“That was before you tried to drown me.”
“Technically,” Finnian says, eyes still closed, water dripping from his hair onto the moss, “drowning requires sustained submersion. That was a splash. Legally distinct.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
“I’m going back to sleep.”
“You’re not.” Orion is already hauling himself fully out of the water, shaking his hair like a dog. “We have things to do. Places to be. Courts to topple.”
“I need to wash off first.” Ash looks down at herself, a little smirk on her face as her fingers trace love bites. I left a few of those. “All of us do. We smell like?—”
“A very good night,” Orion says.
“A very good night and also a forest and also a battle and also—” She stops. “We’re getting in the spring.”
“I thought you didn’t want to get in the spring,” Finnian says, still not opening his eyes.
“I changed my mind.”
“You said the spring was where we?—”
“Finnian.”
“I’m simply noting the inconsistency.”
“Note it from inside the water.”
Orion drops back in first, because Orion has no complicated feelings about anything. Finnian follows with the careful dignityof a man who has decided to pretend the past twelve hours were a completely normal sequence of events. Ash slides in beside me without ceremony, hissing at the heat and then immediately going boneless in a way that suggests her muscles have been waiting for this after that last orgasm.
I lower myself in last.
The water runs pink where it touches Finnian and then clears. Then runs briefly amber. Then clears again. Evidence washing away into the current, downstream, gone.
Ash dunks her head under and comes up silver-pink and blinking.
“Better,” she announces.
“Marginally,” I say.
“You have something—” She reaches up and pulls a leaf from my hair before tossing it. “There.”
“My gratitude.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Orion is already using the far edge of the spring as something between a bench and a headrest, eyes closed, face tipped toward what passes for sunlight in this forest. The guardian tattoos across his chest shift in the water. I’ve been watching them since the clearing. Dark ink over the pale scar tissue Dagda left behind.
I still don’t know what they mean. I still know I won’t like it.
“We smell better,” Ash observes. “Marginally.”
“You said marginally,” Finnian notes. “You’re using his word.”
“It’s a good word.”
“It implies we still smell.”
“We still smell.” She tilts her head back into the water. “Just less like orgy.”
