Page 10 of Fate’s Bane

T HE W EDDING

A year passed, and most of another. The Queen-Beyond-the-Fens sent more emissaries, and whatever dispute arose because of the dead warrior was smoothed over.

Hadhnri’s and my aging day would come at the next Sunstead, but before that came second Ha’night.

As the leaves of the Baneswood changed color, it was time for those who wished to marry to pledge their troth in the sight of the clan.

It would have been little more than another celebration to me, if not for Gunni counting among them.

Not to the Queen-Beyond-the-Fens, as he’d sworn, but to Efrig, a woman as tall as he but more beautiful by far.

He had dodged the luck-hound, we made certain to tell him at every opportunity.

Hadhnri even threatened to steal her from him if he could not please her, and they had pup-tussled in the dirt, yipping and tickling until Hadhnri begged for mercy, tears of laughter in her eyes.

Now, Hadhnri and I sat on benches on opposite sides of the room while we watched three couples take their oaths in front of the chieftain’s chair.

There had been drumming, but it had stopped, the better to hear the words the couples spoke.

Nocrin stared at his new husband with tears in his eyes.

Efrig recited her oath with a fox’s smirk while Gunni grinned, guileless with joy.

It stirred an acrid longing in my chest.

Though she’d been offered many, Hadhnri had taken no one’s love-lock.

She couldn’t tell them that she kept my own in her pocket, and so people thought her vain, or silly, or childish.

Too absorbed with her work. Pedhri Clan Aradoc would set his eye upon her soon, now that Gunni was wed and she to be grown in a few months’ time.

He wouldn’t force her to wed, but he would suspect her reasons, and that would not bode well for me.

When the oaths were spoken and water from the fen was daubed across their heads by Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s hand, a loud cheer rose to the roof of the roundhouse.

Then there was chaos and laughter as friends of the couples attacked them, unclasping cloaks and whisking away jackets and tugging at belts; as other couples, wed and unwed, found each other and kissed and teased at buttons and clasps; as those who were not participating in the wedding festivities made their laughing exits, chivvying the children out before them.

I met Hadhnri’s eye across the room, and she nodded subtly.

I left while she hung back to steal her brother’s cloak.

Outside, the air was apple-sweet and crisp with the Ha’night chill nibbling the edge of summer’s last heat.

A bonfire kept it from seeping into the bones, and the season’s first batch of cider flowed freely.

Malgin, a girl a year younger than I, handed me a cup and smiled shyly from beneath thick, dark eyelashes.

I took it without thinking, and then she laced her fingers between mine and spun me beneath her hand to the quick-whistle heartbeat of the night.

It might have been innocent. It might have been foolish and bold, as Hadhnri was, in defiance of the unspoken rule—no one had given me a love-lock but Hadhnri.

No one but Hadhnri had ever dared show an interest in me.

It was startling, and pleasant in its novelty, and I let her lead me around the fire once before I broke our dance with an awkward smile of my own.

I had somewhere to be.

I found Hadhnri standing outside of the roundhouse, wearing her brother’s heavy fur cloak jauntily off her shoulder. Her arms were crossed, her eyebrow cocked like her hip.

“Malgin? She never struck me as the kind you favor.”

I laughed and glanced back at Malgin, who was dancing someone else around the circle now, her shoulders broad and her steps as certain as Hadhnri’s. She was exactly the kind I favored.

“Are you jealous?” I danced around her, my fingers grazing her lower back.

Her stare devoured me. She said simply, in a low voice, “Yes.”

Heat rose up my neck to the tips of my ears. “Hurry.”

We crept away from the burning light of the fire and beyond our hamlet, into the wild fens. The silence was so sudden, the night so dark, that I thought my ears stopped with mud and my eyes as well. I glanced behind us to make sure no one had followed. Only then did I take Hadhnri’s hand in mine.

In the months that had passed since the winter Sunstead, Hadhnri and I had desperately sought a chance to be alone.

For a chance to explore beyond the furtive kisses we pressed into each other when we had a moment unchaperoned.

We waited for Pedhri Clan Aradoc to leave on clan business, but whenever he went, Gunni stayed, a shit-clod clinging to our boots.

At the last Ha’night, as the leaves returned to the trees and fens swelled with rainwater again, we thought Gunni would stay in the roundhouse with Efrig; they’d already shown signs, then.

But no. He’d joined us around the fire, goading us into games and drinking the last of the winter’s cider until we were all so drunk that Hadhnri and I hadn’t a hope of sneaking away.

But not tonight. It was Gunni’s wedding night, and Pedhri Clan Aradoc remained in the roundhouse with the rest of the celebrants. My stomach leapt with the thought of it. A lucky thing that Malgin had danced with me. Perhaps people would remember seeing me last with her, and not with Hadhnri.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay in the roundhouse with the rest of them?” Hadhnri asked in the dark. Her voice hid a mischief.

I snorted and shoved her away. The same yearning I’d felt during the oath-making stole over me again, though.

What would it be like to share in the tradition of the wedding night, the joyous and unburdened fervor, separate but spurred on by the communal?

It would have been harder, much harder, for us to hide, even in the darkness of the roundhouse.

I said, “I want to find the spring again.”

She found my hand again in the dark. “Have you been to it since…”

I shook my head, realized she might not see it, and murmured, “No. I thought—maybe we would have to be together. Like we were then.”

“Do you remember the way?”

“We’ll find it.”

We walked, trotted occasionally. Hadhnri grew impatient, tugging me back to her for kisses, each one asking more than the last. When we made it to the Baneswood, though, we could not find the spring.

“It’s too dark, Agnir.”

“We’ll find it.”

I stopped, bewildered, in a clearing beneath a willow. “It should be here. This is where we found it, isn’t it?”

“We were children. Surely we did not run so deep?”

It was difficult to see in the dark, but it was clear there was no spring.

The air was cool, but it was the ordinary coolness of the Ha’night evening, not the frigid cold of that spring.

The only sound was the crunch of twig and leaf beneath our boots.

Not even squirrel-chatter. It sent a chill up my back.

“Agnir.” Hadhnri spun me into her. She kissed me again, drinking me deep, and my whole body tightened with the pleasure of it. “Please. Someone will look for us soon, and if you don’t touch me, I will drown myself in the Ene—”

“Don’t!” I press her lips closed with my hand. “Do not speak so. Not here. Not even in jest.”

She dropped her gaze, chagrined, but it didn’t stop her from flitting her tongue out against my fingers and pulling me closer. “Then touch me.”

“Ah.” I let slip a moan at the flick of her tongue. “Here?”

“By Fate, yes,” she breathed against me. “Here, anywhere, so long as you do it now.”

How was I to deny what I had desired for so long? I surrendered, and she swept me under in her river-swift rush.

When she and I had our first Making, I thought that was what loving her would be like.

The same coming together, the same understanding of where she stopped and where I began and how that line blurred and blurred.

This was like that, and it was nothing like that.

In the workshop, I didn’t think of our bodies beyond the heat of her beside me on the bench.

Now I could think of nothing but the fog of her breath against my cheek, of the apple-swell of her breast beneath my hand, the plaintive, wind-sharp keening from her throat.

We were lost, the two of us beneath Gunni’s fur cloak.

Somewhere, back in the darkness of the clan’s roundhouse, other couples made their furtive moves, some silent, some perhaps less than silent, and at the center, the joyous couples and the racket of their lovemaking and the drunken cheers from other pallets as the newly wed cried out.

None of that existed for me or Hadhnri. There was us and this moment, alone together in the Baneswood, and though she would not have admitted it, I knew it would be our last, our only.

Pedhri Clan Aradoc would not let her have me, no matter how she begged.

Not if I begged with her, and I would not.

No, he would refuse us, but we would also not be able to hide that we had done this.

Someone would have seen us retreat together—and who would we surprise?

No one in the clan; all knew Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s ward and his daughter were nigh inseparable. Certainly not Pedhri himself.

Knowing this, I buried myself deeper inside her so she would always have a part of me, holding her close in the sweat-dank heat of our clothing until she broke against me.

“Agnir,” she murmured against my lips. I shivered in response, resting limp against her until her hand stirred between my legs. She rolled me onto my back, said my name again, and it quickened me—as if I weren’t already straining taut. “Sweet Agnir.”

“Hadhnri?” It came like a request, but I could not say—exactly—what I was asking for.

She held herself over me on her elbow. Used to the darkness now, I could make out the tenderness around her mouth.

“By my name and my clan, I, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc, pledge myself to you, Agnir Clan Fein,” she whispered.

She stole my breath from me with that oath, tonight of all nights—or perhaps with the steadiness of her hand.

I said, chest hitching, “That’s three times you’ve sworn. You will make a spell of this.”

“I will,” she breathed. “And I will swear again and again if it will keep you by my side.”

I bound her to me then, my legs around her hips, my hands around her neck, and in her ear, I whispered, “By my name and my clan, I, Agnir Clan Fein, pledge myself to you, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc.”

And so I learned what it was to be unmade by the hands of another.

“We should go back,” I whispered sometime later, the sweat on our bodies drying cold.

Hadhnri murmured, love-drunk, from her spot in my neck: “I don’t want to go back.”

“We’ll be missed. Or do you want to live out our days in the Baneswood?”

“Run away with me,” she whined. “Are we not wed?”

I smiled against her forehead. “We are wed. But that is our heart-secret, and it will not be a secret if we don’t go back now.”

Abruptly, Hadhnri stood to riffle through our discarded clothing. Then she returned, shifting from foot to foot, staring down at me, at turns impish and shy, hiding her hands behind her back.

“What?” I lay back on my elbows, smug. “What have you done?”

“I made these for you,” she blurted.

Hadhnri thrust two leather bracers into my face. They were tooled in a simple, elegant pattern of knotted bramble. She must have made them without me. I took them carefully.

“I don’t have—”

Hadhnri waved my words away. “They’re to protect you. As long as I live, no harm will come to you.”

I froze. “A Making?” Then I concentrated, and I could feel Hadhnri in it, the way I could in every Making. “You did it alone?”

Hadhnri nodded, her bashfulness returned.

To say I was not frightened would have been a lie. I should have reminded her of her promise. They were beautiful, though, and Hadhnri would never Make malice toward me.

“I love them. Help me put them on.”