Thirty-Two Never Again

THIRTY-TWO

Never Again

MARY

I caught Samuel's arm. We were in the close warmth of the inn's kitchens, lit by the dying embers of the hearth and a jar with a single dragonfly, gold and pulsing softly at his rest. The remnants of our dinner had been stowed and Benedict and Charles already retired to their rooms, leaving Samuel and I in more solitude than we had had since leaving Hart .

"You should take this," I said, pressing my Sooth talisman into his hand. "If Hae is so fixated on you."

Samuel shook his head and pulled up one sleeve, showing me a kerchief bound around his arm. "My own talisman will suffice."

"But it makes you more ill," I pointed out. "Isn't it better to take a chance on this one? Surely the Ess Noti wouldn't make talismans that corrupted their mages."

He hesitated, his eyes dropping from my fingers to my lips. If he intended to reply, no words came.

I wanted to press him, to put the talisman around his neck myself. But instead, the impulse to kiss him beset me, and, in that moment, there was no history, no barriers to hold me back—just the warmth of wine in my stomach and the relief of warm shelter.

I saw the kiss play out in my mind, each subtle movement as I leaned up and pressed my mouth to his, the warmth of our breaths and the taste of wine. The heady rush of heat, burning away the memory of the cold and the very real threat of our pursuers.

Awareness spread over him, his chin lowering, shoulders leveling, his reserve transforming into focus. But his back remained straight. He did not bend down. He did not allow me in.

"If I take that, you will be the one being tracked," he pointed out. "I could not rest, knowing that. My own will not work on you."

I stepped back, disappointed and worried all at once. "You could not rest, but you will not kiss me?"

He pushed my hand, with my talisman, back into my chest. It brought him even closer.

"I do want to kiss you," he said. "But now is hardly the time."

"Then the time will never come." I put the talisman back over my head. "You make me feel unwanted, Samuel Rosser."

I stepped around him and left the kitchen, climbing the short set of stone stairs back into the darkened common room.

His voice came from close on my heels. "Mary, never think I do not want you. We have… you know my reasons for holding back."

I tsk ed, irritated. We reached the stairs to the upper floor, and I lowered my voice to a whisper. There was a tremor inside me, the exhaustion and emotions of days of flight, cold and discomfort colliding with his nearness and his unwillingness to yield.

"Yes," I snapped. "I must remain chaste for the good of all Stormsingers."

His voice as quiet as mine: "That would be unfair."

I turned to face him from the first step of the stairs. I wished I could read his thoughts, but the light from the stoked fire only cast his face in deeper shadow.

"Once we are safely back at sea, you and I… we must talk."

Disappointment clawed at me, only thickened by the hope that tried to surge up behind it.

I started to climb the stairs again, turning my back to him. "Good night, Samuel."

I was at the top of the stairs before his response drifted up to me: "Good night, Mary."

* * *

We left the inn just after dawn. The innwife had refused payment from such ‘pious children, ' instead loading us with more food and drink for the road. She chattered with Charles as Sam and I readied the horses and Benedict stood at the mouth of the yard, looking out across the flooded roads and the abandoned hamlet to the white-foamed sea.

The rain had stopped but the sky remained clouded, and the flooded, empty land was no less unsettling in the light of day. The discomfort of sodden boots and socks still rankled me, though at least our clothes were dry and the floodwaters low enough not to soak our hems when we took turns walking. The men had returned to their robes, and I wore a gifted, wrapped winter dress from the innwife, with a short cloak and a fur hat that I very much appreciated.

There was a warm wind from the south, stirring more mist from the snow and ice. We took turns riding the horses, and I bore perpetual goosebumps on my skin, wondering if, just then, Mereish soldiers were crossing the river or Inis Hae stalked the Other, waiting for our lights to appear.

Once, we passed a sleigh, stuck in the mud-thick snow and stripped of all valuables. Another time we saw people at a distance, but they avoided us as readily as we avoided them. One hamlet we passed had managed to evade most of the flooding but was watched over by a line of hard-looking men and women, while the next contained little more than a scattering of forgotten chickens and the body of a horse with a visibly broken leg, its slit throat yawning and its wounds crusted with pinkish ice.

I leaned forward to stroke the neck of my mount and forced myself to focus on the road ahead.

As dusk came on we neared another small settlement, sprung up close to a smooth length of shoreline. Only half-flooded but wholly abandoned, we agreed it was as good a place as any to take a few hours' much needed rest, though we dared not linger for the whole night.

"We should divide to search for provisions," I said as we tied the horses in the shelter of a lean-to and appraised the house we had selected. It was a small, croft-like affair of wood and stone with white-painted sides and Mereish psalms depicted beneath its thick, sheltering thatch eaves. Its yard was scattered with icy puddles but otherwise unspoiled. Whoever had lived here evidently anticipated higher waters to come or had chosen to follow their neighbors inland for other reasons.

The men agreed, and before long Samuel and I split off in one direction, Charles and Benedict in another. We combed the eerie streets as dusk thickened and the mist turned towards a fog, creeping in on the still-warm southern breeze. Everywhere, eaves dripped and floodwater clutched at our boots and the hems of our garments.

"If this weather keeps up, we may see grass before we reach Ostchen," I commented, turning my face to the wind and relishing its gentleness. I knew it would not last—these first thaws of spring rarely did—but I would take any encouragement I could find. "Grass and endless mud."

Samuel made his way towards a closed door, the water lapping a foot up its sturdy fa?ade. "I never thought I would look forward to mud."

"Our feet may even rot off more slowly," I pointed out brightly, earning a true, crooked grin as he shouldered open the door and we entered the interior. The expression transformed him, lifting away days of exhaustion and strain, and reminding me of simpler, easier days—days in Hesten markets, or in the warmth of his cabin, reading and mending and passing the hours in familiar mundanities.

Days separated only by the distance propriety and his corruption forced between us.

I watched him move through the shadows, the long lines of him, the reach of one broad hand to push open a shutter and allow in a vestige of thin light.

An ache awoke in my chest that had nothing to do with fatigue.

Tane, evidently deciding it was time for a distraction, manifested across my skin. Illumination flooded the house, revealing that the bottom floor was a living space and storeroom, with stairs to a second story. Eager to be out of the water, I made for the stairs as Samuel sloshed behind me.

The upper floor consisted of two cramped sleeping chambers, both with large beds. One obviously belonged to children, scattered with abandoned toys, its window left carelessly open. The other belonged to the parents of this eerie home, inhabited by a wardrobe with sparse clothing, an empty clothes press, and sun-stain marks on the floor where chests had once sat at the foot of the bed. No linens remained on the mattress, and the wardrobe had been ransacked, but there remained enough for me to rifle through.

Samuel moved to the window as I threw a collection of worn, stained and unmended clothes onto the lumpy straw-and-canvas mattress.

"I can see why these were left behind," I muttered, thumbing a hole the size of my fist in the bottom of a sock. "And that whoever lived here disliked mending."

Samuel didn't reply. He was staring out the window, up at the sky, and I realized there was light on his face—not firelight, not Tane's light. Moonlight.

I drew up next to him, the unfortunate sock still in one hand. The sky had begun to clear. There in its dark embrace I saw a sickle moon perched amid wisps of thin cloud. And beyond it, another moon. And another.

Four moons, all at nearly the same degree of darkness and light. All sickles. All within days of one another, in their turning.

"How am I seeing this?" I whispered, speaking to Tane and Samuel at once. "Those are the Other's moons."

Samuel shook his head. He had drawn closer to me, his chest brushing my shoulder. "I… I have no answers."

"The division between worlds is at its thinnest during the Black Tides." Tane's subdued voice came from my lips. "That is what we are seeing."

Unsettled, I inched back into Samuel, resting partially against his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, and together we watched the moons until the clouds covered them again, and darkness retook the settlement.

We spoke little as we finished scouring the house, filling a crate with provisions. Samuel carried it to the next house, then the next, and then we made our way back to the cottage we had selected for our shelter.

I glanced at the horses nibbling at buckets of grain. Inside the house, a fire burned in the hearth and there were numerous new crates and bags scattered about. Charles and Benedict had apparently been and gone, for there was no sign of them now.

Sam stopped. I turned to see him slowly setting his own crate on a table, then he closed the door at our backs.

"Should we go find…" My voice faded as he took the bundle from my arms, set it aside and reached for my hands. He took them, his skin cool and rough.

"What you said, at the inn, about making you feel unwanted. I cannot forget it. Mary, that is the last thing I want you to feel." He gave me each word clearly and gently. There was a rawness to him, perhaps something awoken by the sight of the moons in the sky and the reality of the changes taking place around us. But there was more—a steadiness, a decisiveness, and a need.

"I am going to kiss you now," he said. "Are you opposed?"

"I'm… no, no, not opposed," I tried to reply, but my words were lost in a soft gasp as his mouth closed over mine.

His kisses were gentle but insistent, hungry but measured, and it was all I could do to breathe between brushes and touches and the skim of his tongue. His hand slipped around the back of my head, large and warm. Soon the other came up to meet it, cradling my head and grazing my cheeks, my jaw, the curve of my ears.

"I'm dizzy," I finally managed to whisper.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"No."

"Then I will hold you up." His arm slipped around my waist, pressing my hips into his, and the world receded for another few moments—now just a haze of warmth and want and need, of his touch and his closeness.

"Do you believe that I want you, now?" Sam's voice wheedled through my stupor, just as I was beginning to contemplate shedding my gown and dragging him to the floor.

His lips retreated, and he rested his forehead against mine as he waited for an answer.

"Yes." My reply was so soft, I almost didn't hear it myself. "I've no doubt."

The door clattered open.

"Skirts up, trousers down, that's the next step," Benedict advised, a satchel over one shoulder. He no longer wore his robes but had found breeches and a heavy, wrapped Mereish coat with a broad belt. He'd also lined his eyes darkly with black paint as Mereish sailors did, and his hair was mussed.

I stiffened. Something had shifted in Ben, and it was more than the shedding of monk's garments and the dulling of fatigue. He was more intense, more self-satisfied, the malign threat of him closer to the surface. I felt it at the same time as Sam, whose touch became more protective than amorous.

Ben smirked, slipping past us and depositing a small barrel of water on the table. "Should I take Grant for a drink? Give you two some privacy?"

"Drinks? Where?" Charles came through the door behind him, noted Sam and I entangled, and unfurled a slow, knowing grin. He nudged Benedict. "We should, ah, yes, go find drinks."

Sam stepped away from me. The interruption and his brother's words had clearly jarred him. "No one should go out again. We need to sort all this and sleep while we can. Mr. Grant, Mary, you're welcome to sleep first."

The last thing I wanted to do was rest, my body still heated with need, but fatigue was there too. "I feel like it's dangerous to leave you two alone," I said, looking between the twins.

"There is no ‘alone' in a place like this." Benedict threw out an arm to encompass the room, then reached into a crate. I saw a knife glint and he stabbed it down, lifting it a second later with a small wheel of cheese impaled on the blade. "Cheese?"

Charles glanced between all of us, then joined Benedict with his hand outstretched. The tension dissipated, and Samuel stepped back from me as Benedict began to carve portions of hard, pale cheese.

"I am sorry," Samuel murmured.

"Sorry you kissed me?" I whispered back, though I knew that wasn't the case. I simply wanted him to speak plainly.

"No, for the interruption." He looked back down at me. Despite the shadows and Benedict's presence, the smile on his face was true and his eyes intent in a way that made my belly heat all over again. "Not for kissing you. Never again."