3. Kieran
Kieran
At two in the morning, I was kneading bread on Rev’s worktable.
The oven fire had burned down since supper, and the kitchen still held some warmth. I’d left the lamp cold; the coals gave me enough light to work by. I liked the kitchen in the near-dark, though I would have denied it if asked.
The other seven slept elsewhere in the house. Rev’s breathing came through the pantry wall. Aldric had taken the loft room and gone quiet within two minutes.
I was awake because for three years I’d fallen asleep counting down. Every night I repeated the count until I drifted off. I had expected it to kill me. I hadn’t expected to miss it.
I’d joked about the quiet to Astra weeks ago. The truth was, I didn’t know how to live without an ending in sight. I rehearsed everything, and I had rehearsed that.
When sleep wouldn’t come, I baked. It gave my hands something to do.
Aldric had arrived that afternoon with news of four hundred scattered survivors and a Council summons. Every lineage chair had to be filled at Zenith Court by the season’s turn or counted against us. I hadn’t stopped thinking about it.
The green-gold at my wrist warmed half a breath before the stair board creaked.
Astra stopped in the doorway, her hair loose from sleep and her feet bare on the flags. An old shirt fell to her knees.
“Your line was loud,” she said. “It woke my wrist.”
“I’ll ask it to whisper.”
She crossed the kitchen and perched on the end of the worktable. “Third night this week. What’s keeping you up?”
“I was hoping I’d know before you asked.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
She waited while I folded the dough.
I set it in its bowl, covered it with the cloth, and wiped my hands on the apron.
“Some nights I miss the countdown.”
She didn’t flinch. The coals settled behind me, and her breathing stayed even.
“I don’t miss dying,” I said. “I miss knowing what came next.”
She slid off the table but stopped short of touching me. “And now?”
“Now I lie there waiting for the count to start again.”
She took both my wrists, flour and all.
“What time is it?”
“Ten past two. The bread needs another hour and a half.”
“Then we have time.” Her thumbs rested over my pulse. “Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Stay.”
She lifted my hand and kissed the flour off one knuckle.
I kissed her slowly, then picked her up and set her on the table’s end.
My right shoulder took half her weight without complaint; I noticed and let it pass.
Her knees opened to bring me in against her.
The shirt rode up, and my hands left flour prints on her thighs, ghost-white on warm skin.
She looked down at them, laughed low—“Mark of the trade”—and pulled me back to her mouth.
She tasted of sleep and well water. The oven breathed at my back; her hands worked the tie from my locks until they came loose around my face, unhurried, in a dark that smelled of ash and proofing dough.
I ran my palm up the inside of her thigh and stopped, asking with stillness.
She answered by taking my wrist and setting my hand exactly where she wanted it — already wet, her breath going shallow the moment my fingers found her clit.
“Quarter past two,” I said against her ear, drawing slow circles. “We have time.”
She laughed, and then she stopped laughing.
I gave her two fingers, curled to the spot that made her grip go white on the table edge, the heel of my hand firm against her clit, and kept the pace slow and even.
She rode my hand with her heels behind my thighs.
Her head tipped back. Her breath came in small pieces, quiet for the sake of the sleeping house, and the effort to stay quiet made it hotter.
When she came, her mouth pressed to my collarbone to bury the cry.
“Half two,” I told her when she caught her breath. “Approximately. I lost the thread near the end.”
“Liar. You never lose the thread.”
“I’m learning.”
The watch-quilt lived folded on the bench for cold shifts.
I spread it over the flagstones in the oven’s warm shadow, and she lifted her arms and let me draw the shirt off over her head.
The coal-glow laid copper along her skin.
She watched me strip to the waist with open hunger. I still wasn’t used to it.
“Still want this?” I asked, settling onto my front between her thighs.
“Yes. Come here.”
I kissed my way up the inside of her knee by inches and put my mouth on her—salt, the small jump of her belly under my palm.
Her hand came down into my loose hair, riding, not steering.
I worked her clit with my tongue without a fixed pattern, following each change in her breathing, and the sound she made went straight through me.
Her hips rose. Her thighs closed warm against my ears. The second one took her slower than the first, a long swell instead of a snap, rolling through her while she dragged the quilt out of its folds and said my name.
“Ten to three,” I said to her hipbone, and kissed it.
“You’re inventing the numbers now.”
“I never joke about time.”
I shed the rest of my clothes—flour on the waistband, tragically—and sat back against the oven’s warm brick.
She settled into my lap with her back against my chest, rose onto her knees, and set me where she wanted me.
She sank down by slow degrees while my forearm crossed her collarbones and my breath went ragged against her hair.
We both went still when she had all of me.
At our wrists the lines stood bright, green-gold answering green-gold.
“Five past three,” I said against her ear. “The bread has another hour. So do we.”
“Then talk,” she said, and began to move, that deep slow rock that was going to unmake me at a pace entirely hers. “Tell me the time. Keep telling me.”
So I gave her the minutes as they passed—ten past, quarter past—my hand splayed low on her belly, my fingers finding her clit again, matching the rhythm she set. Somewhere in it her voice frayed and she said, “Say the Tower thing.”
“I have a great deal of Tower material.”
“What you said when I healed you. Say it.”
My voice cracked through the middle, and I said it into the curve of her ear: “Yours. Fully. No clock on it anymore.”
“No clock,” she said, and came apart hard around me, her head dropped back to my shoulder and her hand clamped over mine to keep it exactly where it was. I followed her with my mouth pressed to the side of her throat and her name breaking in it.
The kitchen returned slowly: cooling iron, the soft shift of coals, the dough risen under its cloth.
I pulled the quilt around her shoulders and kept her in my lap while our breathing eased.
I kissed her damp temple and told her she was warm, she smelled of us, and I would be finding flour on her for a week.
I fed the fire two sticks, knocked the coals open, and shaped the loaves while she watched from inside the quilt.
We dozed against the oven while they baked, her spine along my side.
When the first loaf came out, I broke the heel off too soon, burned my fingers, and swore in a whisper.
I buttered it while it steamed and fed it to her piece by piece.
She ate from my hand with her eyes closed, butter on her lip.
Afterward she raised her wrist and breathed in. Beneath flour and wheat, she wore my scent on her skin—green apple, sun-warmed stone, clean wind.
“I’m not washing until supper,” she said.
“The whole house will know by breakfast.”
“The whole house knew when I came down the stairs.”
She slept against my arm while the second loaf browned. When sleep finally came, I let the bread keep time.