His tongue kept its merciless work on her swollen bud all the while, and he felt her begin to wind tight as a bowstring beneath him, her belly fluttering, her heels digging into his back, her breath sawing high and desperate.
“That’s it,” he hummed against her aching flesh. “I can feel ye, lassie. Ye are close. Let go. Come apart on me tongue and me hand. Let me feel it.”
She came undone for him as she had that first night, only now it was his mouth and his hands that pushed her to it.
There were no rules between them anymore, and no careful silence kept in the dark. Now, when she broke, it was his name she shouted up at the indifferent stars, again and again. Her back arched off the plaid, her thighs trembling hard around his head, and her fingers clenched so tightly in his hair that it hurt.
He worked her through every last wave of it, relentless, drawing it out long past where she thought she could bear it, until she was sobbing, boneless, and weakly tugging at his hair to beg him to stop.
Only then did he soften, his mouth becoming gentle and worshipful, drinking down the last small shudders, pressing one final slow kiss to the inside of her thigh before he lifted his head.
She lay wrung-out and gasping beneath him, her bodice gaping and her skirts ruched at her waist and her wild hair full of crushed grass, the bonniest wreck of a thing he had ever laid eyes on.
He crawled back up her body, pressing his mouth to her belly, her breasts, the wild flutter at her throat, before he braced himself on his forearms above her and looked down at her undone face in the starlight.
And Ragnall, with his wife loose-limbed and gasping beneath him and her taste still on his lips and his want a hard, insistent,deliberately unspent ache against his laces, was closer to a happy man than he had been in the whole grim run of his life.
Then, he pulled her close against his chest in the warm tangle of the plaid, both of them exhausted and breathing heavily, and pressed his lips to her damp temple, holding her.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
“I missed ye,” he said into her hair, giving it back to her, the only confession he was allowed to make. “Every hour of every day. The bed was a tomb without ye in it.”
“Daenae let me go back to Blythe, then,” she whispered.
He froze. A whole future depended on those four small words, which he wanted so badly that he was afraid to touch it.
And that was the moment the night tore open.
It came from upriver, from the festival ground, faint at first and then horribly clear. The bright clash of steel against steel. A man’s scream. And then the rising baying roar of two clans falling on one another in the dark.
Ragnall instantly stood with his half-dressed wife in his arms. His joy vanished as the first scream echoed. He quickly lifted her, and they ran together along the river toward the fire, overwhelmed by the very sound he had dedicated a month’s effort and his wounded heart to preventing.
War.
CHAPTER 32
The festival had beena triumph not one hour past, and now it was a nightmare, and Ragnall could not for the life of him find the seam where the one had torn into the other.
He climbed up from the riverbank into a churning, dark area lit red by the dying bonfire, and everything he had spent a month and most of his heart building was falling apart before his eyes. Men he had watched toss the caber together that very afternoon, Cairn and Blythe, with their arms around each other’s shoulders and ale going around, were now at each other’s throats in the flickering firelight.
A trestle lay on its side with the black bun and the broth crushed beneath it. A piper’s drone wheezed and died somewhere underneath. A woman was screaming off to his left, high and ragged, and a bairn was screaming somewhere closer, and above both of them rose the old sound, the one his father had taught him to fear more than any noise on God’s earth—the wet and ugly squelch of clansmen driving steel into clansmen.
“Hold!” He waded into the heart of it, roaring, and caught a Cairn man by the back of his plaid and hauled him off a Blythe lad half his size. “Put up yer steel! I said hold!”
A few heard him. A few faltered, blinking, as if waking. But fear had a logic all its own once it took a crowd by the throat, and there were too many already too far gone, swinging at any face that was not their own kin, no longer knowing nor caring who had struck the first blow.
Somebody struck the first blow intentionally, in the dark, hoping to ignite everythin’, while three generations of buried hatred did the rest of the work for him. I should have seen it comin’. I should have doubled the guards, circled the area, and never let the dark fall on two clans with drink in them and old grudges half-asleep. I built the powder, laid it out openly, called it peace, and handed the man his spark.
He fought toward the center, and he drew to part them and not to wound, throwing his bulk and his roaring voice and the flat of his blade between man and man, dragging them off one another by collar and hair.
Alastair appeared at his shoulder out of the darkness, bleeding from a gash above his brow, doing the same without a word. A group of the steadier Cairn men gathered around them and began to push back the chaos with their strength, forming a moving wall of sense in a sea that had lost it.
And then the press heaved and broke before him, and Ragnall came through into a clear patch of trodden grass at the very heart of it, and the bottom dropped clean out of the night.
There, in the flickering red light, stood Lucas Arran. The boy was holding a sword with blood on its blade, and at his feet, a Cairn man lay face down and motionless in the mud. He stared at the scene with pale, shocked horror spreading across his face. Then he looked up, and his eyes found Ragnall’s.
Ragnall watched the boy understand all at once exactly how it looked.
