I lift my chin and rise toward it.
He turns his head. Smooth, unhurried, the way he does everything, and my lips land on the flat of his jaw instead.
I sit back enough to look at him. “You’ll put your tongue on my throat. But not that.”
“The venom is strongest in my mouth.” His voice stays level. The coil at my waist does not. “Your skin has answered everything else. A kiss you would swallow. That is the one test I will not run.”
A lifetime of watching his own body hurt people. That kind of fear doesn’t drain out in a few days, and this one is the oldest he has.
“Someday,” I say, “I’m collecting.”
His coil tightens at my waist. He doesn’t say no.
Something catches my eye. The edge of the basin. A thread of green. One filament of new moss pushing up from the seam in the stone.
And on the far wall, in a crack where the stone is dry and bare, a vine. One tendril. Its first leaf half-open.
“Did that grow just now?”
He stares at the vine. His chest rises and falls under my hands.
“Yes.”
We look at the green. New growth in a dead place. One thread. One vine.
I press my cheek against his chest. His pulse runs under the scales. He puts one hand on my back. His palm covers me from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
We stay in the water until the steam thins and the light from the corridor shifts.
When we come out, I stand on the pool stone and wring my hair. I squeeze the worst of the water from my shirt hem, pull on my pants, the cloth sticking to damp skin, and carry my boots. He puts the armor back on, piece by piece. When he reaches for the chest plate, I put my hand on his.
“Not yet. Walk back with me without it.”
He picks the chest plate up by the strap. We go back to the main hall side by side, the gold swinging from his hand. Hischest uncovered, the scales catching the lamplight, the softer scales at his sides shifting with each movement.
He sets the chest plate on the steps instead of putting it on.
He leaves it there for the rest of the evening.
I eat my meal on my stone. He eats on his. The armor sits on the steps behind him, the gold dull in the low light. We are two people who have seen each other’s bodies sitting three feet apart pretending to eat bread.
VADH
She found the garden.
She tells me at breakfast. She found it yesterday, after turning a corner of the temple wall and there it was. The south-facing beds, the basil gone leggy, the wild onion spreading into the border.
“You didn’t tell me you had a garden,” she says.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I’m asking now. Show me what grows there.”
After breakfast, I take her to the beds. My mother’s beds. The stone wall holds the afternoon heat, and the soil is dark and rich. I have been watering these beds for years. My venom runs through the groundwater, thinned to almost nothing by the time it reaches the roots. Diluted that far, it does not kill. The garden grows anyway.
She kneels in the dirt. She doesn’t pull anything or plant anything. She puts her hands in the soil, closes her fingers around a handful and lifts it to her face. Smells it. Dark earth and root and something green underneath.
She wipes her hands on her pants.
