Chapter 19
Nineteen
Sorcha
Houston was big, noisy, and smelled awful from the loads of cattle set to ship out east on the river network.
It was nearing dusk when we arrived, and the streets were full to bursting with dockworkers, locals, and travelers passing through on their journey west. I was immediately unimpressed.
After weeks on the road I was ready to be somewhere nice, somewhere clean and civilized, somewhere I could find a tidy little hotel for the night and luxuriate in a few days off my feet and out of the saddle.
I’d somehow kept myself going with the promise of stopping here and getting on a train.
But now, with the stinking river and the veritable horde of rough manual laborers, I would readily choose the snowy Sangre de Cristo peaks instead.
At least trekking made sense now. It was, if nothing else, painfully familiar.
Milkweed didn’t seem to enjoy the atmosphere either, having tucked himself head down in my deepest skirt pocket and had refused to emerge since we arrived.
As late spring bled into high summer, Houston was unbearably hot and humid.
I was used to a hundred degrees at noon, but without even a trace of water in the air.
Here it felt like trying to breathe in hot soup, and I found my already aggravated symptoms flaring even further.
Every inch of my skin was damp and I was inexplicably itchy.
I was well past my wits’ end as Neal flagged down a dockworker and started asking about train times.
“You want a train?” the man replied, brows knitting together in confusion.
“To New Orleans, ideally,” Neal said. “Anywhere we can head east.”
“Can’t even get to the Louisiana border without a boat or a stagecoach,” the man informed us. “That is unless you plan on walking through the swamps all that way.”
And with that, he returned to his work. I just glared.
“Ansel,” I nearly growled, “you said the rail lines connected to Houston.”
“My information may have been optimistic,” Ansel admitted. “But there’s sure to be options to keep us moving.”
“Ansel, I am going to throw you into that river,” I muttered.
“I’ll figure it out,” Ansel assured us. “Have a little faith, lass. I’ve only saved your life, what? Five times now.”
“I will throw you into the river,” I repeated. “And summon a catfish to swallow you alive.”
“And here I thought your powers didn’t work on fish?” Ansel drawled.
I glared.
“Let’s see,” Ansel mused. “Options . . . steamboat? Yeah, that’d be fun. Or what about a stagecoach?”
“Ansel.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried not to yell. “I have been vomiting multiple times every day for months now. And you are trying to convince me to get on a stagecoach?”
“It’s what, five percent of our total distance to Islay?” Ansel dug his heels in. “You’d be fine.”
“I’m fairly certain I’d get dehydrated and die,” I said, voice steely. “And then this entire trip and my entire pregnancy would have been worth absolutely nothing and Iksura would get control of the Outer Court after all. Is that what you’re going for?”
“Sorcha, just take a breath.” Neal wound his arms around my waist, steadying, calm, placating. I hated that it worked.
“Answer.” I glared at Ansel, but the venom was receding.
“I’ll find us another option,” Ansel said. “You two go get some food and some sleep. I’ll meet you at that boardinghouse.”
He pointed at a dark blue building with tidy white trim and a long porch stretching across the front facade.
“Fine,” I muttered through gritted teeth, watching Ansel retreat into town.
“Listen,” Neal said gently, turning me to face him, “is this ideal? Absolutely not. But we’ve been through worse already—multiple times.”
“Neal, it’s too hot and this whole place smells,” I complained, burying my face in his chest, composure quickly dwindling.
“We will figure something out,” Neal assured me, fingers brushing under my chin to coax me into looking at him.
“I promise. And in the meantime, we are going to get some dinner and—since we have a whole hotel room all to ourselves—we’re going to try a second attempt at our wedding night. Now that we’ve both decided . . .”
I glared, snorted. “Excuse me?”
“Okay now that I’ve finally admitted,” Neal corrected himself, “that I’m completely in love with you.”
“Food first,” I said, conceding, relaxing now, starting to smile a bit. “I’m hungry.”
“That’s progress,” Neal exclaimed.
“I also feel like I could throw up any second.” My brows knitted together. “But I’m starving.”
I looked down and cradled my growing belly. “Would you make up your mind about me eating already?”
“Nobody’s bothering us tonight. It’s just you, me, and a quiet room. I’ll make sure of it,” Neal promised, pulling me against his side and kissing my head, then bending down to kiss my lips. “And there will be plenty more where that comes from later.”
Fed and clean and settled into our rooms, I finally let myself fully relax.
The hotel Ansel had seemingly arbitrarily selected was pleasant, luxurious even.
Our room had a brazier for coals—though I couldn’t begin to fathom a situation where that might be necessary—a writing desk, a small settee, and a bed frame with a clearly expensive, tufted wool mattress on top.
The sheets were clean and bleached and pressed.
The windows were framed in heavy printed cotton curtains.
After a life spent in timber-framed, adobe-brick ranches with simple shutters and hand-woven linens, I felt like I’d stepped into a fancy postcard from back east. I’d tucked Milkweed into the flowerbox outside the window to sleep, under detailed instructions not to try and hop off overnight.
We stayed up far too late talking before Neal even hinted at a second attempt at our egregiously awful wedding night.
“I know this hasn’t been easy,” Neal said as I curled up next to him on the sofa, “but eventually, years or maybe decades from now, I think we might just look back on it fondly. Or at the very least want to tell this one about it.”
His hand ghosted over my growing belly.
“So,” Neal said, fishing in his pockets, “I got them something. Got you something? I got something. I know it’s not much. But it’s sturdy for travel, and I figured they can play with it even when they’re really little.”
I sat up and took the tiny paper-wrapped parcel from his hands, unwrapping it to reveal a small carved wooden mule. My heart clenched in my chest. After all that shit when we first got married, how could he truly be this sweet? I didn’t let the dissonance bother me for long.
“Thank you,” I said, climbing into his lap. “For everything. You were supposed to work for my dad. You didn’t sign up for this. You could have taken an easier posting.”
“But I didn’t take an easier posting, Sorcha,” he said. “And I don’t regret it. Because as hard as I tried to convince myself otherwise, that first day I met you I knew that this, that we, were supposed to happen. I wouldn’t trade you and what we have for anything.”
Emboldened—both by his earnestness and by the privacy of four walls and a room to ourselves—I leaned in and kissed him.
Neal’s hands slid around my waist and he began to unfasten the buttons on the back of my dress, quickly discarding it before starting to unfasten the busk of my corset, still kissing my lips, my temples, my neck.
I bit back a moan, heat flooding through me. That felt far too good.
“You alright?” Neal asked, pulling away for a moment. “Not too nauseous? Not too dizzy? I don’t want to make you feel worse.”
“A little nauseous, a little dizzy,” I admitted, pressing my forehead against his. “And definitely too hot. But I’m pretty sure this’ll be worth it.”
I leaned in and kissed him again. And for a moment the sheer closeness, his hands on my back and his lips against mine, made me forget the discomfort, the Texas heat, this awful trip we’d been forced to undertake.
And for a moment it was just us—together, happy, married, pregnant—everything we should have a chance to enjoy.
“Did it hurt this time?” Neal asked as I lay curled up on his bare chest, fingers tracing along his collarbone. I just shook my head and sighed contentedly. The quiet voice at the back of my mind, that had mourned the missed opportunity the night we’d conceived the baby, was silent now. Sated.
“You were holding out on me,” I chuckled. “I don’t know what I expected, but nothing that good.”
Neal laughed and kissed my forehead. He pulled me closer, and I mused aimlessly how much I wished it could stay like this.
The two of us. No outside political pressures.
No travel. A house somewhere. Assurance of a good healer when I was due to have the baby.
It all felt so completely impossible, at least with Iksura vying for the Outer Court throne—willing to resort to violence to get it—and the threat of the portals and the cults growing by the day.
“It’s like I almost forgot where we were,” I murmured into his chest, “about the chaos outside. About how awful this town is. I felt safe. Really safe. For the first time in a while.”
“You’re always safe with me,” Neal whispered into my hair.
And then suddenly someone was pounding on the door.
“Police, open up!” a man’s voice shouted.
We both startled. Neal put a hand over my mouth when I went to speak.
“Let me,” he whispered, grabbing his shirt and pants and heading to the door, revolver in hand.
“What do you want?” Neal asked, voice icy, barely cracking the door open.
“A certain Ansel O’Faelan wants you to bail him out of jail,” a man’s voice, presumably the sheriff, said in reply.
I groaned.
“Just a second,” Neal said, closing the door and tossing me my clothes.
“Ansel got arrested?” I asked, starting to get dressed.