Chapter 9
Reilly
I sold it as arithmetic and my body called me a liar before the second sentence was out.
The council met in the hall at first light because Idony refused to let a quartering line sit on a page overnight without witnesses. Marshall had copies. Edward took the wall. Two other elders sat where they always sat and tried not to look like they could smell the cabin on me from the door.
I had washed. I had changed. It did not matter.
The bond had spent the night running a wire from my bed to the room under the ridge.
I had felt him on those boards. I had felt him spend himself on them.
I had put my own hand between my legs at some point in the dark and gotten the same short, useless clench as always. I sat down wet anyway.
Idony laid the contract in the middle of the table.
“Watch terms,” I said. “West cut. Eight wolves now, more if we call and he agrees. They don’t eat our stores. They don’t enter the village without a runner. Pay is coin this month, meat after. No banner. No claim. He quarters in the holding cabin for the term.”
One of the elders, a man named Pell who still talked like my father was in the chair, tapped the quartering line. “That’s the old cell.”
“It’s storage.”
“It was a cell the night you brought a Tillson through it,” Pell said. “People have noses, Reilly.”
“People have empty barns,” I said. “Hillsford is on the far ridge counting our smoke. Gareth wants a date before the next moon. The cut is open. I can put Landers bodies on it and lose men we cannot replace, or I can pay a company that already fights for coin. That’s the math.”
Marshall did not look at Pell. “I witnessed it. The bounds are clean. If Hillsford crosses, we have something standing there that isn’t a Hillsford uniform.”
Idony’s eyes were on my throat. Not on the page. On the place a bite would have gone if Owen had not put his teeth in his own mouth instead.
“You rejected him in the yard,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The bond is not rejected in this room. It’s sitting on you like a coat. If Gareth walks in here this week he will smell that cabin on this contract and he will smell you under it.”
“Then he can smell that the cut is watched.”
Edward’s voice came off the wall, careful. “Is this the man from the night no one names.”
The table turned toward me.
I should have said yes. Yes would have been a fact. Yes would have let me keep my knees together and my voice level.
“No,” I said.
The lie went through the bond like a hand between my legs.
Heat spiked so hard I grabbed the underside of the table.
Wet, sudden, a pulse in my clit that made my vision narrow.
I felt Owen on the cut—awake, moving, the echo of my lie hitting him and turning into want with no target.
My nipples drew so tight the binding hurt.
I had to swallow before I could hear Pell asking something about coin.
“Say again,” Edward said. Not accusing. Worse. Hoping I would correct it.
“The contract is with a free-company lead,” I said. “That’s what you need to know in this room.”
Idony did not blink. “Edward asked you a different question.”
“And I answered the one this council gets to own.” I stood up because sitting was making a sound I did not want Pell to hear. “The levy letter went out. The watch is signed. If you want to argue the cabin, argue it after breakfast. I have a runner to send.”
I made it out of the hall.
I did not make it to my rooms.
The side passage by the old pantry was empty.
I put my back to the wall and shoved my hand down the front of my pants and cupped myself hard, just pressure, trying to stop the spike.
It didn’t stop. I was soaked through the new cloth.
I rubbed over the underwear first, clumsy, then yanked it aside and got two fingers on my clit and the other hand over my mouth.
No. I had said no. The lie was still in my teeth.
It made the heat worse, not better, like the bond wanted the truth and was going to wring it out of my cunt if I wouldn’t say it in the hall.
I circled my clit and thought of him signing his name and thought of him on the floor last night with his cock in his fist on the boards where he had knotted me.
I had felt that. I felt it again now. My hips rolled against my hand. Boot scuffed the stone.
Steps in the main hall. I froze with my fingers on myself, dripping, and waited. The steps went the other way. I dragged my hand out and it shone in the dim. I wiped it on the inside of my coat like a thief and walked to my rooms on stiff legs and locked the door.
Belt off. Pants to my boots. I sat on the floor because the bed felt like the cabin if I used it for this.
I spread my knees and put three fingers in and my thumb on my clit and fucked my hand with my head back against the door.
I said his name into my wrist so I would not say it into the hall again.
Owen. The lie sat next to it. No. I pushed deeper and it was not enough.
I wanted the stretch of him. I wanted the knot catching and that burn when he shoved it through.
I wanted to have told Edward the truth and I wanted Owen’s mouth on me for telling it.
I came with my thumb grinding and my fingers curled, a hard squeeze that ran through my stomach and out and still left me twitching around nothing.
I kept my hand there until it hurt. Then I pulled out and looked at the shine on my knuckles and laughed once, quiet, at the acting Luna of Landers Ridge sitting on her own floor with her pants at her ankles because she had said no about a man whose come she could still remember the taste of.
I washed. I put the same pants back on because I was not wasting another clean pair before noon. I wrapped the wrist again. The old bite was yellowing. I wanted a new one. I wanted it from him. I put the thought in the basin with the dirty water.
Edward was in the corridor when I opened the door.
He looked at my face, then at my hands. “You lied.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because if I say his name the way you mean it, Pell puts it in a letter and Gareth Hills gets to write rejected mate and occupied cabin in the same sentence. You can hate that. You’re not wrong. You’re still not saying it in council.”
Edward’s jaw worked. “I remember that morning. You came up from the cabin and you sent me to the kitchen and then you took him into the yard. I heard the rite from the window.”
“Then you know what I did.”
“I know what you said. I know you haven’t slept since. I know Marshall is covering for you and Idony is waiting for you to slip and I know that man is in the cabin you won’t let anyone else use.” He didn’t raise his voice. “I’m not a kid in the infirmary doorway anymore. Stop feeding me no.”
I could have ordered him off the subject. I didn’t. “It was him. It is him. The rite stands. The watch stands. That is all you get to carry around this hall.”
He nodded once, angry and satisfied at the same time, and stepped aside.
Marshall was in the yard with the runner. A wrapped parcel of meat. Not much. What we had.
“Cabin or cut,” the runner asked.
“Cut,” Marshall said, before I could say cabin. He glanced at me. “He went out at gray. Melanie Vernon has him on the line. If you send meat to the cabin you’ll walk it into a room he should be working out of.”
“Cut,” I said.
The runner left. Marshall waited.
“You said no,” he said.
“I heard myself.”
“Edward heard you. Idony heard you. The lie spiked the bond hard enough that I smelled it from my chair.” He kept his voice down. “You cannot do that in front of Pell again. He is already writing the story in his head. Gareth only needs one elder who wants a wedding more than a cut.”
“Then Pell can eat the math. We don’t have the men to hold the west without that company.”
“I’m not arguing the company. I backed you in there.” He looked toward the river. “I’m telling you the arithmetic only works if you can sit still while you tell it. You couldn’t.”
I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t his hand or my own. I took a patrol loop I did not need, south not west, because west was Owen and I had just lied about Owen and I was not going to the cut with my pants already damp to ask him how the tracks looked.
The south pasture was still down. Wire reused. A girl mending a coat that had been a man’s. She nodded at me and I nodded back and the bond tugged west the whole time like a finger in my belt.
By midmorning I had to stop behind the empty hay shed and get my hand down my pants again.
Standing. Fast. Two fingers on my clit, forehead on the wood, breath held.
I rubbed and thought of the word no and thought of his cock on my table and came in a tight, almost-silent jerk that left a wet patch I could feel when I walked.
I wiped my fingers on the inside of the shed wall, which was filthy, and went back to the loop like I had been checking posts.
Idony found me in the hall after. The contract was already filed. Gareth’s polite reply had not come yet. She stood with her hands folded and looked at my throat again.
“When you go to the cut,” she said, “take Marshall. Do not go at night. Do not go alone. And if you cannot say his name in council, do not go down to that cabin to say it with your mouth on him. I will not bury this pack under a knot you already refused.”
“I’m not going to the cabin.”
Idony’s look said she had been alive too long to buy that at full price. She left me with it.
I ate standing up. Grain. Salt. My stomach wanted nothing.
Between my legs I was still a problem. I wrote a patrol order for Marshall’s scouts and a note to Melanie Vernon that meat would come to the cut at dawn and the cabin was not a hall store.
I wrote Owen’s title, not his name. Company lead.
I stared at the cowardice of that and left it.
Edward passed the desk and saw the line. He didn’t comment. He set a cup of water down and kept walking.
Near noon the bond pulled sharp, the way it did when he turned toward the ridge. I stood up too fast and had to grip the chair. Want. His. Mine. Mixed. I sat back down and put both hands on the desk where anyone could see them.
I lasted until the hall emptied for work.
Then I went to my rooms a second time, locked the door, stripped from the waist down, and lay on my back on the bed with my knees up.
I used both hands. One spreading, two fingers of the other in, then three, pumping, the wet noise loud in the quiet.
I pinched my clit and twisted a nipple through the shirt and I said, out loud, to a room with no council in it, “Yes. It was him.”
The truth did what the lie had done, only deeper.
I came harder, still not enough, still empty of what I wanted, a rush of slick down onto the sheet and a sound I smothered with my own wrist. I stayed there pulsing around my fingers and staring at the ceiling and thinking about the yard and the rite and the page where I had written no claim.
The claim was in my body. The rite was in the yard. The contract was in Idony’s file. All three of them were true at once and only one of them was arithmetic.
I got dressed for the third time that morning.
I did not go to the cabin.
I stood at the ridge and looked west toward a cut I was paying a man to watch, a man I had denied in a room with my brother in it, and I felt him feel me looking.
I went back inside before I did something I could not put on a page.