Lan angled his head down as if he wanted to study Fen from even closer and the small distance mattered. He frowned. His frown cleared. “Warm like with this?” He released Fen enough to tug on a piece of the rope. “Or like with this?” He trailed a touch over the leather braid.
Fen shivered. “I suppose both. I slept in your arms. I should not have, but I did.”
“Ah.” Lan narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me this to try to keep me from sending you away?”
“Would it do that?” Fen asked with real surprise. “Allowing you to put something over my eyes again would tempt you that much?” Saying it nearly stole Fen’s breath. The memory was one thing. Imagining that feeling of darkness settling over him like Lan’s weight in bed, how his world would narrow to the sound of Lan’s voice and the touch of his hands, made him more than merelywarm. “I can’t stop you from sending me away,” he insisted, but couldn’t smooth his voice for it, “and I agreed to go. But you will come for me? When it’s done?”
“Such faith in me.” Lan snarled it, then stared over Fen’s head, breathing hard, before letting go of him and stepping away. “Sit on the bed, flower.”
Fen sat on the edge, his feet on the floor, his hands in his lap. Lan went around the bed to the chest. He returned quickly only to pause when Fen raised his head expectantly. The cloth Lan had found was rough spun, but didn’t snag on Lan’s callused hands as he folded it with impatient, sure motions.
“Be still,” he ordered before gently turning Fen’s world dark. “Just like that. That’s it.”
The knot he tied at the back of Fen’s head caught not a single strand of hair. The cloth covered part of Fen’s ears. Lan let go and then said nothing, leaving Fen to breathe in and out and flex his fingers. Outside, people were talking to one another, discussing things Fen could only guess at: firewood or water or food, the upcoming journey, whether Lan would talk with their Lylanth visitor tonight or be too busy.
Lan would talk to her; Fen was sure of it. But this first.Fenfirst.
Fen’s hands fell open. He exhaled.
“Not too tight?” Lan asked, too far away for Fen to feel the heat from his body, but still within the tent. “Not afraid?”
Fen slowly shook his head. He thought somewhat dizzily that he would accept more such bindings, though he also didn’t think that made sense, to want to be held so he could feel free. That was the only peace that interested him, but Lan wouldn’t understand. “I’m warm,” he tried to explain anyway, “safe.”
“Mine?” Lan was closer.
Fen angled his head up to find him. “Yes.”
“Fuck.”
Fen had almost expected to hear it, but flushed anyway.
“It goes on no one else,” Lan went on, even closer than before. Fen could feel his heat again, then a touch under his chin and a promise against his cheek. “I will come for you, and you can decide if you still want me. I will take all the Acana have and give you that too, if you wait.”
Fen tipped his face up and parted his lips.
Lan’s voice held a rasp. “And then all of it, if I can. If you wait. I shouldn’t make you wait but I will, so that you can freely make the choice.”
Fen was free now and had made his choice, but Lan’s judgments were clear and true and Fen was willing to follow them. “Yes, Lan.”
His whisper made Lan’s breath catch. “The Flower with me to say what I won’t. I’ll give him everything, if he chooses me.”
Fen doubted he could ever choose anything else. He raised his hands until he felt Lan take the end of the rope again and wind it until the line was taut. “I will give you everything,” Fen promised him in return, “unless you’d like to take it first.”
“A suggestion only?” Lan asked, breathing harder, then pulled on the rope to bring Fen forward for a kiss.
Twenty
The first month of waiting, Fen was cold. Acana territory sat in a valley fertile and warm. The holding where Fen’s father held court had been built over hot springs. As Lan had once guessed, it did not feel much of the touch of winter, and Fen had lived in that holding for all his life until he had run away. The territory of the Maben was to the north, not along the coast but near enough for massive storms to roll in from the sea during the darkest months.
Half of the territory would be covered in snow before long, Tellan had informed him, the rest drenched in rain. To Fen, it was a place of damp and chill that would not leave him even at night, when he pulled the furs from the bed in the room he’d been given and wrapped himself in them before the fire.
Nothing indicated who the room had once belonged to, or still belonged to, save for a small wooden box he found beneath the bed that held simple colored glass beads meant as decoration for those with piercings.
Many had such piercings here. Fen considered it for himself sometimes during his shivering sleepless nights, and then the ink beneath Lan’s skin that others probably also had. Fen might have seen that for himself if he had arrived in the summer when more bared their skin. But it had already begun to rain during their journey here, Fen and Tellan, Maril and the children, and many more guards than Fen thought Lan could spare.
Waiting was cold and wet and lonely even in a holding full of people. In that, it was not very different from the life Fen had left. He spoke with Tellan and Maril, stayed out of the way of Lan’s mother with her watchful dark eyes, and busied himself with needles and thread.
Dol would likely have said Fen was fretting. But if so, Fen was not the only one.
