The Adorned (40 page)

I moved slow, as if in water. Some ancient grace lay upon me, beneath the scars. It was a hard-earned mercy, perhaps, but no one says the gods are fair.

I kissed him first on the palm of each hand. His wild eyes went wide and still. Slowly, I drew my fingers through his tangled hair and pulled him close to me. He let out a small, wordless cry when our mouths touched, as if he was afraid to kiss me.

I guided him; my hands had never been this sure. On the soft tilting place at his hip was the small, unfinished tattoo I had given him, more vivid than any other ink he bore. I laid the tips of my fingers against it; these lines were all delicate scars.

Then I drew back. I tilted my head and squared my shoulders. All of me was on display to him.

“All I have to give, I will give to you.” My words came quiet and sure. “If you want it.”

The air between us was still. I kept time with my heartbeats. Each one seemed to stretch on for hours. I counted them out in the silence of my mind:
One.
Two.
Three
.

Then his wounded hand closed on the back of my neck and pulled me into his kiss with bruising force. With all the hunger of a starving thing, he answered me in full.

He pulled away from me, and it was my turn to utter a wordless cry; he stroked the back of my neck with his remaining fingers, and I leaned in to his touch. “I can’t make the same offer.” His breaths came quick and ragged. “You see, you already have me.”

I looked up into his dark blue eyes. I knew that he would tell me nothing but the truth.

It was as if a final weight had dropped away, and I was flying. The sunlight through the window made bright patterns across our skin. I fell backward onto the bed under the weight of his touch.

With clumsily careful hands, he slowly traced every inch of new flesh, every wrecked curl of ink. I pulled him closer; my eyes were wide open, drinking him in. “Roberd.” I half breathed, half laughed his name.

“Etan,” he said, and he lowered his lips to the scars on my chest, tracing the new nerves with his tongue—tasting me, his mouth growing insatiable. The care and wonder of his touch still remained, but now a hunger burned beneath it. His skin was hot against me, his teeth lightly grazing me, old strength returning to his hands, wounded or no.

His rough kisses moved to my neck then, and lower again, tasting the hollow of my belly, sliding down between my legs. I curled my hands into claws against his back, feeling the shift of his muscles—he had grown thinner and sparer in his prison, but the outlines of him were still there, waiting to come back into their full strength.

“Etan,” he said again, making a low growl of my name, and then he slid atop me, parting my legs, clenching my wrists in his hands; he did not move as if we were some fragile, broken creatures, but as if we were both hale and whole.

He came into me with a low cry, pressing his hot mouth against my neck; with a sigh, I found we still fit together, each subtly lathed to the other’s pattern. I surrendered to his kisses, to his thrusts, and the smile on my face was the smile of triumph.

In the gold of noon light, we began work on the design of our future.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Smoke rose in lazy coils, white tendrils of incense mingling with the oily fug of the funeral pyre. I watched it rise, vivid against the hard blue of the sky.

It was the edge of winter, nearing spring, but cold enough still that my breath hung visible in the air. I wore a dark coat lined with fur, a little too large for me. We were few here on this chill morning: too few. The city had healed, but it would never be the city I had first come to. So many had left it never to return, one way or the other.

The priestess said her final benediction, and the corpse burners came to extinguish the pyre. When we had gone, they’d gather the remaining bones and stack them carefully in the ossuary. The ash would go to fertilize the temple grounds.

I felt a steadying hand against the small of my back. “Are you all right?”

Smiling through a thin, teary haze, I turned in to Roberd Tallisk’s embrace. He put his arm around me. The two silver fingers of his right hand clicked together as he brushed them through my hair. He had kept his own short since trimming a year’s untidy growth away. It suited him. He had regained his natural bulk, but something austere would always linger in his features, sharpened by the militant cut of his dark hair.

“Will you cry for me,” he asked in a whisper, “when I go on the pyre?”

“If you prove as worthy of it,” I said, the jest soft between us.

Deino Meret had not been treated gently by his last winter, less mild than the two that had come before. He had shivered and coughed, and the last of his sight had gone from him. He had never come back down from his attic, but when Roberd had kneeled by his bed and taken his hand, he had smiled. When he passed, it was with a sigh and a slow closing of his eyes.

Doiran and Roisel had come to the ceremony, and Padrig, who knew the corpse burners. Amere writ-Meret was there; she wore a tunic in mourning colors that showed the old ink on her arms—misty moons and a faded sky filled with blue and purple stars. She had returned to the city a month before, face browned by Southern sun.

The corpse burners finished their work. Two handfuls of ash they took and placed in small lacquered boxes. Amere took one and Roberd the other. He frowned, enclosing it within the circle of his hands. They gleamed in the wintry light, those hands—or at least, two whole fingers and two fingertips, a silversmith’s masterwork. Roberd could no longer hold the hammer and needle of his trade, but with care he had learned to steer a brush.

“You should have this,” he said.

I shook my head. “He was never truly my master. Not as he was yours.”

“I have not been an apprentice for a long time.” He turned the box round and round, eyeing its subtle design. “If you won’t have it, then let me put it in the workshop. He would appreciate it.”

“Yes.” I laid a hand atop his. “I think he would.”

He looked at it for a moment longer, then tucked it carefully in the pocket of his coat.

Sheaves of cloud had moved in from the north, white and frail. They glowed like pale crystal in the waning afternoon sun. A wind came with them, with a whispery promise of storms—but that would be tonight, when the fire was lit and the windows shut against the world.

There had been room enough in the Teinnes’ house for us, but after a month of careful coexistence we had left. Roberd was not made to be a good guest. Still, we remained in Gressey; on sunny mornings I could hear the youngest Teinnes playing and bickering on the street outside our window.

The house we shared was small and old, but it had a wide hearth and clear light coming in through its tall windows. Above our kitchen and bedroom was the workshop; narrow stairs twisted up to it and opened into a single large room. Doiran and Padrig had come to help tear the old walls away. When we could afford it, we planned to put a skylight in. For now, we made do with mirrors, cunningly angled. Roberd had an instinct for catching the light; I watched him hunt it down with slow precision. It was another part of the art, like mixing the inks, like the heft of the needle.

There was a simple wooden sign hung above our door. It was a carving of a hand, rough-edged but oddly elegant, and painted on it in a bright blue was a vivid, blooming rose. It was a signpost rather than an advertisement; those who knew to look for it knew where to find us.

The box of ashes took pride of place on a high windowsill in the workshop. It caught the light, the lacquered design turned silver. It looked beautifully in place, here among the fine tools and designs, the tattooing chair and the stained worktable. It looked like an inkwell, or a box of replacement needles.

There was one thing not quite in its place, strange among the practicalities. In an alcove beside the great wooden table there was a painting—small, almost cramped in its simple brass frame. Roberd had balked at its place there, at first, but my quiet insistence had overruled him in the end.

The artist had left it unsigned. It was more cartoon than masterpiece, with faces and hands hinted at rather than portrayed. It had come by a strange route to our wall. A Lowlander courier had been paid to deliver it to Peretim. His employer—dark as a Southerner, he told us, but wearing a Northman’s furs—had not given a name. It had been meant for Nightwell Street. When he had found that in ashes, he had asked careful questions until he found the house under the hand and rose.

Roberd asked him why he had bothered, why he had not simply kept or sold his cargo.

The courier shook his head. “He made me swear an oath to the Storm Lords that I would do all I could.”

“Before he paid you, you mean?”

He nodded. “Yes, and well.”

The gift came with no letter, no hint of its ultimate origin. Nevertheless, it was a message.

It was a portrait—a family portrait, I thought. A tall woman stood behind a high-backed chair; she was in shadow, showing nothing of her features save for the firefly light of her eyes. Sat on the chair was another woman, dressed in red, with dark braids piled like a princess’ crown atop her head. She held a baby on her lap. The child was too young to show gender, or the future shape of its face. There was just a cloud of dark hair and porcelain-pale skin.

Isadel’s child.

The scene was vague, the decor old-fashioned. They could have been painted anywhere. I could send nothing in return.

I told the courier, should he meet the strange Northman again, to say that the gift had been gladly received.

“Nothing more?” he had asked, eyes taking in my scars, the scattered papers in the workroom, the designs pinned to the walls, Roberd’s half-silvery hands.

I had shaken my head and pressed a few ral into his palm. “No. Nothing more.”

* * * * *

About the Author

John Tristan is a multinational nerd with a passion for fantasy fiction. He lives in Manchester with his husband, best friend and various cats. He writes science fiction with a queer, romantic twist.

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ISBN: 978-14268-9596-8

Copyright © 2013 by John Tristan

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