“Please,” I said, louder.
He increased the pressure of his hand at my stomach. He curled the fingers inside me. He sucked, hard, at the top of me, and the orgasm that built in my pelvis was like nothing I had ever felt before.
It took me.
It took my hips, my thighs, my back, my voice. I convulsed against the rim of the well, against his face, against the thick air of the chamber, and the sound that left me was not the sound I had made at twelve, or at twenty-one, or even last night at the ice—it was an animal sound, a wild raw letting-go, a sound that was so full of pleasure and power that I could not, at first, bear it.
He drank it in.
He kept his mouth at the apex of me, tongue moving, hand pressing, until the aftershocks left me shaking, panting, clutching at the rim with both hands to stay upright. The well’s light was white as a new star. I could see the bond's braid of color running up my sternum and into my throat.
He drew back, finally.
He stood. His lips were wet with me. His eyes were alive.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Magnificent.”
He knelt again, and this time, he cradled my head in both hands and kissed me on the mouth.
I could taste myself. I could taste the salt and the heat and the metallic hint of pleasure. I opened my mouth for him. I let the tongue in. I kissed back, not as a performance, not as a reward, but as a thing that was mine, that had always been mine, that he was giving back to me in this room at the heart of him.
The kiss broke.
He set his forehead to mine. His hands never left my jaw. He let me breathe. He let me stay.
Then, low, into my mouth, he said, “You are ready.”
I was.
The robe stayed on my shoulders as he carried me, but it did not close. It left my skin open to him. His hands around me were not rough, but neither were they soft; the word for what they were was certain.
He laid me out on a low platform at the edge of the well.
The stone was warm. The gold rising from the basin painted my body, my thighs, the curve of my breasts, the whole line of me. My hair spilled out behind me. He set the robe aside, careful, as if it was a piece of art, but it was not the robe that interested him.
He knelt above me, both knees on the stone, the line of his thighs framing my hips, the length of him bent over me as if sheltering me from every cold thing in the realm.
The pause was long.
I looked at him. For the first time, really looked. The light from the well caught him from below, and the effect was not human.
He was beautiful. In a way that had nothing to do with muscle or symmetry, and everything to do with the fact that he had been cracked by his own magic, and the cracks lit him from inside. Across his right jaw, down the line of his neck, the fissure at the back of the hand—white, hot, lambent, not wound but window. In his eyes, the concentric rings had stilled; the whole iris was lit, and in the pupil there was a spark of white, as though the well’s fire had decided it liked the architecture of him and moved in.
I reached for him.
I set my hand at the place on his jaw where the old seam ran down from the temple, and traced it with my thumb, mirroring his touch on me. It was not warm. It was hot, as if the bond was a live wire and my skin the first thing to touch it.
He let me.
He bowed his head, just enough, so I could follow the line down to his throat, to his collarbone. There, the crack vanished under the collar of his tunic.
I wanted more.
“Will you show me?” I asked. “Please?”
His mouth did the full smile. The first I had ever seen on him.
He unfastened the clasp at his collar with care. The fabric parted. The muscle beneath was corded, not with the aesthetic muscle of a man who lifts for show, but the hard-earned muscle of one built by fighting, standing, bearing up entire cities for an age. Along the clavicle, the crack ran deeper—down to his heart, then into the fabric again, then gone.
