“How did you,” he said, pushing himself up on an elbow,indignation finally dawning, and I pushed him back down and kissed him.
He made a noise of surprise against my mouth and gripped me by the arms, holding me off.“Listen, you impossible creature,” he said, “I’m a century and more older than—”
“Oh, be quiet,” I said impatiently; of all the excuses he might have used.I scrambled up the tall side of the bed and climbed in on top of him, the thick featherbed yielding.I glared down.“Do youwantme to go?”
His hands tightened on my arms.He didn’t look me in the face.For a moment he didn’t speak.Then harshly he said, “No.”
And then he pulled me down to him instead, his mouth sweet and feverish-hot and wonderful, obliterating.I didn’t have to think anymore.The heart-tree blazed up with a crackling roar and was gone.There was only the heat of his hands sliding over my chilled bare arms, making me shiver all over again.He had one arm around me, gripping tight.He caught at my waist and pulled up my loose falling-off blouse.I ducked my head through and my arms free of the sleeves, my hair spilling over my shoulders, and he groaned and buried his face into the tangled mess of it, kissing me through it: my throat, my shoulders, my breasts.
I clung to him, breathless and happy and full of uncomplicated innocent terror.It hadn’t occurred to me that he would—his tongue slid over my nipple and drew it into his mouth, and I flinched a little and clutched at his hair, probably painfully.He drew away, the sudden cold a bright shock on my skin, and he said, “Agnieszka,” low and deep with an almost despairing note, as if he still wanted to shout at me and couldn’t.
He rolled us over in the bed and dumped me in the pillows beneath him.I gripped fistfuls of his shirt and pulled, frantic.He sat up and threw it off, over his head, and I threw my head back and stared at the canopy while he pushed up the maddening heap of my skirts.I felt desperately greedy, urgent for his hands.I’d tried not to remember that one shocking, perfect moment, the slide ofhis thumb between my legs, for so long; but oh, I remembered.He brushed his knuckles against me and that sweet jolting went through me again.I shuddered all over, hugely, and I closed my thighs tight around his hand, instinctive.I wanted to tell him to hurry, to go slow, to do both at the same time.
The curtain had fallen shut again.He was leaning over me, his eyes only a gleam in the dark close room of the bed, and he was ferociously intent, watching my face.He could still rub his thumb against me, just a little.He stroked just once.A noise climbed the back of my throat, a sigh or a moan, and he bent down and kissed me like he wanted to devour it, to catch it in his own mouth.
He moved his thumb again, and I stopped clenching shut.He gripped my thighs and moved them apart, lifted my leg around his waist; he was still watching me hungrily.“Yes,”I said, urgently, trying to move with him; but he kept stroking me with his fingers.“Sarkan.”
“Surely it’s not too much to ask alittlepatience,” he said, his black eyes glittering.I glared at him, but then he stroked me again, gently, dipped his fingers into me; he drew a long line between my thighs again and again, circling at the top.He was asking me a question I didn’t know the answer to, until I did; I clenched up suddenly, wrung-out and wet against his hands.
I fell back shaking against the pillows; I put my hands up into my snarled mess of hair and pressed them against my damp forehead, panting.“Oh,” I said.“Oh.”
“There,” he said, smugly pleased with himself, and I sat up and pushed him backwards the other way on the bed.
I caught the waist of his breeches—he was still wearing his breeches!—and said,“Hulvad.”They melted into the air with a jerk, and I flung my skirts after them.He lay naked beneath me, long and lean and suddenly narrow-eyed, his hands on my hips, the smirk fallen away from his face.I climbed onto him.
“Sarkan,” I said, holding the smoke and thunder of his name in my mouth like a prize, and slid onto him.His eyes shut tight,clenched; he looked almost in pain.My whole body felt wonderfully heavy, pleasure still going through me in widening ripples, a kind of tight ache.I liked the feeling of him deep in me.He was panting in long ragged breaths.His thumbs were pressing tight on my hips.
I held on to his shoulders and rocked against him.“Sarkan,” I said again; I rolled it on my tongue, explored all the long dark corners of it, parts hiding deep, and he groaned helplessly and surged up against me.I wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging, and he put an arm tight around me and bore me over and down into the bed.
—
I lay curled snugly against his side to fit in the small bed, catching my breath.His hand was in my hair, and his face staring up at the canopy was oddly bewildered, as if he couldn’t quite remember how all of this had happened.My arms and legs were full of sleep, heavy as if it would have taken a winch to lift them.I rested against him and finally asked, “Why did you take us?”
His fingers were carding absently through my hair, straightening out tangles.They paused.After a moment he sighed beneath my cheek.“You’re bound to the valley, all of you; born and bred here,” he said.“It has a hold on you.But that’s a channel of its own in turn, and I could use it to siphon away some of the Wood’s strength.”
He raised his hand and drew it flat over the air above our heads, a fine tracery springing up silver behind the sweep of his palm: a skeletal version of the painting in my room, a map of lines of magic running through the valley.They followed the long bright path of the Spindle and all its small tributaries coming in from the mountains, with gleaming stars for Olshanka and all our villages.
The lines didn’t surprise me, somehow: it felt like something I’d always known was there, beneath the surface.The splash of the water-bucket echoing up from the deep well, in the village square at Dvernik; the murmur of the Spindle running quick in summer.They were full of magic, of power, there to be drawn up.And sohe’d cut irrigation-lines to pull more of it away before the Wood could get hold of it.
“But why did you need one of us?”I said, still puzzled.“You could have just—” I made a cupping gesture.
“Not without being bound to the valley myself,” he said, as if that was all the explanation in the world.I grew very still against him, confusion rising in me.“You needn’t be alarmed,” he added, dryly, misunderstanding dreadfully.“If we manage to survive the day, we’ll find a way to untangle you from it.”
He drew his palm back over the silver lines, wiping them away again.We didn’t speak again; I didn’t know what to say.After a while, his breath evened out beneath my cheek.The heavy velvet hangings’ deep dark closed us in all around, as if we lay inside his walled heart.I didn’t feel the hard grip of fear anymore, but I ached instead.A few tears were stinging in my eyes, hot and smarting, as if they were trying to wash out a splinter but there weren’t enough of them to do it.I almost wished I hadn’t come upstairs.
I hadn’t really thought aboutafter,after we stopped the Wood and survived; it seemed absurd to think aboutaftersomething so impossible.But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I’d half-imagined myself a place here in the tower.My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.
I’d already known without having to put it into words that there wasn’t a place for me in my mother’s house anymore.But I knew I didn’t want to spend my days roaming the world on a hut built on legs, like the stories said of Jaga, or in the king’s castle, either.Kasia had wanted to be free, had dreamed of all the wide world open to her.I never had.
But I couldn’t belong here with him, either.Sarkan had shut himself up in this tower; he’d taken us one after another; he’d used our connection, all so he wouldn’t have to make one of his own.Therewas a reason he never came down into the valley.I didn’t need him to tell me that he couldn’t come to Olshanka and dance the circle without putting down his own roots, and he didn’t want them.He’d kept himself apart for a century behind these stone walls full of old magic.Maybe he would let me come in, but he’d want to close the doors up again behind me.He’d done it before, after all.I’d made myself a rope of silk dresses and magic to get out, but I couldn’t makehimclimb out the window if he didn’t want to.
I sat up away from him.His hand had slipped from my hair.I pushed apart the stifling bedcurtains and slid out of the bed, taking one of the coverlets with me to wrap around me.I went to the window and pushed the shutters open and put my head and shoulders out into the open night air, wanting the breeze on my face.It didn’t come; the air around the tower was still.Very still.
I stopped, my hands braced on the stone sill.It was the middle of the night, still pitch-dark, most of the cooking-fires gone out or banked for the night.I couldn’t see anything down on the ground.I listened for the old stone voices of the walls we’d built, and heard them murmuring, disturbed.
I hurried back to the bed and shook Sarkan awake.“Something’s wrong,” I said.
We scrambled into our clothes,vanastalemspinning clean skirts up from my ankles and lacing a fresh bodice around my waist.He was cupping a soap-bubble between his hands, a small version of one of his sentinels, giving it a message: “Vlad, rouse your men, quickly: they’re trying something under cover of night.”He blew it out the window and we ran; by the time we reached the library, torches and lanterns were being lit all through the trenches below.
