The Last Night

The two weeks passed in preparation. Aldric worked from dawn to dark. He organized the stores. He set patrol schedules for the men who would remain. He drilled Briwer on the chain of command and Briwer listened and nodded and at the end of it the old man said "You are coming back."

It was not a question. Aldric looked at him.

"You are coming back," Briwer said again. "Because if you do not I will have failed her and I do not fail her."

"You will not fail her."

"See that you do not."

The night before they were to leave Elara sent for him. The boy came as always and Aldric went downstairs to the hall. The door was closed. The shutters were shut. The fire was low. The bench held nothing this time. No rope. No knife. No jar.

She stood in the center of the room in the dark dress with her hair down and bare feet and she looked at him and she did not speak for a long time.

"Take off your armor," she said finally.

He did. He laid it on the bench and stood before her in his breeches. She looked at the scars on his chest. The three lines. They had healed now. White lines on his skin. Permanent. She came to him and touched them.

"Did you press them every night," she asked.

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because they were yours."

She closed her eyes. Her hand stayed on the scars. He could feel her fingers trembling. Not from cold. From something she was holding back. Something enormous that pressed against the walls she had built.

"Kneel," she said.

He knelt. She went to the bench and came back with something he had not noticed. A strip of cloth. She stood behind him and placed it over his eyes and tied it at the back of his head. Darkness. Total darkness. His other senses sharpened. He could hear the fire. He could hear her breathing. He could smell her. Soap and woodsmoke and underneath that the thing that was just her.

"Do not speak," she said. "Do not move. Do not try to see. I want you to feel everything and see nothing. I want you to know that I am here and not know what I am doing. I want you to trust me with your eyes closed."

He knelt in the dark and waited.

Her hand touched his chest. The scars. She traced them with her finger. Then her nail. Then something else. Something cold and flat and metal. The knife. She ran the flat of the blade over the scars and the steel was cold on the raised tissue and he could not see it but he could feel every millimeter of it.

She moved the blade. Not cutting. Not yet. Tracing. Drawing on his skin with the flat and the edge and the point. She ran it down his chest. Over his stomach. Along his ribs. The point would dip and press and he would feel the sharpness of it and his body would tense and she would pull back and move somewhere else.

Then she cut. Not on the chest. On his side. Below his ribs. A short line. Deep enough. The pain was a white flash in the darkness behind the blindfold and he made a sound and she said "Quiet" and he bit it back.

She cut again. His shoulder. The opposite side from the burn scar. Another line. Another flash. He bit his lip and tasted blood and did not make a sound.

A third cut. His stomach. Low. Just above the line of his breeches. This one was longer. Slower. She drew the blade across his skin with a deliberateness that said she was savoring it. That the act of cutting him was not just a means. It was the thing itself. The slow parting of skin under steel was what she wanted and the blood that followed was what she needed and his silence was the frame that held the picture.

She set the knife aside. Her hands replaced it. Her palms pressed against the cuts and the pain was enormous and her hands were warm and wet with his blood and she spread it across his skin the way she had before. She painted him with it. His chest. His arms. His neck. She covered him in his own blood and her hands moved over him and the touch was somewhere between violence and worship.

Then her mouth was on him. On the cuts. On the blood. He felt her lips on his side where she had cut him and her tongue on the wound and the sensation was unlike anything he had ever experienced. Pain and warmth and wetness and the knowledge that her mouth was on his open flesh and she was tasting him and the sound she made was the sound from before. That quiet private sound that meant she had gone past the point of control and was somewhere else entirely.

She moved from cut to cut. Her mouth on each one. Her lips and her tongue on each wound. He knelt in the dark with blood on his skin and her mouth on his body and the pain was so deep it had become its own country and she lived there now. She lived inside his pain and she fed there and he could feel her feeding and he gave it to her. He gave her every sound his body tried to make. He held nothing back except the words. The words he could not say. The words she could not hear.

She stood. He heard her move. Heard fabric. Heard her breathing change. Then her hand was in his hair and she pulled his head back and her mouth was on his neck. On the bite scar. She bit it again. The same spot. The scar split under her teeth and fresh blood ran and she bit harder and he made a sound that was not pain. Not exactly. It was the sound of a man being consumed.

She pulled his head back further. Her mouth moved from his neck to his jaw. To his chin. To the corner of his mouth. She stopped there. Her lips against the corner of his. Her breath on his skin. Her blood covered hand in his hair.

"Do not kiss me," she whispered.

He did not move. He did not close the distance. He knelt there with her lips almost on his and the blood drying on his skin and the cuts throbbing and her hand shaking in his hair and he did not kiss her because she had told him not to and his will was hers and that was the only thing he had left to give.

She pulled away. He heard her dress. Heard her buttoning. Heard her breathing slow. The walls going back up.

She removed the blindfold. The firelight was blinding after the dark. He blinked and she stood before him dressed and composed and the only evidence of what had happened was the blood on her hands that she had not yet wiped away.

She looked at his body. At the new cuts and the old scars and the blood and the marks and she looked at it the way a sculptor looks at finished work.

"You are beautiful," she said.

She had never said that. She had never said anything like that. The word hung in the air between them and he did not know what to do with it because it was the kindest thing she had ever said to him and it was said over his blood and his pain and that made it the cruelest thing too.

She knelt in front of him. She took his face in her bloodied hands. She looked at him and her eyes were wet and the tears did not fall. She held them.

"Tomorrow we ride south. Tomorrow I am a lady of the court and you are my knight and none of this exists. None of it. Not the hall. Not the knife. Not the blood. Not my mouth on your skin. None of it. It lives in this room and it stays in this room and when we come back if we come back we can open this room again. But until then you carry my marks and you carry my words and you carry the knowledge that you are mine and I am yours in the only way that matters. The way that cannot be spoken."

"My lady."

"Elara," she said. "In this room. One last time. Say it."

"Elara."

She kissed his forehead. Light. Brief. The only kiss she had ever given him. Then she stood and walked to the door and opened it and the cold air from the hallway came in and the room was just a room again and he was just a man kneeling on a stone floor with blood on his body and scars that would never fade.

"Clean yourself. Sleep. We ride at dawn."

She left. The door closed.

He did not clean himself immediately. He knelt there and he felt the cuts and the blood and the place on his forehead where her lips had been and he stayed there until the fire burned down to embers and the hall went cold and the dark came in through the shutters and filled the room.

Then he stood. He cleaned the cuts. He bandaged them. He dressed the wounds and put on his clothes and went to his room and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

Tomorrow they would ride south. Tomorrow the world of Greyhollow would end and the world of the capital would begin. A princess returning to a court that wanted her dead. A knight sworn to a woman who could not love him and who owned him body and blood and soul.

He pressed his fingers to the cuts on his side and his shoulder and his stomach. He pressed them one at a time and he felt her mouth on each one. He pressed the bite scar on his neck and felt her teeth. He touched his forehead where she had kissed him.

He did not sleep. He lay in the dark and he held the pain and the kiss together in the same place because that was where she had put them and that was where they belonged. Together. Inseparable. The knife and the lips. The blood and the words. The cruelty and the tenderness that were not opposites but were the same thing wearing different faces.

He lay in the dark and he waited for dawn and for the road south and for whatever came after. And he was not afraid. Because the marks she had left on him were a map and the map led only one direction and the direction was her and he would follow it wherever it went.

Even if it went into the dark.

Even if it went into fire.

Even if it did not come back.