Not heavy. Not tense. Just still.
He's still inside me. Neither of us moves to change that. His arms are wrapped around me, both of them, his entire bodycurved around mine, and I am completely enclosed. My ear is against his chest. His heartbeat is loud and slow.
“The beast,” I say.
He's quiet for a moment. Checking.
“It never came up.” The wonder in his voice is so raw it hurts to hear. “The whole time. Not once.”
“The stone worked.”
“The stone. You. Both.” His arms tighten. “Maren, I've never. Not even before. It was never...” He stops. “I don't have words for what that was.”
“Then don't find words.” I press my mouth against his collarbone. Salt and oil and heat. “Just stay here.”
We stay.
Eventually he shifts, lifts me, lays me on the bed. It creaks in protest but holds. He settles on the floor beside it, his head level with the mattress, and I roll onto my side and drape my arm over the edge until my fingers find his hair.
“You're not sleeping on the floor.”
“The bed won't hold both of us.”
“Then I'm sleeping on the floor with you.”
“Maren.”
“Move.”
He sighs. But he shifts, makes room, and I slide off the mattress and into the space he's made. The stone floor is cold against my bare skin and then his body is against mine, warm, vast, and the cold stops mattering.
His hand settles on my stomach. The same place it rested at Vorneth, but different now. The bond hums between us, thick and sure, and I can feel his heartbeat in my own chest, slow.
“Kovren.”
“Mm.”
“I don't regret this.”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.” I turn in his arms until I'm facing him. In the near-dark I can just make out his features, the hard planes of his face, the lines around his eyes. “The ditch. The road. The fever and the fighting and the oath and the bond. Any of it.”
His hand comes up and traces my jaw. His thumb brushes across my lower lip.
He pulls me closer. I fit against him, my head below his chin, my back against his chest, his arm heavy and warm across my waist. The bond pulses between us. Settled. Ours.
MAREN
We stay in Korsmot for two days.
Two days of learning each other. Not just the physical, though there's plenty of that. Two days of waking up on a stone floor, his body curved around mine, and not having to wonder if this is the morning he leaves. Two days of walking through the market with his hand on my back and watching people look at us and not caring what they see.
He buys me new boots. Proper ones, fitted, with soles that won't wear through in a month. I argue about the cost. He puts the gold on the counter and tells the cobbler to measure my feet, and the argument is over before it starts.
I buy him tea. Loose leaf, the kind Mother Sanque drinks, because he's been making it wrong for years and someone needs to teach him the difference between steeping and boiling. He holds the small paper packet in his massive hands and looks at it with an expression I can't read.
“No one's bought me anything,” he says. “In a long time.”
