POV: Seraphina
They got her up the last of the slope on her own feet, but only just. In the tent Yona worked the wrappings up her arms by lamplight and said little. Corwin came and went twice, and asked his questions, and took what answers she had. She said no more than she had to. When they finished she was clean and bound and warm to the touch. The warmth stayed on the surface. The cold sat under it, in a place their hands never reached.
"Drink the whole cup this time," Yona said, and put it in her good hand and watched to see that she did. "The rider went out at dusk. Until he comes back you spend nothing. Not on Edrin, not on anyone."
"Edrin is hurt."
"Edrin can wait a day. You cannot spend what you do not have." Yona said it flat, in the voice she kept for things she would argue with no one about. Seraphina drank the cup.
Suri pressed against her hip and stayed restless. He had felt the fight from the rim all day, and the smell of her now put him off. She laid her hand on him and he leaned his weight into it and settled. Outside, the camp had gone still. They had all watched what happened at the stone, and no one had found the words for her yet, so they held their peace and let her be.
Edrin looked in once, his arm bound across his chest in a sling Corwin had tied. He stayed at the flap. He worked his mouth around something and let it go.
"You did the thing," he said at last. "The one that could not be done."
"You held the wing," she said. "That thing would have had me from behind."
He nodded once and let it stand. That squared the account between them, and they both knew it. She lifted her good hand toward his shoulder before she thought about it, and he stepped out of reach. "No. I heard Yona. You keep it." He was gone before she could argue. She lay there with the want to mend him still live in her hand and nowhere to put it. Mending her people was most of who she was, and tonight the work was closed to her.
Thalion came when the camp had settled. He ducked through the flap and sat on the ground near the bedroll, close but apart, as he had learned to sit with her. He had washed the dirt off. There was a cut on his forearm someone had closed. He looked at her a while before he spoke.
"You saw it," he said. Not a question.
"I have not stopped seeing it," she said.
He waited. He was good at waiting. She wanted the thing out of her chest and into the room, where someone steady could look at it with her.
"They told me the dead ground breeds them," she said. "Yona taught me that, and every ledger I have read says the same. The wards fail, the soil turns, the bad soil makes demons. I have killed them for months and believed it." She turned her hand over on the blanket. "Nothing bred comes out of a hole in the air."
He went still. "Say that part again."
"There was an opening in the stone. I have no better word for it. Something gave, and there was a way through where no way should be. The demons did not climb up out of that ground. They came through."
"Through from where."
She had nothing. She turned her hand over on the blanket and looked at it, and there was nothing in it.
"I do not know," she said.
He turned it over slow. He always did, before he set a thing down. "Then we have been wrong about what these places are."
"About something. I cannot tell you how much." Her voice went thin. "I closed it. I do not know whether I shut it or only pushed it to. I do not know if the others are the same. I have knelt on one after another of them with my palms flat to the stone, and until tonight I thought I knew what I was kneeling on."
He did not try to comfort her. She was glad of it.
"Then nobody touches another one of them until we know," he said.
"Lucien," she said.
Thalion did not answer at once. She could hear him counting it out. Two riders. Thirty men. A camp sitting still on a rim while the circuit waited.
"He has the keeper records," she said. "Every reading anyone ever took of a dying node, going back two hundred years. He knows what one is supposed to look like on the day it dies." She turned her hand over. "I felt something down there and I cannot prove one word of it. Put him in front of that stone. Either it broke the way the records say a node breaks, or it did not, and if it did not he is the only man alive who can go and find out why."
He thought about it. She let him.
"He is not in the capital."
"He never went. He is three days behind us at the most, sitting in somebody's record room with a lamp." He had told her what he was hunting, and she had believed him. "Send back along the estates we opened. He is in one of them."
"And if he tells you that you have it right?"
"Then someone besides me will know it."
She kept the rest to herself. On the far side the thing had turned and looked at her, and it had known what she was. She had no words that made it any smaller. She did not want it in the tent with them.
He saw her hold something back. He left it where it was. "You can set it down for a few hours," he said. "It will keep. It will still be there in the morning, and when we are home."
"Can you set yours down?"
"No," he said. "But I want you to."
That undid her in the end. He offered her only what he was able to keep. He gave her a few hours, and told her plainly that he had none himself, and he stayed anyway. She reached for his hand where it rested on his knee, and this time she went past his hand. She drew him down onto the bedroll with her.
"Careful," he said, low, his eyes on the gold high on her arms.
"I am always careful. I am tired of careful." She got a fist in his shirt. "Be here. That is all I want tonight."
Suri would not settle beside her. He got up off the blanket and went out through the flap, to the fire and the cleaner air.
So he was here.
He came down over her and kept his weight off her arms. He kissed her slow and careful, and she knew why. He had stood on that rim this morning and watched the gold climb to her throat.
"You are handling me," she said.
"Yes."
"Everyone in this camp handled me today." She got her mouth to his jaw. "Do not start on it too."
"You nearly went out on that stone."
"I was there." Her arms lay dead on the blanket, bound to the elbow, her hands open where they had fallen. "I know what you are holding back from me. Stop holding it back."
He went still above her.
She had never reached for him this way. She went down the thread and found the thing he would not give her. She let him feel that she wanted it.
"Do it," she said.
He let go.
He stripped her fast. He was not rough with her arms. He was rough with the rest of her. He shoved the shift up past her hips and got his hand between her legs and found her already wet. Two fingers pushed into her. He crooked them hard and her spine came off the bedroll.
"Say it again." His mouth was at her ear. "The part where you tell me to stop being careful."
"Stop being careful."
She opened around his fingers until she was slick to the thigh and swearing at him. He pulled them out and put his cock against her. He pushed in. One long stroke. She took all of him at once.
She cried out and did not care who heard it.
He held there, seated to the hilt, breathing hard through his nose. He was thick and she was stretched wide around him and every part of her had gone tight and hot. Then he began to move.
She had nothing to hold. Her hands lay open above her head and stayed there. He got an arm under her back and lifted her onto him and took her whole weight, and he fucked her, and he stopped holding himself back.
He kept her arms where he could see them. It was the last careful thing left in him.
This was the man under the careful one. She had wanted to meet him.
The next stroke drove her farther up the blanket. The bedroll rucked and scraped under her back. Her bound arms dragged over the wool above her head and she had no way to stop them. The tent post took a knock and she did not care about the tent post. She got her leg locked high over his hip and pulled him into the angle that broke her voice, and he stayed there. He found it again because the thread told him he had it.
"Look at me."
She looked. He was watching her take his cock. He had never let her see him want anything this plainly.
His control burned off him and came down the thread into her chest. Her own body came back at her from his side of it, tight and wet and closing on him. He lost.
She lost her words. What came out of her was his name, broken in half, and small sounds she had no permission over, and then nothing at all. Her eyes stung. He read it and kept going and asked her nothing.
He got his hand down between them and set his thumb on her clit and worked it against his own rhythm. She came apart around him. She clenched down hard and her useless hands closed on nothing and her whole body pulled tight under his.
He stayed in it. He kept her up there and would not let her come down.
He turned her onto her side and came in behind her and pushed back into her wet pussy, deep, one arm across her ribs, his mouth at the back of her neck. He fucked her from there long and slow, to the root every time. Her thighs were slick and shaking and she could not close them.
"Tell me to keep going," he said against her neck.
"Keep going."
"Say the rest of it."
"I am here. I am staying. Do not stop."
He laid his hand flat between her breasts, over the place the resonance ran. He held her spine against him and kept going.
She came the second time and the thread drove it straight through him. She was still clenching around him when he buried himself deep and held there and shook. His hand closed on her hip and did not let up, and she would find the bruise of it in the morning. He spilled into her, and it came back a second time down the thread, so that she felt him finish from inside his own chest.
Then he was still, and so was she.
She turned her head and looked at him.
He was wrecked. His hair stuck to his forehead and his chest was still going hard and he had not put his face back together yet. He let her see all of it.
She had told him she could take it, and he had believed her.
That was the thing. Not that he wanted her. She had known that for a while. She had told him what she could bear, and he took her at her word, and he did not go away and check it against his own fear of losing her.
Every other soul in this camp had checked. They loved her, all of them, and not one of them believed her when she said what she was still able to carry.
He kept the gold clear the whole time. He knew where her limit stood. Inside that line he used her hard and gave her the whole of it, and his hands held no fear of her at all.
She was sore. Her thighs ached and there would be a bruise on her hip in the morning. The wrappings had pulled loose at one wrist and the skin ran hot under them. She lay in the wreck of herself and found she had not broken.
She had not known how badly she wanted one person in the world to be sure of that.
"Thank you," she said.
He did not ask her what for. He put his hand over the mark on her hip and left it lying there.
She lay against him a long time and let the quiet hold her. The cold had sunk down to almost nothing. She could still find it if she reached. She left it where it lay. She kept to herself that it was only for tonight.