Page 58 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

I pushed him, too. Pushed him back against the opposite wall and followed, sliding my hands under leather to find him with the knowledge that belongs to bodies and not to courtiers.

His spine met stone; his head tipped; he let me take what I needed as if he had been told, finally, what tenderness looks like on the side of the person who took the first blow.

I dragged my mouth along the line of his throat where dragon heat is strongest. He swore softly.

My lips found the place where his pulse beats, where last night I had learned how to count battle with my mouth, and I bit, not to mark him, but to test whether blood tastes the same when it is heated by fury and not by love.

It does.

He said my name, not as an accusation this time, not the low warning he uses when he wants obedience, but the way a starving man speaks the word bread .

It undid me more than flattery ever could.

I reached down and drew him harder against my hip.

The soft sizzle of our magics fed back into my throat, turned me into sound for a second, not a princess.

The noise I made belonged only to him and to rooms that lock.

We found a rhythm, not slow. Not careful.

Desperate in a way that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with having been looked at by a room full of people who begged to see us break.

My mask slid, loose, a bad moon slipping from orbit; he steadied it with two fingers and then pressed his mouth to the skin it exposed, cheekbone, corner of eye.

Gentleness struck like a mercy I had not earned.

I shoved him harder for it. He took it like penance.

We moved together because neither of us could afford to stop wanting and neither of us could afford to name what wanting might cost next.

He murmured Elowyn as if he were positioning himself on a battlefield and didn’t trust his feet without saying the name of the ground out loud. I answered with Rhydor around his mouth. The word burned. The good kind.

When the rush came, it wasn’t a wave or a fall.

It was heat that trembled all over me and then settled, like an iron being quenched and knowing it will be asked to do the hard work now.

He bit against my shoulder and swallowed a sound that would have told the corridor too much about who we are to each other when no one else is invited.

I felt the drag of his breath on my skin.

He felt the shake of mine. The room stopped being entirely about walls for one brief, carved-out second.

Then the second passed.

He leaned his forehead against the plaster over my shoulder and breathed hard, eyes closed. I watched the tendon jump in his neck. I pressed my palm to the damp, warm patch of his tunic between his shoulder blades. We didn’t speak. It was too heavy a silence to burden with language.

Slowly, everything returned to its shapes. The room became a room again. The ward-light resumed its pulse. The palace, out there, remembered that it had asked the law to do something ugly for it and had to prepare its face for that.

I reached for him again, not for more. For a hand.

For something simple. For a promise his body could make without being forced to decide what his mouth owed the world.

I wanted the bridge; I wanted the small thing that means we haven’t entirely taught each other to use standing as a word for alone.

He stepped back.

Not far. Enough.

The sudden space ran cold along my skin where heat had been.

I glanced up. He had put his walls back on: the face for war councils, the jaw for verdicts, the eyes dragons learn so they can cross a room without setting it on fire and still make everyone in it warm themselves.

He looked at me like I had handed him a blade and asked him to decide whether to cut me or keep me safe with it.

My lips parted. The apologies I don’t believe in, the pleas I refuse to make, the truth I will not hand to a mouth that might speak it out loud and make it vulnerable, all of it crowded behind my teeth and knocked, stupidly polite, on a door I had already barred.

He didn’t ask me to open it.

He bent, retied the strap of my mask where his fingers had lifted it without ceremony earlier, a meticulous tug so gentle it scraped the back of my throat with wanting. His knuckles brushed my cheek. He didn’t let his hand linger.

He turned to the door. He touched the glyph with his left hand and spoke quietly to it. The lock clicked. Air from the corridor shouldered into the room, carrying with it incense and murmur and the world’s rude insistence on continuing.

He took one step across the threshold.

He said nothing.

The edges of my vision stung. That surprised me. Tears and I have not been on speaking terms since the first time I realized they make good men feel useful in a way that makes women more tired, not more comforted.

“Rhydor,” I said, because I have limits, and because my body wasn’t ready to be done being the person who knows what to do with his name.

He paused. He didn’t look back. The set of his shoulders altered the way a hill does when it decides whether to be climbed.

“I will stand,” he said, and the words fell like weight onto stone. “Whatever you’ve done. Whatever you do next.”

My mouth lifted at one corner. It wasn’t a smile. It was a scar remembering itself.

“I know,” I said.

He left.

The room did not sigh, because rooms don’t know how when they’re built from rock that has been taught to be useful instead of loving. The door clicked. The ward-light kept breathing. The little barred window went on pretending it wasn’t a metaphor.

My knees were obedient for two breaths more than I expected. Then they said enough. I slid down the cool wall until the hem of my dress pooled around my ankles and the world got shorter. My palm found the floor and pressed there. Stone is indifferent. It makes a good confidant.

I breathed. The way women do when the quiet after the war is worse than the war because it leaves them alone with the inventory of what they saved and what they broke to save it.

Salt burned my eyes. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand and hated the way it felt like proof of weakness to a version of myself I also hate.

There’s no position you can take that keeps you from being disappointed in yourself later.

I let the water gather and then I wiped it away.

It left a streak that the ward-light found meanly beautiful.

Outside, the corridor moved, men in armor making their breathing polite, women in silk making their footfalls quiet, everyone pretending they didn’t know what just happened behind a door that still felt warm in my back.

I thought of a boy in Greneford with eyes like a storm I had never learned to predict.

I thought of a queen in a pool of ritual steam whispering words so old they hurt to hear.

I thought of a dragon who had said over my ashes and meant it.

I thought of my own mouth, and what it had just told me, and what it hadn’t.

And then I put my palms on the floor and pushed up, because the next hour was already coming for me, and whatever my body remembered of his would have to wait for the part of the story in which there is less blood.

I smoothed my skirt. I set my mask right for a second time.

I walked to the door and laid my fingers against the chalk glyph Nyssa would have drawn if she’d been the one who locked me in.

The cool powder kissed my skin. I whispered the syllables it likes.

The latch lifted. The world smelled like roses trying to hide ashes.

I didn’t look back to see if I had left anything in the room that would be worth coming back for. I already knew the answer.

I opened the door. The corridor looked like a throat you put prayers down. I stepped into it. And the hour swallowed me whole.