Page 4 of Coiled By the Naga

So I stand up. While I still can. While the wanting is a thing I can walk from instead of a thing walking me. “Have food sent to my room,” I say. “I’ll learn your edge, Sarn. On my feet. Not on my knees begging for it. That part’s done.”

I walk out with my legs not quite steady and his scent pulling at my back the whole way up the stair, and I don’t turn around.

SARN

Itold myself taking her apart would quiet the rut. It does the opposite. A starving thing fed once is not less starving. It has learned what food tastes like.

The pits keep handing me the sound she made. I did not know I could be made worse by getting what I wanted. I am learning a great deal this week about what I am.

And what I am keeps wanting the same thing my body has wanted since the dock, which is not only to breed her. It is to wrap her. To take the whole length of myself and close it around her until there is no part of her I am not pressing, until I can feel her heartbeat through six loops of my own muscle, until she could not move if the cliff came down.

The breeding-drive I can name and shame. This other one runs deeper and has no decency in it at all. I want to crush her down to the size of a thing I can keep, and the only reason I have not is that I know what my coils do when they close and stop knowing they have closed.

So I govern the one part left to me. I can’t stop the scent. I can do the rest. I have food sent up that a coastal woman knows, not garrison rations, the cook digging out salt fish and flatbread and the sharp green stuff that grows in the cracks above the tideline, because she is a creature of this water and I want one thing in that room to tell her so.

I move the night watch off her stair so no soldier passes her door and tastes what is behind it. I leave the dock alone in the grey hours, when I know she goes down to it, because the water was hers before it was mine, and I will not take it by standing on it.

The pits give me everything about her and the one thing I need they cannot reach. I know when she wakes by the change in her warmth through the stone. I will know she is fertile before she does. I read all of it, clean, certain, and every grain of it could be nothing but my own scent handed back to me.

And under the wanting I keep my watch on the worse thing. The rut is climbing. I feel it bank higher every day, toward a peak I will not govern, with the coils closing on her at the moment my body decides breeding and holding are one act. I have locked before. Not on a woman. On stone, on a beam, on a rift-hound that came over the north wall, and every time the thing in my grip broke before I felt the edge coming.

She has told me she will learn my edge for me. Read it the way she reads water that drowns men, because I can’t. A human. A woman who would not fill the curve of one of my coils. I told myself it was the kind of thing people throw when they are frightened and won’t show it.

The pits read no fear in her when she said it. None. She meant it. And I have caught myself believing her, which is the most dangerous thing either of us has done yet.

AUDE

Three days, and the scent is in everything now. The stone, the air on the stair, my own skin when I wake. He floods the whole garrison without trying and I live inside it, and there is no walking from a thing that is in the walls.

I last as long as I can. I tell myself I am going down to the lower hall to learn his edge, the way I said I would, and that is even half true. The other half is that my body has been climbing toward him for three days and tonight it will not be talked down, and I am soaked through my trousers before I reach the bottom of the stair, the wet of me cooling on my thighs in the sea air and going hot again the instant his scent thickens.

The lower hall is his own ground, off the watch routes, where no soldier comes uncalled, and at this hour it is only him and the sea through the arch. He is coiled along the bench when I come through, and he lifts his head and reads me, and whatever the pits hand him sends the amber up his jaw all at once.

“Say it,” he says. Low. He doesn’t move toward me. He makes me bring it. “You didn’t come down here for my edge.”

“I came for both.” Even now I won’t give him all of it.

“Then learn this one first.” The coils come for me across the floor, and I let them.

He has me off my feet before I’ve crossed the room. A loop takes my ankles, another my waist, and the floor is gone and I am lifted into the middle of him, into a cage of muscle thick as my own body, and the first thing he does is close it. Not all the way. He draws the coils in around me until they meet my skin everywhere at once, my legs, my hips, my belly, a loop banded across my chest under my arms, and then he draws them in further, and the give goes out of the air in my lungs.

My ribs take the pressure. My next breath comes shorter than the last, and the one after that shorter still, and I understand that he can do this, that he can take my breathing away from me by degrees and hand it back when he wants, and the understanding does not frighten me as it should. It pours down through me and pools between my legs and I hear myself make a sound, thin, helpless, want.

He holds me there a moment without doing anything else, just holds me, the loops settled to my skin and the pressure even all over me, and lets me feel it. Lets me feel that there is no part of me he is not touching and no direction I could go if I tried. The sea comes through the arch, loud, the only other thing in the room, and I hang in the middle of him with my breath rationed and my whole weight given over to a creature who has not even begun, and the waiting is its own torment. I do not want him to wait. I am furious that I do not want him to wait.

He feels it the instant it happens, the squeeze turning the fight in me to something else, and the pits read it off me, and his coils answer, drawing in another notch. I gray at the edges for a breath and come back wetter than before. “You go soft when you can’t breathe,” he says against my jaw. “When you can’t get loose. I felt your cunt clench on nothing just now, Aude.”

“Stop reading me,” I get out, what little air he leaves me shaping the words badly.

“No.” He strips my clothes with the loops, the wet fabric dragged off me and dropped, and then there is nothing between his scale and my skin and the compound that sheens him is on me everywhere, soaking in, lighting up nerve after nerve until the air itself is friction. “I’m going to read everything you feel and give you more of it. Hold still. Not that you can do anything else.”

I can’t. That is the thing my body keeps coming back to and keeps coming around. I cannot move. He has my legs drawn wide on two loops and my arms pinned and my whole weight held off the ground, and I have no work to do and nowhere to fall and no say in any of it, and somewhere under the heat the part of me that has never once set its own weight down does, and goes soft with a relief that is almost grief.

He works me open with his fingers first, the scaled hand spreading me, one thick finger pushing into me where I am already running wet, then a second, and the coils hold me so dead still that there is nowhere to flinch from it, no way to ride up or pull back, only the slow filthy stretch of him opening me on his hand.

He does it slowly. He has nowhere to be and nothing to prove and the slowness is deliberate, his fingers working into me and curling and dragging back and pushing in again, learning the give of me, while the loop across my chest keeps my breath shallow and my head swimming and the want winding higher with every unhurried pass.

My hips try to chase his hand and the coils do not let them move a finger’s width. I can only take what he gives at the speed he gives it. I beg before I have decided to. “Now. I need it now.” The words are out before I can stop them.