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The notion of Ari marking me in such a way nearly stole my consciousness.
We remained locked together for a long pause. Ari’s kisses speckled my neck, his arms held me close to him. I straightened and hooked one arm around his head, threading my fingers through his hair.
“I love you, Saga,” he said softly. “Life with you is my greatest honor.”
I turned to face him. My thumb tugged on his bottom lip. I kissed him sweetly. “The honor is mine. Forever.”
Chapter31
The Golden King
My fingers strokedSaga’s hair. Her soft breaths were peaceful during sleep. I could go a thousand turns without sleeping, or so it felt, but Saga had battled to stay awake after our time at the hot springs.
No doubt, the four times I made her body quake had added to the exhaustion.
Once we’d returned to the Court of Blood, I’d told her to sleep. She protested, likely because that was what we did—poke and prod at each other, then touch and kiss until our flesh was rubbed raw.
When Saga recalled I was the more stubborn of us, she succumbed. Of course, I was quickly reminded of the thought of closing her away in a room alone turned my stomach in irrational unease. What if the window wasn’t latched and that bastard took her? What if the Norns grew cruel and took her into an endless sleep as penance for my waking? What if taking my eyes off her somehow led to her destruction?
I was being ridiculous, but I’d cave to anxieties tonight and deal with them tomorrow.
I traced the peak of her ear, a smile playing on my lips. Maybe I wouldn’t address them ever and simply demand this position, her peaceful face on my thighs, the only proper position for her to be sleeping until we took our last breath.
Perhaps someday I would be able to take more than ten paces away from my wife. Tonight was not that time.
Flames danced in Gorm’s open hearth in the great hall. The heat of it bit the skin on my face, but reminded me I was here. Alive. Present. To wake from such a deep fae sleep was disorienting. Thoughts bled into memories, sometimes I did not know what was true and what was a dream.
Head back on the padded chaise, I studied the rafters. This land was in my blood because of Saga giving up half her feather. The pull to it was steady and strong. It was undeniable. But there was more.
A lump tightened in my throat.
This land was in my blood for it was in my mother’s, my father’s. I’d yet to tell Saga. There was too much to share in one night. Memories of a past I wasn’t certain she even recalled. Her curse had altered her recollections in such a way, the king’s ward, her brother’s bleeding heir, had never crossed her thoughts.
How connected we’d become. From the moment I took my first breath, I was destined to have this woman in my arms. We were carved from the same land, even if I lived a world apart. The borders I had always studied in the four kingdoms were shaped by Petter Sekundär. He’d never known. In his mind, my father hailed from Etta, the Night Folk province.
I let out a long sigh, reliving the moments when Wraith had shown the interactions of my parents with Riot.
The map. No doubt the fate king had known what would come.
The blade. I did not understand its purpose, nor my mother’s significance. What I knew was it had been hidden away. Wraith revealed it to me for a reason, and beyond thoughts of touching every surface of my wife’s body, I’d thought of little else.
The groan of ladder pegs brought my attention to the loft over the hall.
“Oh. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” Calista hesitated, perched two rungs from the bottom.
“You aren’t. I have no desire to sleep.”
“Makes sense.” The storyteller hopped off the last rung.
She wore a long gray nightdress. Her hair was longer than I thought now that it was out of her braids, and the blood from the claw marks was wiped away to nothing but irritated gashes. I’d first met the girl when she was freed from the cells in the North. Then she’d been skin and bones, afraid but fierce. I’d aged her at maybe twelve back then. Now, fed and healthy, she was no child.
I tracked her across the hall to the chair positioned next to mine. “Why do you not sleep?”
Calista’s eyes were pools of crystalline, pale enough I could make out the shadows she hid from us. The burdens and fears she carried.
“A lot on my mind,” was all she said.
“I know the feeling.”
