The itch walked me down the hill ahead of my pride.
I took the unlit side streets with the cloak pulled tight, and the throb between my thighs had stopped pretending to be anything but itself.
Not the marsh's honey. Not the spores. This was fresh, mine, unwanted, a pulse with the watcher's fingerprints all over it, left there on cold stone at the foot of his wall, an orgasm confiscated at the door and the debt of it compounding ever since.
My body had spent the whole walk home filing complaints, and somewhere behind the bakery it had won the argument.
The yard opened off the keep road exactly where Joss said it would, hay-dust ghosting through the torchlight at the gate, the sweet dung-and-straw smell of horses asleep.
The loft ladder ran up the side of the cart shed. My boot hit the bottom rung, one rung, no more, and above me a man came awake like a struck match.
"Knew ye'd come."
His voice, sleep-rough, from the dark of the loft.
"Didn't know when. Been sleepin' in m'boots."
"Shut up and get down here."
He came down the ladder so fast he nearly brained himself on the beam, and then he was standing in front of me in the torch-spill with hay in his curls, and I did the thing I had climbed a hill and walked a town to do.
I checked his eyes.
Brown. Just brown. Pupils ordinary, with want instead of flooded black with fixation, blown no wider than any healthy man's would be standing this close to a woman who smelled like me, and that, somehow, was the thing that undid me.
Nothing in his face was taken. All of it was given.
I had a fistful of his shirt before I'd decided to. He went up the ladder backwards with me climbing him, and we spilt into the loft's hay together in a rattling sprawl of knees and straw, and he got his bearings faster and did the last thing I expected.
He went to his knees.
Not to me, not yet, just down, onto the boards at the foot of the cart bed, and he patted the bed's rail like a man inviting a lady to a proper seat.
I sat.
He took my leg and laid it over his sun-burned shoulder, pushed my skirt up to the waist with both hands, careful as lifting a curtain, looked at what he'd uncovered for one long reverent second, and put his whole wide mouth on my pussy.
No technique. None. All of the province's enthusiasm and not one hour of training, a broad clumsy tongue lapping through my folds like a man allowed at a well after a week in the dust, and it was perfect, it was exactly perfect, because I was so wet it embarrassed me, the whole denied evening of it, an afternoon of the watcher's fingerprints and a night of my own bad decisions, and Joss drank it down and groaned into me like the well itself.
Rapport caught on the second lick.
The world doubled.
I felt my own cunt hot against his mouth as he felt it, the grip and the flood of me arriving through the link flavoured as him, and at the same time I got his side pouring back into me, the taste of a woman spreading through his senses like the first swallow of ale, the softness of my inner thighs against his ears, the weight of my leg over his shoulder as a thing precious and unbearable.
My pleasure fed his.
His fed mine.
The loop chased its own tail up through my spine while he licked me with the flat of his tongue, no rhythm yet, all appetite, his big hands gripping the cheeks of my ass with both hands to hold me still for it, fingers sinking in, spreading me open to his mouth.
Schlick. Schlick.
His tongue through wet flesh, loud in the sleeping shed.
I came against his jaw in under two minutes, and I didn't come quietly.
Short hot pulses, squirting over his chin and the open collar of his shirt, both my hands fisted in his curls, my heel drumming the small of his back, a sound out of me that scattered something in the rafters.
He held me through it with his mouth sealed over me, drinking what he'd asked for, and when I let go of his hair, he sat back on his heels, chin dripping, eyes shining up at me in the torchlight.
"Do it again," he said. Hoarse. Awestruck.
"Please. I want to feel it from my side again."
He was asking for my orgasm, like a second helping. Somewhere in the fog I understood this was the sweetest sentence any man had ever said to me in two worlds, and then my body informed me that the itch had only been primed.
He'd done nothing about his own trousers except open them, and his cock stood out through the gap, forearm-thick, the plum head bared and shining, bobbing faintly with his heartbeat, untouched, leaky, patient.
Thirty seconds of reprieve, no more.
I pushed him backwards into the hay and sat down his length in one gravity-fed swallow, and his entire vocabulary died in his throat.
He came almost immediately.
"Sorry, sorry, fuck, miss—"
Babbling it up at the rafters while his hips punched up off the hay, spurting hot and endless inside me while I ground down and took it, and it would have been over with any other man, and it wasn't over, because he was twenty-five and ring-broken the right way.
He didn't soften a hair.
Deep in me, thick as ever, his own spent frothing white around the root where we joined.
"Again," he panted, when he could speak.
"This one's yours. Tell me how."
"Fast. Hard as you can."
I leaned down until my mouth was at his ear.
"Don't be polite."
He was never polite again.
He rolled me under him and drilled me into the cart bed with ten years of bales architecture, hips like a piston, and the shed filled with the sound of us.
The wet smack of his thighs on mine, plap, plap, plap, off the boards and the walls, my cheeks clapping under each stroke, the cart bed itself thumping its legs against the floor in time, furniture percussion and skin percussion landing together the way I'd learned to hear them.
My nails raked red lines down his burn-necked shoulders. I wailed into the curve of his neck and soaked us to mid-thigh, and the sound got filthier, squelch on every outstroke, schlick on every plunge, his first load churning to froth inside me while the second climbed.
And Rapport ran the whole circuit.
His buildup was mine.
I felt it gathering in a body that wasn't my body, the tightening, the ache, the climbing weight of him about to break, felt it from inside a man's skin, and he felt mine, my crest arriving in him as his own, and when I went over the edge we went together like a fuse finding powder.
I detonated.
Squirting hard enough to stripe his belly and spatter the boards below the cart bed, clamping down, and he felt all of it from inside me, roared like something kicked, slammed to the root, and pumped me full a second time, pulses so long I felt them in my spine, both of us feeling both of us, a closed loop with the current running.
After, while I lay there smoking gently in the hay, he touched my hip, tentative.
"Can we," he said.
"The way ye kissed me last time."
So the last round was slow.
I rode him through the wreck of his own cum, Velvet Grip rippling down his length in deliberate waves while the link handed my grip back to me from his side, milking him from inside his own pleasure, and his mouth found my bouncing tits and stayed there, sucking marks into the softness like he was signing work he'd already signed.
My final orgasm was so quiet it was almost private.
A long shudder, a held breath, my forehead against his, the two of us breathing like one animal in the hay while he spent a third time in slow rolling pulses and I took every pulse of it and gave every pulse of mine.
Then the silence.
I lay in the crook of his arm with his spent cooling between my thighs and hay dust drifting through torchlight, and did not know at first why the world felt so strange.
Then I knew.
The Widower's Needle lay still on my chest. Not a tremble. Not a tick. Cracked crystal, bent silver, silent as a stone.
The green attention existed up that hill, certainly. The needle had hummed for less. But somewhere at the threshold of this yard it had drawn back, like light flinching from a fire already lit, and for one whole hour I had been unwatched.
Simply a woman getting absolutely railed by a sweet-tempered carter with clear brown eyes and a terrible tenderness, under no gaze at all, wanting everything she got.
Joss's thumb traced my hip bone, drowsy.
"Had a girl in Marrenford," he said.
"Past tense's still true."
His arm tightened, rolling me deeper into his side, his big body curving over mine, covering me completely, the way I loved.
"But if ye ever want hay and this, Cartwright's yard. Any hour."
A kiss, clumsy, into my hair.
"Any year."
I dressed before the watch-change bell and left him asleep with hay in his lashes, and went out through a yard that smelled of horse and honey and me.
The Stag at that hour was banked fire and held breath. Hobb sat in the taproom with a lamp and a glue pot, re-seating the leg of the table that had died in Brok's advance, and he looked up at me the way a man looks at weather he'd already predicted.
"Hot water's on the hob. Third bucket's yours."
His eyes ran the catalogue while his hands kept working the glue. Hay in the hair. Ink on one cuff. The particular walk of a woman who had spent an evening being thorough. He went back to the leg of the table with the supreme tact of an innkeeper who had decided to know nothing.
"Greta left towels," he said. "And she left opinions, which I'm instructed to withhold."
The oak tub waited behind the canvas screen, and I lowered into it with a sound I didn't plan.
Heat found every used place, the grip-bruises gone soft, the deep pleasant ache, the muscles of a woman who had walked a causeway, climbed a hill, and climbed a carter.
The water went cloudy around me, honey and gel and two men's spend lifting off in pale threads, and I scrubbed until the jasmine smell was mine again and only mine, and then I sat a long time in grey cooling water with my eyes shut, listening to the inn tick.
Greta caught me in the upstairs hall with the towels. She plucked a hay stem from my bob and held it up like evidence.
"Marsh honey last night, hay tonight. If the trial goes badly, you could open a stable."
Then the joke went out of her face by degrees, and what was left underneath was quieter.
"Da hasn't slept two nights right since you came. Not like that."
She folded a towel with more care than towels need.
"Like a man guarding something. He was like it when Mum was sick."
She heard herself say it, went pink, and pivoted to business at speed.
Candidates arriving proper tomorrow.
Registrants permitted one walk of the great hall's length before the trial, today only, midday bell, supervised.
Chancellor Malden at the keep since dawn.
The minstrel thrown out of somewhere already.
The grain merchant's girl had taken three rooms and brought a harpsichord, the word delivered like a war crime, tuned at five in the morning.
"She will not survive me," Greta said. "Sleep, my lady."
I slept, and the tower room was waiting.
I knew it was a dream before I knew I was dreaming, because the proportions were wrong the way remembered rooms are wrong, drawn with a ruler by someone who had only had the room described to them. The chairs stood in their half-circle facing the window. Five of them. Four empty.
I was in the fifth.
Not sitting in it. Of it. The wood of the armrests had grown through my fingers, and my fingers through the wood, bone and grain interleaved, and I could not tell which of us was older, the chair or the sitting. The room breathed around me, slow and sourceless.
Paper everywhere. Stacks floor to hip-height, and the top sheet of the nearest stack angled toward me, angled to be read, and the hand on it was a small square clerk's hand I had never seen and somehow knew, the hand a captain had checked against a marriage bond with a magnifying glass.
Test the third: that she stays.
Beneath it, charcoal drawings, fine-grained. A woman from behind, small, in a square at night, a cracked compass open in one palm, lamplight on short dark hair.
Me.
Last night.
Drawn before last night.
More sheets beneath, twenty, forty, a hundred, fanning down through the stack like a fall of cards, and every one of them me.
He stood at the window with his back to me.
Tall, spare, furniture-still.
At the crown of his head the light broke wrong, the ridge, the rim, and in the dream I could see it plainly, grown and not worn, its shadow combing down over his collar.
Outside the glass the marsh burned green. Not four fires. Forty, rank on rank to the horizon, and every flame leaning toward the tower the way sunflowers arbitrate.
He began to turn.
It took the length of a held breath to reach profile, and there was no profile.
There was the shape of where a profile would be, like a candle behind paper.
The voice came, closer to a word than it had ever managed, patient as tide.
"F o—"
ANOMALY LOG — SLEEP REPORT
DREAM INTRUSION — RECURRING.
LOCATION: THE TOWER ROOM.
SUBJECT SAT IN THE FIFTH CHAIR.
THE CHAIR HAS BEEN WAITING. CHAIRS DO NOT WAIT.
THE PAPER IS HIS HAND. THE PAPER PREDATES YOUR ARRIVAL IN THE SQUARE.
SATISFACTION LOG: 28.
THE +1 WAS SILENT THE ENTIRE UNWATCHED HOUR.
FIRST FULLY VOLUNTARY ENTRY IN THE LOG: UNRINGED.CLEAR-EYED. CONSENTING.
THE SYSTEM CHECKED THE COUNT TWICE. IT IS REAL.
NOTING IT CHANGED NOTHING. NOTING IT FELT LIKE SOMETHING.
[THE COUNT IS AWAKE. THE COUNT HAS BEEN AWAKE.]
[DREAM TERMINATED BY CLIENT]
I woke on it, hand closed around the Widower's Needle, still and silent in its cracked crystal, and the ordinary grey light of the last free day coming through the shutters.
First bell. I lay still and took inventory like a soldier before a march.
Downstairs, the bakery boy had been and gone, having left six rolls and a look of stricken devotion tied up in a cloth. I ate them warm with porridge and honey, and drank Hobb's coffee, an experience somewhere between beverage and penance, and felt the day arrange itself over my head like weather.
One walk of the great hall's length. Today only. Midday bell. Supervised.
The torc lay quiet at my throat, and the small grey letters confirmed it in the corner of my eye.
TORC: 41%, HOLDING.
The Stag's only males were one cured innkeeper and a bakery boy who had fled the premises mid-devotion. Down the square, The Golden Thread's shutters were opening, Maren's lamp moving behind the glass, and the sapphire gown hung on my chamber door wearing its whole biography. Marsh-gel crusted at the hem. Gatehouse ink at the cuff. Hay-dust worked into the bodice seam. And under all of it, faint but undefendable, a smell.
The chime came while I dressed.
ANOMALY INTEL UPDATED
THE THIRD TEST, IN HIS OWN VERIFIED HAND: "THAT SHE STAYS."
THE SYSTEM CONFIRMS NOTHING. THE SYSTEM TRANSCRIBED IT EXACTLY.
+10 EXP — 230/400
TORC: 41% ⏸
STATUS: BLOOM-SEEDED — QUIET.
DISSOLUTION: TOMORROW. NEAR THE MIDDAY BELL.
SIDE QUEST: THE HIGH WINDOW — OBJECTIVE NEARLY MET.
WHAT HE IS REMAINS UNLEARNED.
THE WINDOW HAS BEGUN ANSWERING QUESTIONS IN YOUR SLEEP.
Tomorrow, near the midday bell. The seed would finish dissolving while I stood in front of him. The sovereign's gift and the widower's test, arriving in the same hour, and I stood in a grey room doing that arithmetic until the numbers stopped meaning things.
One day. Seventy feet of hall. And a third test that had finally, in a clerk's square hand, told me what it was.
That she stays.
The menu hung in the morning light, patient as ever, four doors.
[WALK THE HALL] / [THE GOLDEN THREAD] / [THE FORGE] / [WHISTLE, ONCE]