She put her hands into his beard, sinking her fingers into its length. It made him look like a barbarian or something. It wasn’t… bad exactly. “So, what did I do when you thought of me? Did I touch you?”
He chuckled. “You did.” His voice was thick.
“Where?”
His hand moved through the water to seize hers and he pulled her hand down.
She closed her fingers around him. “Oh, here? Well, this was forward of me.”
“You were incredibly forward,” he said. “But I thought about touching you too. I thought about looking at you.” His hands found her breasts.
She sighed.
He moaned.
Neither spoke for a few moments. His fingers were teasing the tips of her breasts, and they were very clever with whatever they were doing, and she felt languid and loose and free and good. She stroked him under the water, her fingers gliding over his silky hardness. This was good.
He kissed her, and he moved against her in such a way that he dislodged her grasp between his thighs. His mouth was against her cheekbone, his voice low and rumbling. “I thought we were taking a bath to get clean.”
“Mmm,” she managed. His thumb was still teasing one of her sensitive tips. “I did bring soap.” She flung an arm out of the bath, reaching without looking for the bar of soap. Miraculously, her fingers brushed it, and she grabbed it and brought it back into the tub.
He snatched it from her and began to rub the bar of soap over her skin, leaving a slippery film that his fingers could glide against.
She groaned.
They did a lot of scrubbing. All over. Neither of them had really been properly cleaned in the gods knew how many years. And, of course, there was something delightful about being able to put their hands on each other. So, they scrubbed. And caressed. And kissed. When the water was cold, they got out, dripping. They wrapped up in towels and went down the halls to a room with a narrow bed.
They were distracted from putting sheets and blankets on the bed by kissing each other. They kissed with her body pressed up against the wall, Eithan against her, trapping her there. They kissed with Eithan against the wardrobe, her practically climbing him as she claimed his lips. They kissed on the unmade mattress, his fingers tangled in her hair and her hands undoing his towel from his waist.
And then he was inside her before they even bothered with putting on sheets, and he was everything, suddenly. He was all she could feel and all she could see and all she could smell—he still had that faint scent of pine somehow, where did it come from? Her hips bucked against his and they clutched each other.
She felt as if she couldn’t get him close enough. She wanted him closer. She wanted all of him.
He gasped against her eyebrow.
She writhed beneath him as he pinned her to the mattress.
And then…
It was only a few moments, but she had the strangest sensation, as if somehow they’d merged, as if they were connected, and he was flowing into her, and she was flowing into him, and they were the same, just pieces of each other that had been searching to find the other half of a whole being all this time, and that now… now, they were together and everything was perfect.
But then abruptly, she had a thought, and her eyes popped open, and the spell was shattered.
“Eithan.” Her voice was urgent.
He was panting. “What?”
“Can you not… inside me?”
He opened his eyes too and looked down at her. “Yeah,” he said in a different voice. “Yeah, of course. I’ll…”
Then it was strange. Still nice, still good, physically lovely, their bodies entwined, the pleasure pulsing through her, but not… they were separate. When he slid out of her body and thrust against the softness of her belly, she gasped to feel the spill of his cold seed, and he pulled away from her too quickly to get his towel off the floor.
She pulled him down against her. She didn’t care about that. She wanted him close. She missed him inside her. It felt suddenly like a gaping missing part, and she was undone and incomplete. Tears stung her eyes.
“Hold me,” she whispered.
And he did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nicce’s eyes were closed and Eithan was moving his towel on her stomach in rhythmic circles. She wasn’t sure there was anything left to clean there. She was thinking that he was focusing on her belly for a different reason.
She tried to tell herself to stop thinking about it, but she almost wished she hadn’t told him to pull out, that she’d just let him finish inside her, just because it had ruined everything, and now she had lost that loose, good feeling she’d found with him in the tub.
“I need to talk to you about something.” Eithan’s voice cracked.
She opened her eyes, raising her head. “What’s wrong?”
He balled up the towel and threw it off the bed. “We should make the bed. If we’re going to sleep, then—”
“No, you don’t. What do you need to talk to me about?”
“I…” He vaulted up, out of the bed, and he went to the wardrobe to take out sheets. “I don’t know why I said that. Just forget about it.”
She sat up straight. “I can’t forget about it.”
He turned, arms full of fabric. He gestured with his head for her to get up.
She did, feeling too naked suddenly. She started combing her fingers through her damp hair, thinking that whatever they’d just done had only introduced further tangles. She had done her best to keep her hair untangled in the dungeon, more out of boredom than any other real reason. “Is it because I told you to pull out?”
“No,” he said, tucking the sheets around the mattress. He paused. “Yes.”
“You want to get me pregnant?” she said in a very tiny voice.
He shook his head. “No, that’s insane. That’s obviously insane. We couldn’t possibly…” He looked at her. “I’m… my head…” He touched his temple. “And we have nowhere to live, and we don’t know what year it is, and…”
She didn’t look at him, raking her fingers through her hair. “I don’t understand.”
He was busying himself with smoothing out the sheets, and he didn’t speak.
She ran her fingers through her hair until there was no resistance. She stopped.
He sat down on the bed. He scratched his chin through his beard. “All right, well… I don’t even… I didn’t think you’d come for me.” He smirked. “It’s pathetic that I had already given up on rescuing myself, that I was sitting in that cell waiting for you, but—”
“It’s not pathetic.” She crossed to the bed and sat down next to him. She started to reach for him, but then she stopped.
He glanced at her. He swallowed. “Do you want to… lie down?”
She hesitated, then nodded. She wanted to be covered up and close to him. Sitting here next to each other, neither of them wearing clothes, it was just… wrong.
They arranged themselves. In moments, they were lying on the narrow bed, the sheets over their bodies, and she was lying on her side with her head against his shoulder and her hand on his chest, and his hand rested on her hip, but outside the covers, so she could feel his cold skin through the sheet.
And then, he didn’t say anything.
So she prompted him. “Why didn’t you think I would come for you?”
He drew in a breath, as though he was going to speak, but then he let it out.
“Eithan, I wouldn’t have left you there. You wouldn’t have left me there. Why would you think that?”
“I thought you’d forget about me, I suppose.” His voice was insubstantial. “We… whatever we have, it’s sort of all-encompassing for me, but you…”
“It is for me too,” she said.
“That’s the thing, I don’t think it is,” he muttered.
She pushed herself up and looked down on him, resting her weight on her hand. “What does this even have to do with asking you to pull out?”
He
winced. “Nothing. It shouldn’t. It’s… I’m an idiot.”
“Don’t do that.” She was frustrated. “Talk to me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You’re not an idiot.” She waited. Nothing from him. “Maybe you’re not telling me because you know it doesn’t make sense, and you’re embarrassed to say it out loud. But maybe you need to hear it out loud, so that you can hear how it’s ridiculous.”
“You were talking about killing gods when we were leaving the dungeons,” he said. “It’s, you know, your destiny or something. You told me about this, how you’re destined for greatness and you can feel it, and… nothing else compares to that for you, does it? Men are just… distractions for you. Didn’t you call that fisherman a distraction?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. That was a long time ago. But you can’t be jealous of Zed. I didn’t feel anything for him. What I feel for you, it’s… it’s so much more.”
“I’m not jealous.” He shook his head. “Not of him. If I’m jealous of anything, it’s…”
“What?”
He sat up, too, and so she rearranged herself, tugging the sheet up over her chest. They surveyed each other. He rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re it for me, Nicce. You’re the love of my life.”
“You are for me, too.” She snatched at his hand and pulled it against her chest.
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m not enough.” He pulled his hand back.
She knitted her brows together.
“You said it before,” he said. “When we talked about getting married, you said that it was the end, and that you weren’t finished. But that’s not how I think about starting a life with you. I think of it as a beginning.”
Her lips parted. Her fingers tightened around handfuls of sheets and she looked down at them. “This… this isn’t… you want me to stop chasing the gods?”
“I…” He shook his head.
“I thought that was something we did together. I thought we were god killers, you know?” She gave him a tentative smile.
“Maybe I was,” he said. “But… after being in that cell…”
Her hand darted out and she closed her fingers around one of his hands again. “It was bad for me in the cell, too. Really bad. We need to rest and regroup. We’re not ready yet to take on anything, but eventually, we’ll figure out a way to attack, and we’ll—”
“Nicce.”
“What?”
“I don’t know if I can.” He sighed heavily. “I might be broken.”
“You’re not.” She squeezed his fingers. “You said you were better.”
“Well, she’s not…” He looked into the corner of the room, as if he expected someone to materialize out of the wall. “She’s not talking to me anymore. They’re gone, but I…” He turned to her. “What if I wanted something else? What if I wanted something quiet somewhere? What if I wanted to marry you and raise children and…”
“Live?” she whispered, her voice breaking.
He nodded.
She let go of his hand. Her throat was tight. “Is that what you want?”
“I want you,” he said.
“You don’t, though.” She shook her head. “Because this is me. I chase gods and I fight with swords and I kill things. I’m not a… a mother. I’d be terrible at it.”
He didn’t react, and she only breathed, and they looked at each other for long, long moments that seemed to open up and swallow them.
He licked his lips.“So… never?”
“I…”
He looked away, his voice quiet. “You don’t ever want to do that? Not even if we managed it, if we killed all the gods? You wouldn’t…? Not even then?”
She wavered, unsure. “Eithan, I’ve never given the thought of children any serious thought. Maybe…” She cocked her head, looking him over, thinking about a little house surrounded by a meadow of tall grass and small hands and giggles and her arms full of… maybe…
“What if…?” He squared his shoulders. “You could take breaks? You could leave the babies with me, and go off and do whatever it is you think you need to do, and then come home to us in between quests?”
“Since when are children so important to you?”
“I don’t know.” He flopped back on the bed. “Maybe they aren’t. Two days ago, I had no capacity to want anything for myself. I was a mess, out of my head, talking to shadows. I’d probably be a horrible father. I kill things too, you know?”
She picked at her thumbnail.
“It’s because you took them away,” he said finally. “If you said someday, I could wait for that, but if you don’t ever want to…”
“If I don’t want children, then what?” She was horrified. “What are you saying?”
He shut his eyes. “This is stupid. I don’t know why we’re talking about this right now. There are so many other things we should be worried about. This is not…”
“If I don’t want children, you’ll leave me?”
He flinched again. He didn’t open his eyes.
“You’ll find someone else?” she said. “I thought I was the love of your life.”
“Gods take you,” he breathed.
She got out of the bed.
“Nicce, where are you going?” He was reaching for her.
She went to the wardrobe and pulled out one of the tunics that was hanging there. She shook it out, brushing off the dust and age. It was cleaner than the clothes she’d been wearing when she came in. She shrugged into it.
“Nicce, please.” His voice broke again. Tears were gleaming in his eyes.
She turned away. He never used to cry, and now he was constantly crying. Maybe he was broken. And maybe she was insane to be thinking about the stupid gods. That wasn’t the most important thing to her, of course. Eithan was important. She loved Eithan. But if she gave this up for him, if she stopped and hid somewhere and bore his children and settled into some sort of mundane existence… how long until she grew to hate him for taking this away from her? “I just need to…” She left the sentence unfinished.
“You should rest,” he said. “You need to sleep. You’re exhausted.”
“No, I’m just going to go for a walk.”
“If you want to be away from me, I’ll leave,” he said. “You take the bed.”
She snatched a pair of breeches and threw herself out of the room.
“Nicce!” he called after her.
She ran.
* * *
Eithan rolled over in the bed and buried his face in the pillow, which smelled faintly of must. He cursed himself. Why couldn’t he stay quiet? Why had he said those things to her? What was wrong with him?
He didn’t go after her.
He wanted to make it right, but he didn’t know how. He curled up in a ball and closed his eyes. He didn’t mean to sleep, didn’t need to sleep, but when he opened his eyes, the pattern of the sun and shadows in the room was different. It was later.
He got up and dressed in another set of clothing that was hanging in the wardrobe in the room and went looking for her.
He wandered the corridors, up and down, looking in each room. He began to worry that she’d left, that he’d chased her away, and that she’d go off on her own to try to kill the gods. Despite what he’d said to her about her going off on quests while he stayed home to raise children, he would never let her do something so dangerous by herself.
Gods take her.
Where in the pit was she?
Finally, he found her in the library of the Guild, surrounded by moldy books, sitting at a dusty table. She looked up at him.
“Have you slept?” he said.
“I fell asleep reading,” she said. “Right here.” She pointed to a place where the dust had been disturbed. “Now I have a crick in my neck.”
“Let’s forget about everything I said.” He pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her.
She nodded.
“I didn’t mean any of it,” he said. “All I want is to be near you. I want to be wherever you are.”
Her gaze locked with his, and her expression was so open and lost that he wanted to pull her into his arms, but the table was between them. She tried a smile. “Listen, maybe after, once the gods are gone and the world is safe, maybe then… If you think I could be a mother, then maybe I could try—”
“No, don’t. You don’t have to do that.” He pulled the book she was reading over and scanned the page. “You’re reading myths about the gods? The Feteran myth?”
She pulled it back. “We need to figure out other things before we can possibly think of going after the gods. We need to find the other knights. I know you must be worried about them. We don’t know what happened to them, but I guess they didn’t get across the oceans if Phir’s crystals are out there, blocking the way.”
He nodded. He’d thought of this, of course. They must still be in the Four Kingdoms. He hoped they were safe. He’d spent so many years trying to keep them safe. “Yes, I need to find them.”
“So, let’s do that,” she said. “Let’s not even talk about god killing.”
“Nicce…”
She shook her head at him, and his voice died in his throat.
It was quiet, and the silence went on for a long, long time.
She coughed. “I know all these stories anyway. And we talked to Feteran. We know that he didn’t really know how to kill the gods. This did remind me of the version I found in Castle Brinne, though. It was different. In that version, Feteran was trying to dismantle a bridge to the Eliaath Fields. A bridge made of ice crystals.” She furrowed her brow. “That’s a weird detail, isn’t it, knowing what we know?”
“It is,” he said. “Do you think there is a bridge?” Then he paused, realizing. “The portals are bridges in a way.”
She shut the book. “Let’s not talk about this.”
He scratched his chin. “Are there… you think I could find a razor somewhere?”
“You’re going to shave it?” Was there disappointment in her voice?
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