Page 49 of Zenith Court

The sluice pulled me under the wall before I could look back.

The cold knocked the count from my head. Beneath the wall, the channel narrowed to a stone throat with a thin skin of air at its crown. I swam where the current drove me, mouth in that strip of air, hands striking stone I could not see. Behind me, the gate dropped and hit the sill with a boom that traveled through the water. Jonah had released the wheel. I could not know whether he had cleared the gate before it fell.

Then the weight of the wall lifted from my back, and the world returned.

The taste came first, copper sharp at the back of my tongue. Then all three lines struck at once: cold marble with burnt sugar, green apple over sun-warmed stone, leather with warm skin beneath a long sleeve. After nine days of silence, my wrist burned beneath the black water.

It was too much. The current needed both arms, my boots were filling, and the chord flooded through the wrist I needed for swimming. I went under, swallowed water, and fought back to the air with the lines still blazing. I could not tell what they meant. I could barely tell which way was up.

Beneath everything came one word in the oldest hand I knew. Survive. I kicked.

The channel opened. Night sky appeared above me, black and crowded with stars. The water slowed into a field drain. Reeds brushed my hands, and mud caught one boot. Green apple reached me across the water—not only through the line now, but carried on the air nearby.

Hands reached through the dark and found my wrists. Someone on the bank had already wrapped Sadie in a coat. Caspian knelt in the reeds. Behind me, the water broke once, heavily, and Jonah surfaced.

They pulled us from the drain one after another, west of the wall beneath the open night.

32

Astra

The hands in the reeds were Kieran’s. He stood thigh-deep in the outflow without a lamp and caught my forearm as the current released me, wrist to wrist.

Green-gold burned where our skin met. After nine days without the chord, the returning line was almost painful. I held his arm until the mud stopped shifting beneath my boots.

“Nine days of nothing,” he said into my wet hair. He had not let go. “Then it came back all at once. I knew you were in the water.”

Caspian was already kneeling beside Sadie with his coat around her shoulders. Jonah climbed the bank behind me, streaming. Delphine waited with blankets and a shuttered lantern, counting us until she had all four. Sadie thanked her for a second blanket, then thanked the night air and the water. Delphine answered each thank-you as if it made sense. “I have her,” she told me. “Go get warm. I have her.”

A disused fulling mill stood a quarter mile down the outflow channel. The network had left a trimmed lamp, dry wood, and wool stacked to the tie-beams. The old race still ran beneath the floor. I had grown up three streets from a mill; after nine days of the Court’s muffled rooms, the noise of moving water steadied me.

Dry clothes waited in a cedar chest: old millworkers’ shirts, wool socks, and quilts. I untied the oilskin packet from beneath my shirt and set it on the chest. Delphine took Sadie to the picking-room above the race and settled her under a quilt with a lamp burning. Healing her would be tomorrow’s work. Tonight she needed warmth, light, and someone nearby when she woke.

The loft above the wool stores held the other lamp. Fleeces lay two deep across the floor, the tie-beams hung low, and the race moved beneath the boards. Kieran, Caspian, and Jonah stood in borrowed shirts with their attention fixed on me. At this distance the three lines braided at my wrist, loud enough that my skin felt newly fitted.

“Below the water, I couldn’t feel any of you.” The three lines crowded my wrist now, almost painful in their brightness. “I don’t want to sleep yet. I want all three of you.”

Kieran reached me before I finished speaking. Caspian’s hand closed around the wet hair at the back of my neck, Jonah crowded warm against my shoulder, and the three lines struck together hard enough to make me sway.

“If anything changes, I’ll tell you.”

Kieran kissed me before the last word was gone.

I pulled the borrowed shirt over my head and knelt in the middle of the fleeces. For nine days, the Court had handled, fed, washed, and watched my body on its schedule. The first touch after escaping would be mine. I put my hand between my thighs. “Watch.”

Caspian knelt in front of me and held my face between both hands. His mouth hovered close enough that I felt his breath, but he waited until I leaned in to kiss him. Kieran folded against my left side and put his mouth to my breast, unhurried for once, one hand spread warm over my ribs. Jonah knelt at my right and covered the three lines at my wrist with his palm. His thumb found my pulse. “There you are,” he said against my shoulder.

I worked my clit with two fingers, already slick, while the coin taste sharpened at the back of my tongue. They watched because I had asked them to: Caspian following my face, Kieran’s breath warming the wet skin of my breast, Jonah holding the wrist that told all three men exactly what the touch was doing to me. The loft held the hiss of the lamp, the water below, and three men breathing out of rhythm. My thighs tightened around my own hand. I came upright on my knees with Caspian’s hands steadying my face and my cry against his mouth. Pleasure flared down all three lines and struck back through me—burnt sugar at the back of my tongue, green-gold heat across my ribs, the dark steady pull that was Jonah. Kieran swore against my breast. Caspian’s grip tightened. Jonah exhaled through his teeth, his palm still sealed over my wrist.

Kieran lifted his head, breathing hard. “I felt that behind my eyes.”

“Good.” I caught Caspian by the open neck of his shirt and pulled him over me.

He lifted me onto the waist-high stack at the gable end and stood between my thighs, my hips at its edge. Wool compressed beneath my shoulders and caught at my damp hair. He set his forearms beneath my knees and his hands beneath my hips. The head of his cock rested against me, his whole body held rigid with waiting. I locked my heels behind him. “Now.”

He entered me in one long stroke and stopped deep, his jaw tight while my body adjusted around him. I pulled him closer with my heels. “Hard.”

He drove into me, hard enough to shake wool dust into the lamplight. Each stroke pushed the fleece beneath me toward the wall. Kieran found my hand and held it. Jonah slid his forearm between my head and the gable frame without being asked, giving me something solid to bear against. The marble line pulled taut, burnt sugar sharpening as Caspian lost the patience he showed everywhere else. His fingers tightened under my hips; his mouth opened on a breath he would not spend as sound. I hooked my heels behind him and pulled him deeper, meeting him until the pressure gathered too quickly to contain. My next climax broke with his name in my mouth. The flare caught him mid-stroke, stopping him for one helpless beat before he came half a breath after me. His pleasure rushed back through the line while he was still inside me, close enough to tip me toward another crest, and I laughed at the force of it.