I closed my fingers slow, with only a fraction of the true strength I had, and walked her through the turn. I broke my own grip with the motion of her wrist, set it back, and made her run it again. She got it wrong twice and swore at herself both times. On the third pass she twisted free clean and stepped back out of reach, and what came up in her face then wasn't fear.
"Again," I said, when I should have stepped back. The lesson was the only way I had to keep my hands on her and tell myself I wasn't crossing a line. "If he gets behind you." I moved behindher and set my forearm across her collarbone, my mouth close to her hair. "You don't go up against his arm. You drop your weight. Down, under it, and out."
She didn't drop her weight.
She leaned back into the weight of my arm, a fraction, the wrong way, toward me. Her breath went short. The rut came up my spine slow; her scent the whole of the air, warm and green and sweet under the smoke, and my arm stayed across her, no longer teaching her anything, and I did not move it.
She was Zarcal's.
She'd crossed town to me frightened, asking how to do right by him, and here she stood breathing slow against the front of me with my arm a bar over her heart, and every reason this could not happen was true and not one of them weighed a thing.
I turned her by the shoulder, slowly, leaving her all the time she could need o break away the way I'd just taught her.
She came into me instead.
Not the slow way. I got one hand into that loose dark hair and the other at the small of her back, brought her up off the floor into me, and kissed her, and the five days I'd spent holding it down came apart all at once.
She made a small sound against my mouth and her hands fisted in my shirt and she kissed me back, all of her, up on her toes, and for one breath the whole ruined world narrowed to her mouth and her scent and the heat of her against the furnace-heat of me.
She tasted like cider and want. A growl came up out of my chest before I heard it, and she pressed into it, into me, gone soft and open, and the word slammed up behind my teeth,mine, and the thread between my ribs pulled so sharply I feared it might snap.
I had her whole skull cradled in one hand. I felt every fragile bone of her neck. One inch more and there'd be no taking it back.
And that was the inch where Zarcal walked into the room behind my eyes.
Not the man. The thought of him. Zarcal at the supper with his hand pressed flat over his heart, telling the whole table he'd drawn the best of the lot. Zarcal, who'd pulled three men out of a burning hold and never once let me feel I owed him for the one I couldn't save.
I had his sheared winch on my bench and his bride in my hands, and I was standing in his place, wearing the face of a brother, reaching for the one thing he'd let himself want in five years.
I set her back from me, slowly, with both hands.
"No," I said.
The word hit her. I watched it land. I watched the want go out of her face and the old guard come back up behind it, a reflex I'd just tripped.
And under that was the one I crushed flattest. For one breath, in the kiss, I'd had the whole of it: a morning where I woke with her weight against me, no transport waiting on her, no brother I'd handed her to first. A version of me that got to keep her instead of hanging knives for a war that never comes.
She'd felt it too. I knew she had. Not Zarcal. Not the contract. The two of us one inch inside a life we were never going to get, and me the one shutting the door on it, on purpose, with her still warm in my hands.
"Go back to Zarcal," I said, and made it cold, made it the kind of thing she couldn't argue with. "He's your match. He'll be glad of you every morning of his life."
She picked up the winch I hadn't touched. Her hands were steady. Her chin came up, and she had the grin nailed back over the rest of it fast enough that it was almost admirable.
"I'll tell Zarcal you were too busy." She ducked under the lintel into the gray, and at the threshold she stopped, her back tome. The grin had cost her to hold, and there it slipped. "That's twice you've reached for me and set me back down, Lorkin. I don't need a third hint."
5
CHLOE
There'sa trick to not thinking about a thing. I'd been practicing it all week.
You don't tell yourself not to think about it. That's amateur hour. You think about something else so hard that the first thing can't get a word in. So I scrubbed a clean cottage, and rearranged the kitchen twice, and started in on the parts of the house nobody ever looks at, anything to crowd the front of my brain. The front of my brain was exactly where the memory kept trying to sit down.
A forge. A maroon hand the size of a dinner plate in my hair, and a mouth, and the floor going out from under me. Then the wordno, and a door slammed in my face.
Damn it.
Already.
