Page 14 of Fate's Bane
“We’ll find it.”
We walked, trotted occasionally. Hadhnri grew impatient, tugging me back to her for kisses, each one asking more than the last. When we made it to the Baneswood, though, we could not find the spring.
“It’s too dark, Agnir.”
“We’ll find it.”
I stopped, bewildered, in a clearing beneath a willow. “It should be here. This is where we found it, isn’t it?”
“We were children. Surely we did not run so deep?”
It was difficult to see in the dark, but it was clear therewas no spring. The air was cool, but it was the ordinary coolness of the Ha’night evening, not the frigid cold of that spring. The only sound was the crunch of twig and leaf beneath our boots. Not even squirrel-chatter. It sent a chill up my back.
“Agnir.” Hadhnri spun me into her. She kissed me again, drinking me deep, and my whole body tightened with the pleasure of it. “Please. Someone will look for us soon, and if you don’t touch me, I will drown myself in the Ene—”
“Don’t!” I press her lips closed with my hand. “Do not speak so. Not here. Not even in jest.”
She dropped her gaze, chagrined, but it didn’t stop her from flitting her tongue out against my fingers and pulling me closer. “Then touch me.”
“Ah.” I let slip a moan at the flick of her tongue. “Here?”
“By Fate, yes,” she breathed against me. “Here, anywhere, so long as you do it now.”
How was I to deny what I had desired for so long? I surrendered, and she swept me under in her river-swift rush.
When she and I had our first Making, I thought that was what loving her would be like. The same coming together, the same understanding of where she stopped and where I began and how that line blurred and blurred. This was like that, and it was nothing like that. In the workshop, I didn’t think of our bodies beyond the heat of her beside me on the bench. Now I could think ofnothing but the fog of her breath against my cheek, of the apple-swell of her breast beneath my hand, the plaintive, wind-sharp keening from her throat.
We were lost, the two of us beneath Gunni’s fur cloak. Somewhere, back in the darkness of the clan’s roundhouse, other couples made their furtive moves, some silent, some perhaps less than silent, and at the center, the joyous couples and the racket of their lovemaking and the drunken cheers from other pallets as the newly wed cried out. None of that existed for me or Hadhnri. There was us and this moment, alone together in the Baneswood, and though she would not have admitted it, I knew it would be our last, our only. Pedhri Clan Aradoc would not let her have me, no matter how she begged. Not if I begged with her, and I would not. No, he would refuse us, but we would also not be able to hide that we had done this. Someone would have seen us retreat together—and who would we surprise? No one in the clan; all knew Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s ward and his daughter were nigh inseparable. Certainly not Pedhri himself.
Knowing this, I buried myself deeper inside her so she would always have a part of me, holding her close in the sweat-dank heat of our clothing until she broke against me.
“Agnir,” she murmured against my lips. I shivered in response, resting limp against her until her hand stirred between my legs. She rolled me onto my back, said myname again, and it quickened me—as if I weren’t already straining taut. “Sweet Agnir.”
“Hadhnri?” It came like a request, but I could not say—exactly—what I was asking for.
She held herself over me on her elbow. Used to the darkness now, I could make out the tenderness around her mouth.
“By my name and my clan, I, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc, pledge myself to you, Agnir Clan Fein,” she whispered.
She stole my breath from me with that oath, tonight of all nights—or perhaps with the steadiness of her hand.
I said, chest hitching, “That’s three times you’ve sworn. You will make a spell of this.”
“I will,” she breathed. “And I will swear again and again if it will keep you by my side.”
I bound her to me then, my legs around her hips, my hands around her neck, and in her ear, I whispered, “By my name and my clan, I, Agnir Clan Fein, pledge myself to you, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc.”
And so I learned what it was to be unmade by the hands of another.
“We should go back,” I whispered sometime later, the sweat on our bodies drying cold.
Hadhnri murmured, love-drunk, from her spot in my neck: “I don’t want to go back.”
“We’ll be missed. Or do you want to live out our days in the Baneswood?”
“Run away with me,” she whined. “Are we not wed?”
I smiled against her forehead. “We are wed. But that is our heart-secret, and it will not be a secret if we don’t go back now.”
