I twisted one nipple and then the other and worked my clit with two wet fingers and chased the thin, mean finish I had gotten that morning.
I thought about him in the pines. I thought about him handling himself on watch because the bond ran both ways and I had felt that too, at dawn, the shape of him coming into his own fist. I thought about walking to the marker and getting on my knees in front of his company and taking his cock out and sucking it until he knotted my mouth, which I could not do, which I thought about anyway, the stretch of my lips, the taste of him, the way he had spilled on my tongue on the cabin floor.
“Owen.”
Quiet. Ugly. I said it into the mattress and rubbed faster.
My wrist hurt under the cloth. I didn’t stop.
I came with my face in the blanket and my fingers cramping, a short hard clench that squeezed my own hand and leaked down my knuckles onto the bed.
Better than morning. Not enough. My cunt kept pulsing after, looking for a knot that was two miles away in the trees.
I lay there with my pants halfway down and Gareth’s sentence in my head. You have carried yours alone long enough. He had no idea what I was carrying. He would use it if he did.
I cleaned up. I changed underwear. I washed my hands twice. I retied the binding and put on a clean pair of pants and the heat was still there, lower now, not gone. I read Idony’s reply standing at the desk so I would not lie down again.
It was polite. It was late on the levy without using the word poor.
It did not set a date. It thanked Alexander for his concern.
It said Landers Ridge valued the alliance and needed time to set its house in order after the south pasture.
It said nothing about a free company at the marker and nothing about a rejected mate and nothing about me coming on my own fingers with his son’s letter still on the table.
I initialed the bottom.
I took it back to the hall. Idony sealed it. Marshall had his coat on.
“Marker,” he said.
“Now.”
“You’re cleaner. You’re not clean.” He said it without heat. “Two rifles. I talk if you can’t. If he offers a contract, we bring it here before you sign anything in the dirt with him looking at you.”
“I can talk.”
“I know you can talk. I know you can also do what you did in that cabin and I am not burying this pack because your bond doesn’t respect a rite.”
Edward was in the yard when we came out. He had his own coat on. “I’m coming.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“He’s the reason you don’t sleep. I’m not sitting in the kitchen.”
“You’re sitting in the kitchen because if Hillsford is watching the cut I will not give them my brother and me on the same stretch of river as Owen Tillson.” I put my hand on his shoulder. He let me. “If this goes ugly I need you in the hall, not in the trees.”
He hated it. He stayed.
We took the path down. Two wolves with rifles behind Marshall.
The afternoon was cold and clear. Every step toward the marker made the bond louder.
My nipples went tight again. The clean underwear was already not clean.
I kept my hands off myself and my mouth shut and I thought about grain and levies and the sentence I had initialed.
At the last bend I smelled him.
Not a memory. Him. Cold air, horse, pine, and the sour-sweet of the same broken bond I had been wearing for three years. Under it, arousal, blunt and obvious. He was hard in the trees. He had been hard when I was on the bed. The bond lined those facts up with no shame.
Marshall said, low, “Reilly.”
“I know.”
“Rifles stay back. You and I go to the stone. He stays on his side.”
I nodded.
I walked to the marker with my belt fastened and my pulse between my legs and Gareth Hills’ wedding date sitting in my hall like a loaded gun.
Owen did not step out of the trees at first. He didn’t have to. I knew exactly where he was. I stopped at the stone and put my hands where everyone could see them and waited for the man I had rejected to come into the open and talk to me like we had ever only been a contract.