by Holly Lisle
"Thank you for your help," she told him. "And your friendship. If you told me your name…?"
"Rue," he whispered.
"Rue," she said. She gave his hand a squeeze, and rose. "I'll need to be introduced to the other four, too."
"Play with the doggie now?" Jake asked.
"For a little while," Lauren agreed. She had things to think about. And while she thought and planned, Jake would have fun playing with the goroths. She sighed.
"Attend," Rue said, "by Her order." Lauren could hear the capitalization of "Her."
Scurrying feet, and four goroths stood before her. They were fast, no matter their protests to the contrary. They lined up—a chorus line of wrinkled gnomes in great clothes.
"This is Herot, the birdcatcher." The leanest goroth bowed. "And Wyngi, the boatmaster." A goroth with ratty blue hair braided down to the floor bowed. "Next, Tarth, the tracker." The tallest goroth—maybe two inches taller than Jake—and to Lauren's mind, the ugliest, bowed deeply. "And finally, the daughter of Creeg, the seer." The shortest and least wrinkled of the goroths bowed until its head touched the floor.
"What's your name?" Lauren asked the last goroth.
"This one has not earned a name yet, and must prove itself before becoming one of the People. It has been given the greatest honor of the nameless in being permitted to serve the Hunter, and will comport itself with honor." The nameless goroth bowed again, head thumping on the floor.
Jake wriggled, and Lauren put him on the floor facing the goroths. He grinned. He'd been through so much; that he could bounce back said a lot for what he was made of.
"Yes, Doggie," he said, grabbing the daughter of Creeg. "You play with me."
"This one has been given the name of Doggie," whispered the daughter of Creeg the seer. Tears started to run down her cheeks. "This one has been given a name by one of the old gods."
The other goroths gathered around her, hugging her. Lauren cringed inwardly, but considered that there didn't seem to be any dogs on Oria, so maybe Doggie was better than nothing.
She watched Jake show the smallest of the goroths his cars. She saw the others scurry to their hiding places and vanish from sight. She watched Rue, the voice of her new allies, take up a place by the inside of the door, settling in on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest. She felt a little safer, surprisingly. She found comfort in the goroths—and if Seolar and the other veyâr didn't like them, she didn't intend to let it bother her. They were like a little bit of home, and after the attack, and with her fear still fresh, she found anything homelike comforting.
Copper House
The feral urge became a darkness that ran through Molly like black fire. In her mind, the weight of the rrôn overhead. In her belly, a hunger for something to fill the void that formed echoes inside of her. Molly closed her eyes against an unexpected wash of despair, and when she opened them, Seolar had left his seat at the other end of the table to kneel beside her.
"What's wrong?"
Molly looked at him, and the darkness became a dangerous growl at the back of her throat.
Seolar laid a hand on her shoulder, and the warmth of his flesh on hers triggered animal lust, the starved madness of a creature lost in rut, and she leaned close to him, rested her lips against his neck, and bit him hard enough that she heard him gasp.
"I want you," she said, her voice low enough that only he could hear her. "Now. Here." She had not yet had him—their separation by her death, her confusion on her return had stood in the way. Of the promise their love held, of the passion that moved between them when they looked at each other, when they touched, when they kissed.
They had never been lovers. But hunger and darkness drove her, and he stood like a beacon of light before her, and in that moment, she would not be denied.
"Guards, out," he said. "Lock the doors; let no one pass." He sounded like he was speaking around a throat coated in sand.
Molly gave the guards only enough time to clear the room, and then she stood, pulling him up, and lifted up on her toes to bite the back edge of his ear, to lick the soft skin with quick, hard dartings of her tongue.
He pulled away from her, his eyes uncertain. "What are you doing?"
"Don't fear the reaper," she whispered, and undid the laces of her bodice and pulled her underblouse down so that the silk draped beneath her bared breasts.
He breathed faster, staring at her. "Why?" he said.
"Because there is no tomorrow, and now feels hollow, and empty, and I want to fill the emptiness. With you." She loosened the ties on the outer skirt and held the waistband up only long enough to reach underneath and untie the underskirts. She let the many layers of silk slide to the floor in a whisper, and stepped over them.
"Fill me," she said.
He moved to kiss her, but she pulled back, and with a hard yank slid his breeches over his hips. "Bite me." She leaned in and tilted her head to swing her hair out of the way to expose her neck.
She felt his teeth nip at her skin as she gripped his buttocks and pulled him against her. She dug her fingers into his skin and growled, "Harder."
He bit hard and she groaned; the pain drove against the darkness, against the hollowness. Alive, the lost voices sang in her head. Alive.
She shoved him back—hard—and he fell against the table. She stepped against him, and full of a strength she hadn't known she possessed, she caught his weight on her hips and thighs and shoved upward, her legs between his, to throw him onto the table.
Dishes and platters skittered and one crashed to the floor. Seo fell backward and caught himself with his elbows. Molly climbed onto the table after him, poised herself over him, and stopped. She shoved his tunic up over his head and caught his wrists in the linen tangle. Then, slowly, she leaned over him until her nipples brushed his chest.
"I own you," she murmured.
"Yes," he said.
"You want me."
"Yes." His voice hoarse.
Banish the ghosts, she thought, and rose up, and slowly, slowly, impaled herself on him.
"Yes," he whispered.
She rode him, her thighs tightening and relaxing as she fought for silence in her head, as she scrambled for a place away from the whispers of the rrôn, from the grasping of the dead and her own self-doubts and nightmares. She drove herself and drove him, harder and faster, and finally he twisted his hands and wrists free from the bondage of the tangled shirt, and clutched her hips and took her over. With a powerful thrust of his hips and legs he flipped them so that she lay on the bottom, and he caught her ankles in his hands and pulled them up to either side of his neck.
"Nothing will haunt you but me," he said, leaning into her, pressing her thighs to her belly. "No ghosts, no demons, no regrets." He crashed into her, roared over her like a rising tide against a rocky shore, and she lifted up to catch him better and cried out as the exquisite drowning took her over and washed her away.
"Not yet," Seo said, and stilled himself inside her. When she calmed a bit, he ran his hands over her, stroking her gently. As she arched her back to press herself tighter against his hands, he smiled a little and slid his palms over her breasts, circling her nipples with his thumbs until she tingled and ached.
She gasped, and slid her legs down and locked them around his back and tried to force him all the way into her, but he just laughed, grabbed her hips, broke her hold on him, and turned her over. Now he pulled her up against him, and thrust, and she cried out.
In the back of her mind, the voices—whispering. Today, now—but nevermore.
The rrôn, the ghosts, her dread—none banished, all waiting. She threw herself into physical exertion, into roughness and mindless animal urge, and fought back the voices and the fear.
They dug and clawed and tumbled, rough strife and passion that raced the sun and burned like the end of the world. They rode wave after wave, thrashed and drowned and surfaced again, bit and rolled and drove harder, faster, wilder, until at last the riptide tore them f
rom the sea and threw them far up the shore. She screamed his name, he cried out in wordless release. She shuddered and trembled, inside and out, her legs too weak to hold her up, her body so sensitive to his touch that with each slightest movement he took her over the edge again. Inside her, nothing. No voices. No pain. Only the rush of the tide of her blood in her ears, the pounding of her wild heart.
In slow motion, they dropped forward, she flat against the table, he on her and in her. Both of them spent. Sated.
After a moment he rolled off of her and cupped his hand on the back of her head. They lay like that for a while, then he said, "Love?"
"Yes?"
"This was not the way I'd planned it."
"I didn't want soft music and candlelight. I didn't want long dance and slow consummation." She stared at nothing, her voice echoing in her ears. "I wanted you now."
"This wasn't about me," he said, and she could not argue with that, and so said nothing.
After a long silence, he said, "You can't hide from the things that frighten you. And you can't bury them away and pretend they aren't there."
"No," she said. "I know. They're still there."
"You have to face them. But you don't have to face them alone. I'll be with you, no matter what you fear. I love you, Molly."
Molly rolled over and looked in his eyes, and reached out with a finger to trace the line of his cheekbone and the lines of tattoos telling his life on his face. "I love you," she whispered.
"I know." His smile was tentative. "And that—that wasn't us." He stroked her. "That was your shadow, and perhaps mine. But shadows pass."
Only when darkness devours them, she thought, but she didn't say that. Instead, Molly said, "I hope so." The hollow ache lay beneath the placid surface of her thoughts, waiting to bubble up again. She could feel it, just as she could feel the pressure of the silenced voices. They were not gone. They only waited.
She wondered how she could banish them—what magical spell would set her free?
She kissed him lightly, then rose and pulled her clothes on. "I'm going to visit Lauren for a while," she said. "I don't want to leave you, but Lauren and I never did get to discuss everything we needed to. The—the attack got in the way of everything we needed to do." She had her back turned toward him while she said it, because she didn't want him to see the evasion in her eyes.
She wasn't going to Lauren's suite to talk to Lauren. With luck, Lauren would be tired and ready for bed, and Molly would be able to sit down without interruption with the books she'd hidden in Lauren's room—Molly would see what she could make of them. Sometime in the next few days, Molly thought she might take them in to see what Seolar pointed out and what he avoided, just to get a better idea of where she should be reading. But she didn't really want to know that he would lie to her. She thought perhaps she would keep the books to herself and tell him she'd decided not to do any more research.
Which meant she'd be lying to him. The way she was lying to him right now—lies of omission, not of commission. But still lies. Still betrayals.
Dressed, she leaned against the tall back of a heavy chair while he pulled on his clothes. He was beautiful. Not human—but then, neither was she, at least not fully. He had an inhuman grace, a sinuous strength that caught her breath and made her heart leap, and had since the first time she saw him.
They were meant to be together. Fated to share their lives—they meshed perfectly; and now more than ever she could feel what she had in him, and she could appreciate its perfection. But she felt like she held a goblet of sugar-glass in her hand and watched the storm clouds building overhead. None of this felt like it would last, like it could last.
Sometime in the 1600s, Andrew Marvell wrote a poem titled "To His Coy Mistress," a poem that Molly had memorized long ago for a class, and that had never left her since. The final words of that poem crept through her thoughts:
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Seolar smiled at her and as he did she could feel him sliding away from her, not just for the moment but forever. She remembered looking at him and seeing the future. But that had been before she died, before everything changed. It was so stupid—she knew she would live forever, or at least for as long as she wore the necklace. She could be killed, but she couldn't be kept dead; she ought to feel like she had an eternity before her. She ought to look at Seo and see them old together, and happy, with this present horror conquered and the world safe and whole.
But she felt as fragile, as fleeting as Andrew Marvell's coy mistress, already long past dust. She felt like she was already gone, and everything around her was just images receding outside the window of a fast-moving train. A train she could not stop, and could not escape.
She took a deep breath. Tears lay too close to the surface, and she would not let herself cry. She had no reason to cry.
When he finished dressing, she asked him, "What will they think? The guards, the servants?"
"They'll think I'm lucky," Seo said with a wry smile. "And they won't even dare to think that too loudly. Being the Imallin is no small advantage."
"Kiss me," she whispered.
He did. It was a soft, gentle, loving kiss, and she fell into it as if it were the last kiss she would ever have. She couldn't get off that train, not even when he held her in his arms.
"I should go," she told him. "Before it gets to be too late and I interrupt her sleep."
"I'll walk you to her quarters," he said, and held up a hand when she started to protest that it wasn't necessary. "I'll not trust you to anyone but myself. Not after today. I know all of my men. You don't. Had I been with you today, the traitor couldn't have gotten close to Lauren. I won't let such a monster harm you."
"I simply didn't want to be a bother."
He slid an arm around her waist. "Impossible. I've waited my whole life for you. You're a gift."
They walked out the doors of the great hall, past guards who stared straight ahead with expressionless faces, as if they knew of nothing unusual passing, as if they were on some regular duty. Molly had to fight to hide a sudden smile, had to fight off the abrupt urge to giggle. She would bet that if she snickered, one of them would, too, and that the laugh would spread until she left the whole bunch of them gripping their aching sides, teary-eyed and gasping for breath.
But she bit the inside of her lip and held it in. And the brief blissful silliness passed.
Copper House
Jake curled up in the center of the bed, sound asleep. Lauren had discovered a marvelous silver tea-maker and the matches to light the little built-in heater—the contraption didn't look like a samovar, but she guessed that it functioned the same way. And with her hot cup of tea and a big box of cookies she discovered in the pantry, she'd just settled into the rocking chair to drink and snack when Rue let her know that Molly and Seolar were headed for the suite.
She had time to put tea and cookies on a table and throw a robe over the soft white cotton pajamas she'd found in the wardrobe before they arrived.
She greeted them at the door.
"You knew we were coming," Molly asked.
Lauren didn't want to set Seolar off again, so she said, "Yes," and let it go at that.
"I thought we could do the talking we missed earlier today," Molly said.
Lauren didn't feel even a little bit like discussing her parents' p
lan or her duties to the worlds just yet. But she was a guest, and could not very well send Molly on her way. She told both of them, "Come in."
Seolar said, "I cannot, though I thank you for the invitation. Even a small Imal like mine requires constant attention, and I'm afraid the events today kept me from many of my obligations." He bowed, gave Molly a tiny, secretive smile that Lauren found fascinating, and headed down the hall, followed by only a few of the guards who had followed him up. The rest arrayed themselves up and down the hall, mixing with the guards who were responsible for Lauren, until it looked like Foreign Legion dress-up night.
Molly came just a step in, then leaned against the doorframe until Seolar was out of sight.
"I want to read those books," she said. She pulled two small, folded squares of what looked to Lauren like laminating plastic from deep pockets inside her silk skirt, and said, "Here. You wanted one of these."
