She shook out her arms, muscles still sore from the day prior’s activities.
But it had been a good day.
The slice across her palm that called her blood magic to life, a drop offered to the arrowhead, to aim true, to hit its mark.
They’d had venison the night before.
Meat was a unique element to her meals, but the gamey taste made her mouth water, and he’d cooked the offering over an open fire, the scent rising to wrap around her until he’d practically had to hold her back from reaching into the flames to grab a bite.
He’d ensured they used every part of the carcass, from the skins that he’d begun to cure, to the bones and sinews.
The way he worked, with quiet competence, teaching her without making her feel useless…
She trusted him.
She trusted him, and she didn’t know what that would mean for her future or his.
He opened his arms and motioned with his fingers for her to join him in the pool.
“I’m a sea dragon, Ven. I promise, I won’t let you drown beneath the waves.”
“There are no waves. The pool’s not big enough.”
There were waves, ripples from where the waterfall fed the basin with its endless supply of liquid life, but they were not nearly as terrifying as the white caps of the sea he’d risen from and that had tried to claim her.
The thought didn’t ease the racing of her heart, nor make her feet move more readily towards the drink.
“Ven.”
Just her name, his voice deep, husky in the cool morning light. He’d held her in his arms, cared for her, protected her, would catch her if she fell, had raised her before when she slipped beneath the waters.
He’d saved her in the pool in the khan’s temple and he hadn’t even known her then.
She let the slip of fabric fall from her breasts and stepped onto the wet sands, the water tickling at her toes, a slow entrance that he didn’t try to hurry, let her take at her own pace.
She should have been worried about the other creatures that lived in the pool.
There were deer and birds and other creeping things that thrived in the woods.
Surely, fish and eels and who knew what else called the water home, but he wasn’t bothered by anything, and she’d cling to him and his support of the same.
Her feet sank into the wet sand, the sodden granules sucking her toes into the ground, hampering her steps as she moved into the basin up to her calves, her knees.
The water lapped at the apex of her thighs.
It soothed against her, caressed, much like his hands during the night, held her in its embrace the way he held her through the darkness.
Ouros met her in the water, pulled her into his arms, lifted her beneath her buttock so that she twined around him and he held her head above the surface and moved them into the deeper ends of the lake. She held onto him while his hands moved the water around them, kept them bobbing at the surface, never sinking below the waterline.
“Your legs are round me, love. You won’t sink. Let go, move your arms like me, it will help you float.”
She heard him, his words, floating. Her body obeyed his demonstration, arms following his easy strokes, hands cupped to push the water away from her, down and out, bobbing in the surf.
His instructions didn’t matter though.
He’d called her love, and it was a different sort of panic that claimed her now, an aching need to claim him in turn.
Did he even know what he’d said?
Did he know what the title meant? Could mean to her?
“We’ll go slow,” a nod his answer as he loosened her legs from his hips and she displaced the water around herself, no dragon to swim for her, her own strength keeping her afloat. He grinned, and it hurt, to look at his smile, so open and proud and filled with emotions she couldn’t allow herself to believe in.
He would remember who she was before long.
The name of her family; the past that was a living thing between them.
Take this moment.
Take each day, every moment, for its own. Don’t borrow trouble that isn’t there.
Live, Havence.
Remember to never stop living, no matter what the world throws at you.
Nemsi had held her tight to his chest when he whispered his last command to her. It was the last time she remembered crying, the day her father slipped from their home, and her mother fell to her knees at his leaving, and Havence stared at the door for weeks, waiting for him to return only he never did.
She doubted he’d meant for her to live her life against everything she’d been taught; to release the dragon from the seas and find comfort in the arms of the creature who threatened everything she knew about the world.
Ouros turned her away from him, maneuvered her until her head rested back on his shoulder and he used a hand to press her back towards the surface. “Kick your legs and keep your arms moving, nice and slow, Ven. Your body is buoyant. You’ll stay at the surface so long as you are calm and the waters around you are easy. Float.”
She didn’t want to float, caught in the simple activity, her mind racing a mile a minute.
Too much time to think and to worry.
He shifted away from her, and she thrashed when her head dipped, and water closed over her ears, touched at the corners of her eyes.
He caught her quickly, kept her from sinking, held her until her panic ebbed, his smile teasing her to calm, “I’m not leaving you. Relax, love. Let the water hold you. I’ll be right beside you the whole time.”
Ouros helped her to float on the water’s surface once more, before his hands left her and she sucked in her breath but didn’t sink.
It took her a moment before she dared to reopen her eyes, to turn her head and look where he floated beside her, arms stretched out, holding him in place in the pool. She would have thought he’d hate being back in the water, but it was as natural to him as walking on land. He didn’t submerge fully, that she couldn’t blame him for, but he floated, and she closed her eyes, content at his side.
They swam in the water until the sun began to set overhead.
She’d panicked at one point, when the pads of her fingers began to molt. Everything he’d taught her, the strokes, the steady movements to swim through the water, everything had slipped from her mind when she looked at her hands and could not feel her fingertips.
He’d dragged her to the beach, searched her over as she screeched, unable to form words when she thought she was melting.
Her fingers slowly returned to normal, her breathing in time with the same.
When she managed words to tell him what had happened, she’d watched in stunned silence as he fell onto his back in the sand and shook with his laughter.
He’d laughed harder, gasping out a command not to “storm away” when she left him on the shore and returned to their cavern.
“Wait, Ven. I didn’t mean it.”
But his apology lacked conviction, and she wrapped her clothing around herself, drying her skin as she mimed his false apology and left him behind.
It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t understand…whatever it was that had happened with her skin in the pool. Her hands felt normal now, but what if she melted every time she went in the water? What if, because of how long she and her people had been without drink, they all reacted adversely to being exposed to the deluge?
She paced the length of the cave, sat on the chest at the far wall, drew her knees up to hug herself close.
Her fingers traced over the leather straps on the top of her seat, the engraved initials she’d traced as a child, forgotten in the wonder of this verdant land safe-kept for him.
He’d carried her father’s chest for her.
A memento she hadn’t been able to leave behind a second time, forgotten to the dragon.
She slipped from her perch to kneel before the cask, stared at the straps that she’d started to undo a lifetime ago on the sands outside her cottage.
“Ven wait!”
His tone was different this time, no longer the teasing laugh from the pool, caution and warning coloring his words.
Her fingers trembled to continue, to open the lid, but she looked at him, watched him cross the distance towards her, kneel at her side and cover her hands with his, hold closed the box that she wanted to open.
Havence frowned. “What’s wrong? It’s just mementos. Pictures. A few pieces of my father’s old clothing. There’s nothing that can hurt you here. I swear it.”
“It won’t hurt me, Ven.”
She didn’t understand.
Ouros shook his head, the smile he attempted wan and unconvincing. “Come back to the pool. I’ll tell you about your fingers. There’s nothing wrong with you or them. Let me show you.”
“Why don’t you want me to open the trunk, Ouros?”
For once, he was the one who tried to look away, and she, the one to turn his gaze back to hers.
“I can smell it, Ven.”
Smell it? Smell what? It was just papers and wood. Fabric.
“The rains. The night I rose from the sea and the rains came. I can smell it, Ven. Whatever was in the trunk, the waters got to, seeped into. I smell mold. I smelled it that morning when the soldiers came.”
Mold?
A clam had washed upon the beach when she was a child. The white of its shell had stood out against the sand. She’d taken it home and put it in a drawer to keep with her treasures. It had died, and the water it leaked had soaked into the dresser, turned the wood black in places that her father had sanded away. The smell remained until her mother said there was nothing else to be done but to burn the bureau to get rid of the mildew.
“No. Oh no—”
“Ven.”
She pushed at his chest, tried to force him away from the lid, to open it, to find the last pictures she had of her father; her mother’s drawings the only remainder of the man whose face she could barely remember except in staring at the charcoal lines.
The smell struck her before her eyes could make sense of the sodden mess of what had been her most precious possessions.
Ouros pulled her away before she could root through the same, see the complete destruction of it all.
He carried her from the cavern.
The green of their oasis seemed less bright as she sat staring at the water, chills shaking her bones, and he built a fire at her back.
Would he burn the wooden frames that held the last remnants of her father and mother together?
A picture, the only one she had, of Shara smiling at someone, the expression Ven rarely recalled on her mother’s face even today.
But her mother was gone too, wasn’t she?
Ven had lost them both in releasing the dragon from the sea.
Chapter Forty
He returned to the cave and closed the lid on her memories, nose scrunched at the rotten stench that came from the trunk.
In truth, he had forgotten about it.
When they’d arrived, and she’d revealed his sanctuary to him, taken down the blood spell that hid his oasis away, he’d been too grateful to be returned home, that the cask had meant nothing to him. It had a moment of weakness, he returned to the forest’s edge to retrieve the box. She’d not noticed it missing. She had said nothing nor asked after its whereabouts until now.
He’d forgotten the expression on her face when she dug it up from the sands, the hope and despair that clung to her when she pulled it from where it had been buried.
Ouros imagined it was the same expression he’d worn when he first saw the spell that had hidden his sanctuary behind the mask of a dried-out husk of earth.
Her father.
The one upon the sea who had never returned.
He remembered her father as well, or at least the ship he assumed the male might have been on.
The boat had sailed too close to where Ouros was enchained.
It had capsized in the water when he breathed out a spout of steam.
He didn’t need to remember what happened to the sailors on its boards as they splashed in the water and called to the creatures of the deep with their screams.
The faint scent of the man that had worn the clothes in the casket, he didn’t recognize it.
Perhaps that was a good thing. Or he was just old.
Ouros cinched the leather buckles tight.
There was nothing more he could do.
He moved to the mouth of the cavern, watched her rocking on the sand before the lake.
It had been a good day. Such a very, very good day.
She sniffled. He caught the sound over the heavy thunder of the falls into the water, the bird cries that cut across the sky.
No tears though. She didn’t cry.
The pit they’d used to roast the deer over the night before was still stocked with wood to burn. He mounded the firewood at its center, coughed into his palm, the spark delicate in his human form, no raging inferno that he could breathe as a dragon. When the flames caught, he returned to her side, sat next to her, the fire casting the darkening world aglow in reds and oranges, chasing the blackness away for a moment more.
“I do not remember my parents, if a dragon has parents. I remember being, and then I remember the birth of man, and learning to fly as they fought to stand upright on two legs. It is not the same, but it is the only memory I have to offer you.”
She huffed a breath, did not turn to look at him though when she burrowed into his side, he accepted the gesture, wrapped her in his arms.
“My father was a sailor. He said he came from another land across the seas where there were no such things as sands and dragons and snakes guarding the desert. He was pale and golden skinned unlike my mother’s people. He passed it on to me. So many colors of people, he used to say, and then he would look at my mother, touch the deep ochre of her arm, tell her she was the prettiest of them all. My mother never smiled after he left. I think she knew before I did that he would never return when he took to the seas. She wouldn’t let us board the ship with him. I should have left then, but we stayed, and Shara withered, and I—”
“You what?”
She snorted, pulled away and forced herself to take a deep breath. “I freed the dragon.” Her smile held no joy.
Ouros didn’t know how to change her expression to a happier one.
There didn’t seem to be very many between them both.
“It is your body’s natural reaction, when your fingers and toes shrivel like they did when in the water too long. Your hands are not meant to grip beneath the waves naturally, so the body adapts, uses the ridges formed in the water to give you tread should you need it on the sands. You weren’t melting.”
Chapter Forty-One
She passed her hand over his collarbone, fingertips trailing against the smooth edges of the scales decorating his upper chest.
They laid together in the shelter of the cave, the winds blowing strongly across the grove, the acrid scent of ozone in the air, preceding the coming of a storm, he said, but she did not know what type of storm his emotions bred, or was it that she didn’t know what emotion the storm was feeding from.
Lightning crackled across the sky.
She flinched at the crash, the thunder that followed the flash of light.
He pulled her tighter to him, soothed his hand along her spine, hummed softly against her forehead where his lips were pressed to her skin.
They were tangled together, her leg between his, arms wrapped tight to hold onto the other except the hand she stroked over his chest.
His scales were dry, their translucent color darkening to the pale pearl of his skin tone. The faint teal coloring gave his skin a marbled look, preternatural, in this form and as a dragon.
The plates did not cut at her as they did when he was a dragon. They fluttered and wisped, like dandelion fuzz, waiting to fly away when touched.
She smoothed her hand over a patch, one of the white flakes pulling free, caught aga
inst her skin.
His hand paused, but he said nothing of it, made no motion to relieve an ache the loss of the scale portended.
She’d seen the scar over his belly from the first scale he’d given her.
Lost now. That scale was lost now as were so many things since the moment she’d stepped into the sea.
It hurt him, to lose the plates, even ones as small as those decorating his flesh in this form, and she the cause of that pain.
Ouros shifted, pulled her closer, the hard heat of him pressed against her thigh.
He wasn’t asking for anything. Her choice to take whatever she wanted, if she wanted it. The comfort gained in two beings joining, or the simple embrace of two bodies at rest.
In this form, a human, like her, he was not protected.
His every touch was strength and power, even when he was at his gentlest, there was no denying that he was more than met the eye.
As a dragon, his form was nearly invulnerable.
But as a man, seeing his scales which would not protect against an enemy’s sword…
He brushed his fingers through her hair, tipped her chin so that she was not staring at the ridged line across his throat, so that she had to meet his gaze or pull away, that which she would never do.
She closed her eyes when he bent forward, his lips soft against her own, coaxing her mouth to part on a sigh, a dance of tongues that morphed to more quickly, her fingers rising to curl in the heavy strands of his blond hair, his hand moving to her waist, her buttock, pulling her as tightly to him as they could be without joining.
It was her body that fought to meld with his first.
He allowed her to push him to his back, to straddle his waist and writhe against his shaft trapped between them.
They had learned each other’s bodies together. She could not say who the better instructor had been, but she knew the ways to finding her own pleasure, delighted in eliciting his gasps for the same, his growls.
Ven rose on her knees, used her hands pressed to his stomach to kneel above him, stare down at that place where his body would join hers, the heavy length of him waiting to be sheathed inside her.
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