She wiped her face on his shirt. She wrapped her arms around his neck. She felt warm in his arms, and calm, and safe and brave. And then she was laughing, laughing at how nice it felt, how good his body felt against hers. He grinned at her, a wicked, gleaming grin that made her warm everywhere. And then his lips touched her throat and nuzzled her neck. She gasped. His mouth found hers. She turned to fire.
Some time later, as she lay with him in the moss, clinging to him, hypnotized by something his lips did to her throat, she remembered his bleeding hand. “Later,” he growled, and then she remembered the blood on her mouth, but that only brought his mouth to hers again, tasting, seeking, and his hands fumbling at her clothing, and her hands fumbling at his. And the warmth of his skin, as their bodies explored each other. And after all, they knew each other’s bodies as well as any lovers; but this touch was so different, straining toward instead of against.
“Po,” she said once, when one clear thought pierced her mind.
“It’s in the medicines,” he whispered. “There is seabane in the medicines,” and his hands, and his mouth, and his body returned her to mindlessness. He made her drunk, this man made her drunk; and every time his eyes flashed into hers she could not breathe.
She expected the pain, when it came. But she gasped at its sharpness; it was not like any pain she had felt before. He kissed her and slowed and would have stopped. But she laughed, and said that this one time she would consent to hurt, and bleed, at his touch. He smiled into her neck and kissed her again and she moved with him through the pain. The pain became a warmth that grew. Grew, and stopped her breath. And took her breath and her pain and her mind away from her body, so that there was nothing but her body and his body and the light and fire they made together.
———
They lay afterward, warmed by each other and by the heat of the fire. She touched his nose and his mouth. She played with the hoops in his ears. He held her and kissed her, and his eyes flickered into hers.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She laughed. “I have not lost myself. And you?”
He smiled. “I’m very happy.”
She traced the line of his jaw to his ear and down to his shoulder. She touched the markings that ringed his arms.
“And Raffin thought we’d end this way, too,” she said. “Apparently, I’m the only one who didn’t see it coming.”
“Raffin will make a very good king,” Po said, and she laughed again, and rested her head in the crook of his arm.
“Let’s pick up the pace tomorrow,” she said, thinking of men who were not good kings.
“Yes, all right. Are you in pain still?”
“No.”
“Why do you suppose it happens that way? Why does a woman feel that pain?”
She had no answer to that. Women felt it, that was all she knew. “Let me clean your hand,” she said.
“I’ll clean you first.”
She shivered as he left her to go to the fire, and find water and cloths. He leaned into the light, and brightness and shadows moved across his body. He was beautiful. She admired him, and he flashed a grin at her. Almost as beautiful as you are conceited, she thought at him, and he laughed out loud.
It struck her that this should feel strange, to be lying here, watching him, teasing him. To have done what they’d done, and be what they’d become. But instead it felt natural and comfortable. Inevitable. And only the smallest bit terrifying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They had entire conversations in which she didn’t say a word. For Po could sense when Katsa desired to talk to him, and if there was a thing she wanted him to know, his Grace could capture that thing. It seemed a useful ability for them to practice. And Katsa found that the more comfortable she grew with opening her mind to him, the more practiced she became with closing it as well. It was never entirely satisfying, closing her mind, because whenever she closed her feelings from him she must also close them from herself. But it was something.
They found it was easier for him to pick up her thoughts than it was for her to formulate them. She thought things to him word by word at first, as if she were speaking, but silently. Do you want to stop and rest? Shall I catch us some dinner? I’ve run out of water “Of course I understand you when you’re that precise,” he said. “But you don’t need to try so hard. I can understand images, too, or feelings, or thoughts in unformed sentences.”
This was also hard for her at first. She was afraid of being misunderstood, and she formulated her images as carefully as she’d formulated her words. Fish roasting over their fire. A stream. The herbs, the seabane, that she must eat with dinner.
“If you only open a thought to me, Katsa, I’ll see it – no matter how you think it. If you intend me to know it, I will.”
But what did it mean to open a thought to him? To intend for him to know it? She tried simply reaching out to his mind whenever she wanted him to know something. Po. And then leaving it to him to collect the essence of the thought.
It seemed to work. She practiced constantly, both communicating with him and closing him out. Slowly, the tightness of her mind loosened.
Beside the fire one night, protected from the rain by a shelter of branches she’d built, she asked to see his rings. He placed his hands into hers. She counted. Six plain gold rings, of varying widths, on his right hand. On his left, one plain gold; one thin with an inlaid gray stone running through the middle; one wide and heavy with a sharp, glittery white stone – this the one that must have scratched her that night beside the archery range; and one plain and gold like the first, but engraved all around with a design she recognized, from the markings on his arms. It was this ring that made her wonder if the rings had meaning.
“Yes,” he said. “Every ring worn by a Lienid means something. This with the engraving is the ring of the king’s seventh son. It’s the ring of my castle and my princehood. My inheritance.”
Do your brothers have a different ring, and markings on their arms that are different from yours?
“They do.”
She fingered the great, heavy ring with the jagged white stone. This is the ring of a king.
“Yes, this ring is for my father. And this,” he said, fingering the small one with the gray line running through the middle, “for my mother. This plain one for my grandfather.”
Was he never king?
“His older brother was king. When his brother died, he would’ve been king, had he wished it. But his son, my father, was young and strong and ambitious. My grandfather was old and unwell and content to pass the kingship to his son.”
And what of your father’s mother, and your mother’s father and mother? Do you wear rings for them?
“No. They’re dead. I never knew them.”
She took his right hand. And these? You don’t have enough fingers for the rings on this hand.
“These are for my brothers,” he said. “One for each. The thickest for the oldest and the thinnest for the youngest.”
Does this mean that your brothers all wear an even thinner ring, for you?
“That’s right, and my mother and grandfather, too, and my father.”
Why should yours be the smallest, just because you’re the youngest?
“That’s the way it is, Katsa. But the ring they wear for me is different from the others. It has a tiny inlaid gold stone, and a silver.”
For your eyes.
“Yes.”
It’s a special ring, for your Grace?
“The Lienid honor the Graced.”
Well, and that was a novel idea. She hadn’t known that anyone honored the Graced. You don’t wear rings for your brothers’ wives, or their children?
He smiled. “No, thankfully. But I would wear one for my own wife, and if I had children, I’d wear a ring for each.
My mother has four brothers, four sisters, seven sons, two parents, and a husband. She wears nineteen rings.”
And that is absurd. How can she use her fingers?
He shrugged. “I’ve no difficulty using mine.” He raised her hands to his mouth then and kissed her knuckles.
You wouldn’t catch me wearing that many rings.