Chapter 29
Reilly
The want sat under the job like a stone in a boot. I walked it anyway.
Edward was in the hall, not the kitchen.
That was farther home than a guest house and not all the way.
He had the bruise and the rope marks and a way of watching doors.
Marshall wore the pin at the throat like it bit him.
Idony ran stores. Pell talked about the chair as if I had dropped it in the river on purpose. I let him. I had.
My shoulder pulled when I lifted a bucket. Owen’s side had opened in the shallows. I had packed it on a rock and wanted my mouth on him and put thread in him instead. Hillsford camped on the far bank. Gareth’s coat dried in someone else’s trees. The hinge was not finished.
I kept Edward off the water.
He hated it. He stood in the doorway and said he could carry. I said he could sit. He said he had already been carried. I put my hand on his wrist over the rope mark and he shut up.
“Owen went in first,” Edward said after a minute.
“We went in together.”
“You don’t have the pin.”
“I put it on the table.”
He looked at me like he was trying to decide if that was for him or for Owen. I did not help him.
“The pack is talking,” he said.
“The pack is always talking.”
“They’re saying you sold the hall for a cabin.”
“I sold the chair so I wouldn’t sell you. If they cannot hold those apart, that is their math.”
He nodded once. He did not joke. He had seen us move in the guest house dark.
He had seen the bond do the ugly useful thing in a corridor, my body knowing Owen’s before my eyes did.
He had seen me take the hit meant for a shoulder that was not mine.
He was not twenty in the same way he had been with a loaf on a log.
I left him with Marshall and went to the inner bank.
The river was loud. Owen was a pull on the far side of our stones.
Melanie had the west trees. Joss the downriver snag.
I was not supposed to be on the first line.
I stood on the second and felt Owen’s pulse when a probe came across in the afternoon, three Hillsford testing the shallows.
The bond opened. I felt the fat heat of him, the knot-pulse under a fight, ridiculous, and I almost laughed and did not because there was blood in the water again.
They pushed. We pushed back. Short. Ugly. Not the clash of the morning. A finger on a bruise. I moved when Owen moved without deciding to. Shared sense. I hated how good it was. I wanted it in a bed. I had it on wet rock with a blade in my good hand.
The probe broke. They took their wounded. We took a gash on one of Joss’s and a split cheek on a Landers boy who should have been mending wire. I packed what I could. Owen came off the stones and his mouth was a line and his eyes dropped to my mouth and we did not touch.
Melanie said, “If you two stand here smelling like a cabin I am putting you in different trees.”
We stood in different trees.
The want did not move.
By dusk Gareth had not come to the water to talk.
That was worse than talking. Marshall sent a runner along our bank.
Idony sent grain watered to soup. I sat on a crate behind the inner path and shook once, private, from the shoulder and the heat and the not-touching.
I put my hand between my legs over my pants and pressed until it hurt and took the hand away. Discipline. Thin.
Owen found me there. He did not come close enough to break Melanie’s line.
“Far bank is building,” he said. “Not leaving.”
“I can feel it.”
“You should be in the hall with him.”
“He is in the hall. I am the hinge I burned the chair for.” I looked at Owen’s throat. I wanted my mouth on it. I wanted the words I had promised when Edward was all the way home. The far bank was not empty. Home was not done. “Don’t stand nearer.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
He was. The bond said so. He stepped back anyway.
Night. We held in shifts. I took the inner path with two of ours.
I could feel Owen two hundred yards downriver like a hand on my nape.
When he went tight, I went tight. When a branch cracked on their side, both of us looked.
Edward tried to come to the path once. Marshall turned him around.
I heard it. I did not leave the line to do it myself.
Near midnight a second probe. Quieter. Six, not three.
They wanted a body or a banner or the steward’s pin.
They got none. I was in it before I meant to be, second line becoming first, shoulder screaming.
Owen was there the way the corridor had been there, his position in my body before I saw his shirt.
A Hillsford blade went for his opened side.
I was the thing in front of it. Again. The impact took my good arm this time, a shock, not a cut.
I stayed up. He finished the man. We breathed in the same wet air and we did not kiss.
Edward would have seen that too if he had been on the path. He was not. I was glad. I also wanted him to see that this was not a cabin. This was the job under the want.
We broke the six. Two of theirs down. One of ours bad in the thigh. I held the thigh and Owen held the line and Melanie cursed both of us for being in the same five feet of dirt.
After, I sat in the dark with my back on a log and my arm numb and my cunt stupidly wet and I laughed once, no sound, at the knot-pulse I had felt in the middle of a blade. Funny if no one had been bleeding. Someone was always bleeding.
Owen crouched out of arm’s reach.
“You’re done on the stones,” he said.
“You’re not my Luna.”
“I’m the man who is going to put you on the inner path if you fall down.”
I stayed on the log until I could stand without showing him the shake. I went inner. He went back to the water. The want stretched and held.
Toward dawn Idony came down with a coat and a face that had not slept.
“Pell is moving the lower houses toward a story,” she said. “You abandoned the chair, the boy is back, Hillsford is on the river, Tillson is in your skin. Pell’s story writes itself unless Marshall stands on it.”
“Then Marshall stands on it.”
“Marshall is standing on a pin he does not want. You need to walk the hall at first light so they see you are not hiding in a cabin while men die on rocks.”
“I’ll walk.”
She looked at my mouth. “Do not walk there with him on you.”
He was already on me. She knew. I went to the water barrel and washed my hands and my face and not the rest. I walked the hall at first light with no pin and a packed shoulder and Edward at the table eating like someone had told him to. The lower houses saw me. Pell saw me. I let them.
Owen did not come in. Good.
I stood in the doorway and looked at Edward until he looked back.
“You stay in this room,” I said.
“I know.”
“All the way home is this room plus that bank empty. We are halfway.”
He did not joke. He said, “Don’t take the next one for him.”
“I’ll take what I take.”
I went back to the inner path. The far bank was still camped.
Gareth’s pause was a held breath. Chapter of a war, not the end of one.
The heat sat in my clothes. I did not go to the cabin.
I did not say the words. I stood where I could feel Owen on the stones and I kept my hands off myself and off him, and the job held by a thread and a steward’s pin and a river that was not done.
When the next noise came off the far trees it was larger than a probe.
I put my good hand on the blade and I went toward it, and the want went with me, shoved down, useless and alive, and I did not look for a pine or a bench. I looked for the water.