Page 88 of Rhapsody of Ruin
We leaned as if the walls had pressed us there. It wasn’t orchestration; it was gravity. My back hit the cool, slightly damp plaster, and I let the chill climb my spine until my shoulderblades remembered where to fit against a surface that did not want to hold the shape of a woman. Rhydor set both palms flat against the opposite wall and bent, forearms creaking leather, head low between his shoulders. The line of his neck was a blade. The heat of him worked through the air in waves, smudging the threadbare chill. The room had the small echo of a place whose use is fast and secret and easily denied. It held our panting and let it be loud.
“Say it,” I said, because the silence felt like ritual and I needed it to be choice.
His head lifted. The lantern-light, only one, low and ordinary, climbed his cheek, traced the scar at his jaw that my mouth had learned last night. He didn’t come away from the wall. He didn’t move closer either. He looked at me as if asking my hands for permission while his pride forbade his mouth to beg. He was dragonfire and restraint, man and myth, and I hated him for making me want both enough to burn.
“You’re alive,” he said at last, and the relief in it was so wild it sounded like fury.
“You stopped them,” I returned, and the gratitude in it felt like betrayal.
He made a sound. Not a laugh. A cut.
“They’ll come again.”
“I know.”
“And you’ll lie again.”
I kept my back to the wall. My mask scraped when I turned my head. “Yes.”
He stepped forward then. Not far. Enough that the air I was breathing became the air he was breathing. Enough that I could count the tiny, errant flecks of ash caught in his stubble, the fine line of soot along the seam of his collar. Enough that Icould smell what the council floor tries to kill: sweat and leather and heat, the clean metal tang of a blade wiped too quickly, the burnt-sugar scent my magic leaves in the air when it has been forced to make room for dragonfire.
Anger made a sound in my throat. I didn’t know if it was towards him or myself. I heard again the crack of his knuckles on Thalen’s jaw, the gasps it tore from lacquered mouths, the way my body had betrayed me by wanting to defend the knight he’d blooded. That memory flared oddly now that we were locked here: Thalen’s blood; Rhydor’s hand; desire and fury in a braid I could not untie.
“Why,” he asked.
“For him,” I said.
We both knew what name I chose not to use. We both felt it move between us, small and heavy, too alive to be spoken aloud in a room that could learn it. His eyes closed for a second, lashes like soot on his cheek. When he opened them, no law in the palace, or the world, could teach them to be anything but honest.
“Say his name,” he said, low and rough. A command, a confession, a plea.
“Not here,” I answered. And I hated the way that truth felt like cowardice.
He exhaled, a long scrape. The hand nearest me lifted, hesitated in the inch of air that divides permission from assault, then settled, flat, careful, against the stone beside my head. Dragon heat radiated through his radius and into my skull. The pulse at his wrist beat where the bones of my cheek felt it. My own pulse answered within the trap of lacquer and cloth.
And then I reached for him, because if we waited any longer the only thing left would be words, and words had already failed us all morning.
My fingers found his tunic, the rough weave dark with the sweat of his stand, and curled, pulling him down to me. Our mouths met with less grace than last time, teeth knocking, both of us too hungry and too angry to make art of it. He tasted like salt and ash and the iron bottom of the cup we had both been made to drink. I opened to him anyway. He answered with a sound I felt between my shoulder blades, a groan that wasn’t surrender and wasn’t victory, just a man learning he still had a mouth for something other than orders.
He kissed me like reprieve and sentence both, like he forgave me, like he would never, like all the ways men and women invent to keep from being turned into saints by other people’s stories. My palms slid up the heat of his chest, found skin at the open seam of his collar, the slick edge of new sweat. He shuddered where my fingertips grazed the small scar where breastbone divides. The shiver lit me. Rage and gratitude melted into something lower and older, the place where my twilight meets his fire and both ask the other to be gentle and neither can.
His hand left the wall and found my face. He thumbed the edge of my mask once, as if measuring how much of me he was allowed to touch. Then he hooked two fingers carefully beneath the onyx crescent and lifted just enough to take my mouth without lacquer between us. The chin strap grazed my skin. The absurdity of it, making love to a woman while half a moon remains on her face, would have made me laugh if it didn’t make me want to cry.
He didn’t take until I gave. He had to know, after everything, whether I would. I told my body the truth before my mouth: I arched against him. His breath broke; his hand slid down to my hip and pulled, slotting us together. My thigh found the line of his. He made a rough sound and answered with motion.
The spark happened between us the way it always does: the tiny, bright bite of his fire tasting my twilight, the soft sizzle where the two disagree and then harmonize. It isn’t magic you can perform on a stage with gestures and seals; it is heat mixed with need mixed with the old pact between the darkness and the dawn:I will give you my edge if you promise not to name me wrong when you talk about me later.His mouth moved to the angle of my jaw and left heat there; my nails left careful crescents on his back through cloth. He hissed; he pressed closer; I let him.
I pushed him, too. Pushed him back against the opposite wall and followed, sliding my hands under leather to find him with the knowledge that belongs to bodies and not to courtiers. His spine met stone; his head tipped; he let me take what I needed as if he had been told, finally, what tenderness looks like on the side of the person who took the first blow. I dragged my mouth along the line of his throat where dragon heat is strongest. He swore softly. My lips found the place where his pulse beats, where last night I had learned how to count battle with my mouth, and I bit, not to mark him, but to test whether blood tastes the same when it is heated by fury and not by love.
It does.
He said my name, not as an accusation this time, not the low warning he uses when he wants obedience, but the way a starving man speaks the wordbread. It undid me more than flattery ever could. I reached down and drew him harder against my hip. The soft sizzle of our magics fed back into my throat, turned me into sound for a second, not a princess. The noise I made belonged only to him and to rooms that lock.
We found a rhythm, not slow. Not careful. Desperate in a way that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with having been looked at by a room full of people who begged to see us break. My mask slid, loose, a bad moon slipping from orbit; hesteadied it with two fingers and then pressed his mouth to the skin it exposed, cheekbone, corner of eye. Gentleness struck like a mercy I had not earned. I shoved him harder for it. He took it like penance. We moved together because neither of us could afford to stop wanting and neither of us could afford to name what wanting might cost next.
He murmuredElowynas if he were positioning himself on a battlefield and didn’t trust his feet without saying the name of the ground out loud. I answered withRhydoraround his mouth. The word burned. The good kind.
When the rush came, it wasn’t a wave or a fall. It was heat that trembled all over me and then settled, like an iron being quenched and knowing it will be asked to do the hard work now. He bit against my shoulder and swallowed a sound that would have told the corridor too much about who we are to each other when no one else is invited. I felt the drag of his breath on my skin. He felt the shake of mine. The room stopped being entirely about walls for one brief, carved-out second.
