Page 93 of Zenith Court

The watch-quilt lived folded on the bench for cold shifts. I spread it over the flagstones in the oven’s warm shadow, and she lifted her arms and let me draw the shirt off over her head. The coal-glow laid copper along her skin. She watched me strip to the waist with open hunger. I still wasn’t used to it.

“Still want this?” I asked, settling onto my front between her thighs.

“Yes. Come here.”

I kissed my way up the inside of her knee by inches and put my mouth on her—salt, the small jump of her belly under my palm. Her hand came down into my loose hair, riding, not steering. I worked her clit with my tongue without a fixed pattern, following each change in her breathing, and the sound she made went straight through me.

Her hips rose. Her thighs closed warm against my ears. The second one took her slower than the first, a long swell instead of a snap, rolling through her while she dragged the quilt out of its folds and said my name.

“Ten to three,” I said to her hipbone, and kissed it.

“You’re inventing the numbers now.”

“I never joke about time.”

I shed the rest of my clothes—flour on the waistband, tragically—and sat back against the oven’s warm brick. She settled into my lap with her back against my chest, rose onto her knees, and set me where she wanted me. She sank down by slow degrees while my forearm crossed her collarbones and my breath went ragged against her hair. We both went still when she had all of me. At our wrists the lines stood bright, green-gold answering green-gold.

“Five past three,” I said against her ear. “The bread has another hour. So do we.”

“Then talk,” she said, and began to move, that deep slow rock that was going to unmake me at a pace entirely hers. “Tell me the time. Keep telling me.”

So I gave her the minutes as they passed—ten past, quarter past—my hand splayed low on her belly, my fingers finding her clit again, matching the rhythm she set. Somewhere in it her voice frayed and she said, “Say the Tower thing.”

“I have a great deal of Tower material.”

“What you said when I healed you. Say it.”

My voice cracked through the middle, and I said it into the curve of her ear: “Yours. Fully. No clock on it anymore.”

“No clock,” she said, and came apart hard around me, her head dropped back to my shoulder and her hand clamped over mine to keep it exactly where it was. I followed her with my mouth pressed to the side of her throat and her name breaking in it.

The kitchen returned slowly: cooling iron, the soft shift of coals, the dough risen under its cloth. I pulled the quilt around her shoulders and kept her in my lap while our breathing eased. I kissed her damp temple and told her she was warm, she smelled of us, and I would be finding flour on her for a week.

I fed the fire two sticks, knocked the coals open, and shaped the loaves while she watched from inside the quilt. We dozed against the oven while they baked, her spine along my side. When the first loaf came out, I broke the heel off too soon, burned my fingers, and swore in a whisper. I buttered it while it steamed and fed it to her piece by piece. She ate from my hand with her eyes closed, butter on her lip.

Afterward she raised her wrist and breathed in. Beneath flour and wheat, she wore my scent on her skin—green apple, sun-warmed stone, clean wind.

“I’m not washing until supper,” she said.

“The whole house will know by breakfast.”

“The whole house knew when I came down the stairs.”

She slept against my arm while the second loaf browned. When sleep finally came, I let the bread keep time.

4

Astra

Delphine trained with her back to the barn wall. She had chosen the spot the first morning we trained. She tested the boards with her shoulders, set her boots, and folded her arms. The Hall and the Tower had taught her the cost of open ground, so nobody remarked on the wall at her back.

“Left wrist,” she said. “It’s coming up.”

On my end, there was nothing. Five weeks of nothing. I stood at the trough and found the same blankness as every morning since the decree.

“It rises partway, then drops when you reach for it,” she said.

“I’ve tried every morning.”