What would it feel like to take him inside? To find herself pinned beneath him, his heavy body crushing hers in that delicious dance Pahjah and her mother had only vaguely described to her before sending her off with her betrothed in the wedding caravan to Hofft. Try as she might even then, she had never been able to picture what it might be like to lie under Trystay until she saw him perched above the sorceress in his tent, but with Finn all she had to do was close her eyes and it was clear as day.
Urgent, heavy kisses, his soft tongue teasing at hers the way he’d done when he kissed her that first time, his soft, wet mouth devouring hers. The rough brush of his facial hair across her skin as those kisses trailed across her cheek, the tickle of his whispered breath against her ear.
A warm, delicious shock tightened at her very core, her small body reacting with an unexpected jerk that pushed her hips forward until she felt the warmth of his thigh between her legs. She was pulsing in places she had never done before, a steady, almost urgent beat like a heart, and when she realized what that meant her face grew hot as fire. She wanted him, and while she was pretty sure it was the whole mate-bond pulling her in the greater part of her didn’t care if she had a choice or not.
She wanted Finn with every part of her.
“What is wrong with me,” she whispered, lowering her head to rest on his chest again.
“Hmm?” he mumbled, half lifting his head off the pillow to look down at her. She didn’t dare tilt her face up and meet his sleepy gaze. One look into those incredible eyes of his and she would lose herself completely. She would throw her leg up over his hips and make him take her the way she knew deep down he wanted to.
“Nothing,” she muttered. “Go to sleep.”
“I am asleep.” He groaned and stretched into her, the hard warmth of his thigh pressing deeper between her legs, hand sliding up to rest on the small of her back and fingers twitching just above her backside before going slack again. Lorelei’s fingers tightened around the ties of his shirt, her eyes closed as she drew in a hard breath through her lips.
It was only a matter of seconds before he was snoring again, and another breath escaped her, this time one of relief.
She tuned into the beat of his heart, the steady thump-thump, thump-thump lulling her and distracting her mind from the horde of uncomfortable and terrifying thoughts that had been plaguing it since Brendolowyn had dropped her off outside Yovenna’s home.
She had thought telling someone what she’d learned from the seer would lighten the burden, but it hadn’t. If anything, sharing it with Finn only seemed to make it feel even realer than before.
Chosen to alter the repetitive course of their world, hand-picked by the gods to slay a mystical serpent no one had ever seen, and even fewer seemed to know about outside the elven communities.
For some reason, that thought was like a flint striking light inside her mind, and she pushed herself up onto her elbow in the bed. Would Brendolowyn know about the Tid Ormen? Maybe that was why the seer said the elf-mage was a necessary part of her journey.
Was it possible the story had been passed down to him by the elders in the village where he’d been raised? Maybe he would have answers for her.
Or maybe you’re just looking for an excuse to go and see him, a voice in the back of her mind prompted. Oddly enough, that voice sounded an awful lot like Finn, and she felt immediately guilty and self-conscious.
No. It wasn’t like that.
She lifted her head again to glance at Finn, felt the unconscious twitch of his fingers against her skin again and sighed. It wasn’t like that at all. Whether she wanted to believe it, or not, her heart would never betray Finn. The seer assured her he was her chosen mate. She just wanted to know if Brendolowyn knew anything that might help her, and though there would be plenty of time to talk to him in the morning, she also knew there was no way she’d ever get a chance to talk with him alone with Finn around.
He was already jealous of Bren; she could feel it whenever the mage was near her. Finn’s scornful eye watching, the slight increase in his heart rate whenever she laughed or blushed when the other man made an obvious attempt to flirt with her. Remembering her guilty dream from that morning, she knew despite her self-assurance she would never betray Finn, a part of her was more than just a little attracted to Brendolowyn.
How was it going to make Finn feel when he found out she sneaked off in the middle of the night to find someone he obviously thought was competition for her heart. She could have just woke him and talked to him about her fears. Should have done, was more like it. If he was her mate, and what she needed to establish between them was a bond of trust that allowed her to share the most intimate parts of herself with him, including her fears, why would she seek out someone else to comfort her?
No. It wasn’t comfort, she told herself. There was a strong possibility Bren knew things about her quest because of where he’d come from. She was seeking peace of mind; there was a difference. Wasn’t there?
But even as she offered those thoughts to her troubled mind, her heart didn’t feel reassured by them.
For several minutes she laid stiff and silent, her mind racing through a series of thoughts that should have had no bearing over the course of her future. Who she chose as a mate was the least important factor of all, considering all that waited on her path, but she still felt guilty when she began sliding her back quietly along the wall until her feet reached the floor at the end of the bed. Her movement didn’t disturb him. Finn didn’t even stir, his arm dropping slowly onto the mattress to rest in the place she’d been just seconds before. She grabbed her cloak from the back of the chair near the corner and flung it across her shoulders, then she tiptoed toward the door.
She was painstakingly aware of every footstep, every creaking board screaming out like an alarm.
Sneak!
Betrayer!
Harlot!
But Finn never woke. In fact, when she reached for the handle of the door he rolled onto his side and faced the wall with a contented groan, his breathing immediately returning to normal.
Lorelei grabbed her boots from beside the door before she slipped out of the room and peered down the hallway. There was a single lantern on the table, and the hearth burned low, casting eerie shadows through the silent house. As she crept through the house she kept expecting her brother to emerge, catching her in the act and asking where she was going, but no one woke, no one caught her, and when she slipped through the door and into the night it was with a heavy exhale of relief, her breath misting out in front of her in a long, silver cloud.
The streets were silent, eerily lit by the moons overhead and the strange, mystical lamps posted in front of each house that cast a creepy green glow across the paving stones in the street.
It still amazed her how advanced Dunvarak was; that small city felt like it was an age ahead of Rivenn. Where she might have gotten lost in the streets had her parents ever let her wander them, she made her way easily toward the Lyceum by simply following the lights that lined the houses. She turned left into the alleyway Bren had taken her down earlier that day and found herself staring at Yovenna’s small hut as she passed by. The single window glowed orange with the firelight from within, a hunched shadow moving in front of the hearth.
Did the seer know she was passing by? Was her nightly wandering even important enough to merit someone’s knowing about it? While it felt very important and clandestine to her, she doubted it would matter much to anyone else, not even an old woman who’d spent her entire life making the course of Lorelei’s life and existence her business.
Glancing up and away from the hut, she watched the great shadow of the tower lengthen across the street, as the red crescent of the moon peeked out from behind the mass of dark black clouds it hid behind. It looked menacingly brilliant, overwhelming and enticing at the same time, and it took her several minutes to find the courage to actually begin walking toward it again.
As she approached, she spied two
guards posted at the gates, both standing stiff and tall, their long axes perched in front of them, their stern faces staring straight ahead from beneath their dome-shaped helmets. Only when she approached and drew down the hood of her cloak did the guard on the right turn to look at her, his eyes lighting beneath the shadow of his helmet when he realized who she was.
“Our bright lady.” He began to bow in reverence, but Lorelei reached a hand out to stop him, her fingers curling around the cold metal of his armored arm. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company on this long, cold night, Light of Madra?”
“Please, don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t do that.”
“Lady,” the man on her left began, “what brings you to this place? The hour is late and no one in the village, save for the mages, is permitted to enter the lyceum after sundown.”
“I wish to see Brendolowyn Raven-Storm.” That trickle of guilt she felt over being there intensified, tightening in her stomach like a clenched fist. Now someone would know she’d come; how long before word of her visit got back to Finn? “Is he here?”
“He is, but…”
“It is very important that I speak to him,” she insisted, cutting the guard off.
“Not important enough to wait until morning? The hour is late, many of the mages are asleep and their rest is required to keep our city running and our boundary intact.”
She started to answer, the words stuck unspoken on her tongue, but she did not need to speak them for the shadow of an old man appeared in the doorway, the sconces on either side revealing his face when she looked up. He was a tall man, the greying locks of his hair twisted into a single, thick braid that hung over his shoulder and down his chest. From beneath the shadow of his tall, pointed hat she saw his eyes, or rather his eye, for the right one was little more than an empty, puckered socket.
“Let her enter,” the old man said. “The Light of Madra is always welcome here, no matter how late the hour.”
“Of course, Archmage Audun,” they conceded, stepping away from the stairs leading into the tower to allow her entry.
“Thank you,” she nodded to them both, gripped the hem of her skirt and started up the stairs at a quick pace.
The archmage stepped aside, pushing open the thick wooden door behind him. The light from within shone upon the door at his back, revealing intricately carved runes and magical symbols similar to the writings that decorated the sleeves and hemline of Bren’s robes.
“Protection,” he said in a stiff, gruff voice, as if he’d read her thoughts as she studied the runes. “Even in a place such as this, where we are far from the persecution of those who do not understand our ways, it never hurts to ensure our safety with a little protective magic.” Shuffling in behind her, he pulled the door closed with a heavy thunk that echoed through the rising stone walls of the tower.
From the center rose a long, spiraling staircase flanked by four doors leading deeper into the tower. The archmage stopped at the bottom of the staircase and said, “Brendolowyn is likely in the library. He has been preparing scrolls for the journey ahead, despite that I have already told him his magic will be all but useless without the rest his body needs to wield it.”
“May I see him? Even though the hour is so late?”
“Of course,” he nodded.
“Where is the library?” She glanced upward, her eyes winding around the tall stairs before returning to the old man in front of her.
“The thirteenth floor,” he too looked toward the stairs. “Pardon me if I do not show you the way. These old bones don’t often make it to the library, but if you follow this staircase to the very top of the tower, you will find him there.”
“Thank you, sir.” She couldn’t believe he would just let her wander through the lyceum alone, especially considering how strict the outside guards had seemed about allowing anyone into the tower after sundown, but the archmage only nodded at her, and then watched as she began to climb the stairs one by one.
“Remind him of the hour when you arrive, would you please? Sometimes he forgets that the world continues moving beyond these walls when he is working.”
“Of course I will,” she promised and then began the long ascent toward the library.
Each landing was constructed identically to the ground floor, the rising, open staircase revealing four doors at each corner of the tower. She didn’t know much about magic, or architecture for that matter, but she did know the mages paid tribute in rituals to the four corners, calling often upon winds from the north, south, east and west. It only made sense that their towers would be built to honor those corners and the power they lent to their magic.
Even though she saw no one, she could feel the presence of other mages on each floor, the heavy weight of their magic making the air all around her feel stiff and constrictive. Her skin tingled with chills, and her darting eyes scanned the closed doors of every landing, catching runic inscriptions above each one. She wondered what they meant, what protection or magic they lent to the space behind those doors.
It felt an endless climb, and she actually lost track of the floors by the time she reached the ninth, or maybe it was the tenth. She was beginning to think there was no end to those stairs when at last she arrived at the top and breathed in the familiar, wondrous, musky scent of old books, parchment and new ink. She scanned the interior of the vast, open library, her spirit leaping within at the site of so much wisdom collected in one place.
As a child the library in the palace had often been one of her favorite places to hide from Mirien when they were playing. Though she hated taking her lessons there every day, (and with good reason she discovered, as Master Davan had been passing nothing but half-truths and bold lies onto them anyway, and they’d taken great care to prohibit books that might actually teach them anything from being displayed there,) there was something exciting about standing amid all of that wisdom, as if she might hold out her arms and simply breathe it all into herself. Maybe it was like that for mages, she thought, stepping off the landing and into the library. Maybe they simply opened their arms and invited the world’s secrets into their bones. Wouldn’t that be something?
The library was brighter than any of the other floors she’d passed on the way up, with several ethereal lanterns perched on the ends of every shelf and lighting the room like midday. It was silent, almost eerily so, but underneath it she could hear the distant, almost frantic scritch-scratch of a sharpened quill dancing across dry parchment. She followed the sound, passing long, high shelves teeming with books far older than she was and compartments that housed ancient scrolls she wouldn’t dare touch for fear of them crumbling into her hands, their knowledge disappearing from the world forever.
The shelves seemed to go on and on for miles, but she continued following them until they finally led her to an open area containing several tables and desks, all of them empty save for one.
Brendolowyn didn’t see or hear her approach, and for a moment, Lorelei stood near the last shelf with her arms at her sides watching the half-elven mage scribble furiously left-wise across a long roll of parchment that dangled over the edge of the table. The curled end of the parchment bobbed and bounced with every swift dart of his hand, rustling like dry leaves on the wind.
The sleeves of his robes had been pushed to his elbows, and for the first time Lorelei saw in detail the tattoos that marked his skin. Flowing spirals, the once-black ink faded blue against his golden skin, ravens flying up the length of his right arms, linked wings spiraling along his forearm and disappearing into his sleeve. The body of a snake circled his left wrist, and strange runes followed the scaled curves of the serpent slinking into the shadows of fabric hiding the rest of his skin.
How far did they go, she wondered? Up his shoulder, across his chest, along his back? Was he covered in ink, the marked evidence of trials and achievements he had undertaken in his lifetime permanently etched into his flesh? Pahjah had been marked, too, as a child, she’d told Lorelei and her sister when
they were girls, but the marks she wore were hidden always beneath the long sleeves of her tunic and never to be revealed in the king’s presence. She had let them see once, had told them what the patterns meant, but every elf’s tattoos were different, significant to his or her own chosen path, Pahjah said. Lorelei understood the ravens, after the story he shared about his childhood, but what did the snake mean, and even more intriguing, what other symbols marked his body?
Brendolowyn stopped scrawling, reaching across the table to drop the quill into the ink pot, where he left it when he brought his hands up to bury his face as a hollow yawn escaped him. His long fingers crawled upward, disappearing into the long, golden-brown mass of his braided and tangled hair. The pointed tips of his ears were exposed with the movement, and she saw gold rings lining the flesh there, jostling with the rise of his hair as he gathered it into a long ponytail atop his head and then released it. The braids fell back into his face, slapping against his temples and cheeks as a long, weary breath escaped him.
Lorelei swallowed, her mouth feeling drier than she’d expected it to when she parted her lips to speak, but before she could find her tongue the raven perched on the shelf above her cawed, its sharp tone echoing through the silent library and startling them both equally.
“My lady.” His head snapped up, the chair pushing backward as he quickly rose to greet her. “Hrafn, that is no way to announce a lady’s presence. You scared her half to death,” he scolded the bird, which fluttered its wings and flew down to land on the table beside the ink pot. “You’ll have to excuse me, Lady Lorelei. I wasn’t expecting anyone at this hour, least of all, you. To what do we owe this unexpected, but very pleasant surprise?” The sleeves at his elbows dropped down his long arms, recovering the tattoos she’d been admiring only moments before.
“I couldn’t sleep.” This came out sounding more a question than an answer, and she advanced tentatively toward the table.
Edgelanders (Serpent of Time) Page 52
