Hammer & Air (4 page)

I swallowed.
You’re mine.
“I’m yours,” I said, understanding only dimly, it were true, but finally glimpsing the depths of what it meant to belong to Hammer.

He smiled a little more and nodded. “Aye. You’re mine. I want you.”

I nodded back. “I want you too.”

His smile became tentative, shaky. He raised his head then and met my lips, and I touched his lips with my tongue. His mouth opened and the kiss deepened, and the sky darkened to twilight.

He left me shortly after dark. He tried to make me hide in the tree, but I refused.

“I’ll pick the vegetables in my flats,” I told him practically. “I can wash them, and we can eat until we find a town that will take us.”

He grunted unhappily, but it made sense.

“You see anyone but me,” he growled, “you hide in our tree.” He reached into the boot he’d just put on and pulled out a finely honed knife. “You see anyone you don’t like, you use this first, ask questions later.”

I looked at the knife blankly, so cold that I dropped it as I took it from his hands. My teeth threatened to chatter and I told myself to be stronger than my name, stronger than air.

“You put up with the smith,” I said, but my throat clamped down so hard it hurt to speak. “You….” This would hurt me for many years. I could not hide it now. “You didn’t even tell me. I could….” I shrugged and tried to pretend like this thought didn’t make the bile rise in my throat. “I could submit. Grease myself with olive oil in the morning and make my mind elsewhere.”

His hands caught my chin, rough enough to push the bruising that seemed to have spread even there. “I were a boy. You are not a boy. Besides, the smith were gentle. This one won’t be. He won’t be happy until you’re bloody or dead. We’ll go.”

His thumb moved almost gracefully against my uninjured cheek, and I simply stared at him with wide frightened eyes. He nodded, as though to reassure me, and then turned on his heel and strode back to the town.

I got busy dulling his good bowie knife to help me dig up the tubers, carrots, and turnips I’d planted. I dug up the ones in the worm rich soil first. They were, of course, bigger.

But I had unearthed and washed my entire garden, and the moon had moved halfway across the sky, by the time Hammer came back from town, our possessions tucked into a knapsack on his back. I had watched the moon fretfully, trying to judge the time, trying to hear minutes and then hours in my heart, but I couldn’t. It didn’t matter. Something, something, were telling me that it were taking too long. Some turn of the moon, bird cry in the dark, or scent in the earth were telling me that there were summat wrong.

Hammer’s wandering gait back confirmed my uneasiness, and I were only a little surprised when he wandered to the stream instead of toward the bole of the tree, where I waited.

When I got to the stream, he had shucked his loose shirt, the one that he had refused to take off when we were lying together, and were swishing it around in the water and using it to scrub his hands and his forearms, and his chest and his face and….

I fell to my knees beside him and grabbed his shaking, chilled hands.

“What happened?” I asked, panicked.

“You can go back now,” he said without looking at me. “You can go back now. But I have to leave.”

I blinked, and peered closely at him in the moonlight. There were a slash of something dark on his cheekbone and I reached out toward it. He flinched away but my arms were longer, and I took it off with my fingertips and brought it to my eyes. The moon were full, and seemed enormously close to the earth, and I could almost make out the color in the light.

“Is this blood?” I asked, and he grunted.

“I need to go,” he said again. “There will be people after me. You tell them you don’t know anything. Nobody will bother you. You’ll be fine.”

He stood up again, and for a moment, I saw him walking away from me, leaving me puzzled in the aftermath of the dire thing that had happened while I were digging potatoes.

“Bollix!” I cried out, grabbing his bicep with enough force to hurt. “We’re going together, and you’re telling me what happened.”

“You don’t have to come!”

“Do you think I want to stay here without you?” I asked, miserable to admit it. Oh gods… twelve years, our entire lives. Since I were five or six, there hadn’t been a night I hadn’t gone to bed and not heard his breathing. The thought of it now left me terrified, bereft, as though my spirit left my flesh and wandered around this tiny, ten-mile radius that had been the bubble of our world for all our lives.

He closed his eyes and swallowed, and for a moment, I thought he were going to cry.

“He hit you,” he whispered after a moment. “He hit you. Do you think I could let him hit you… threaten you… do you think I would let him live?”

I swallowed. Oh. Oh gods. “I’m yours,” I said, shaking so hard my hand quivered on his flesh. He covered it with his other hand, and it were surprisingly firm.

“You’re mine,” he replied, his voice a little stronger.

“You can’t give me up now,” I told him seriously. Oh, what I did not know about my beguiling Hammer. Set me free? Maybe. Give me up? Never.

He nodded then, accepting. “Let me wash up,” he said, and I tugged on him until we were both back on our knees at the stream bank.

“Let me help you.”

He sat quietly while I used his wet shirt to wash away the blood on his face and neck. There were bruises, too, and when I asked, he said, “I woke him up first.”

“You what?” I were belatedly terrified for him. Oh gods. Master Will had been huge and powerful and… and…. “Why in the hells would you do that?”

Hammer’s placid gaze met mine with his customary directness.

“It weren’t honorable,” he said simply. “Not in his sleep. Any man deserves to know why he’s going to die.”

I shuddered. He were such a better man than I. “I’d rather your dishonor than your death, Hammer. Now tell me you brought another shirt.”

“I did,” he said. “Here. Let me use this one to clean my hammer.”

I didn’t even want to think about what he would be cleaning off of it. I were rifling through the knapsack looking for his clothes when I realized my few changes of clothes and blankets were in there too. So were my old book, and my looking glass, and my stuffed bear.

I pulled out the bear and looked at it fondly. “Hammer?”

“Aye?”

“You told me to go back to town.”

“Aye.”

“But you brought my things.”

“Aye.”

I looked at him, the glimmer of a smile on my lips. “Why’d you bring my things if I weren’t supposed to come with you?”

Even in the moonlight I could see the flush wash his cheeks.

“I hoped,” he said simply, and my smile spread.

“With good reason.”

He grunted, and a little bit of a smile curved along his mouth, and then we got busy with the business of being gone.

Part III
Roses in the Snow

Hammer knew how to hunt, and I knew how to gather. It were the only way we survived.

At first, we thought we would simply travel past a couple of villages, and find a place to ply our trades somewhere we could easily disappear into a crowd. The first town we stopped by, I ventured to the market by myself, looking for more olive oil and a passable cooking pot, and to scent the wind. Hammer waited for me in a small camp a league or so outside of town, and I’d bought the pot and had just purchased some big bread rolls to take back to him, when I saw it.

A flyer, probably run off by Master Lea’s own press, were nailed to a pole, looking for Graeme and Eirn, brothers who had murdered.

It described us, down to our blue eyes and dark hair, and I did everything but turn pale and vomit when I read the finer details. Hammer had bludgeoned Master Will to death with his smith’s hammer. I’d known that; it hadn’t taken a genius or a scientist to figure it out, and I reckoned the bruises on Hammer’s face from the roué had taken as long as my own to heal. But to see it there, in print, that your bedmate had caved in a man’s skull, well, it were a frightening thing.

It didn’t change the fact that I’d felt safer these weeks on the run with Hammer than I had the whole rest of my life.

As I stared at the words of what Hammer had done to protect me, I were blessed with the image, common enough in these last weeks, of Hammer, buried inside of me, his bare chest glistening in the firelight, and his mouth slack and relaxed with the passion of knowing I would care for him when I were in his arms.

I’d tasted his skin—it were salty and tart and sweet. I’d held his cock in my mouth, and swallowed his spend—it were musky and bitter and creamy. He’d gone into the woods in the evening to snare rabbits for us to eat, while I’d set up camp and started a fire, cooking vegetables for us in the embers. Every time he had brought back food, he’d had such pride. He could take care of me. He could possess me. For children who had grown up as we had, with very little to possess, I were his greatest accomplishment.

The words were nothing. The deed were incidental. Hammer waited for me in camp, and he thought I were something to be proud of. I made myself stop and trade my tiny looking-glass for more blankets. We were going to need them as winter progressed, and we were out in it.

Still, when I returned, it were a hard thing to explain to him why no town would do.

“We’ll probably have to turn from the coast and go inland,” I told him through a mouthful of bread. We were both eating it slowly; I’d just told him it were the last we’d be getting for a while. “Head for a kingdom on the western shore, far away from this one here in the east.”

Hammer squinted in that way he had when he were trying to see things clear. “It says both of us? That makes no sense. You were last seen running from the town. I’m the one who went into his room!”

I shrugged. “It’s not like I weren’t the one with reason to make him dead, Hammer,” I said, not particularly perturbed.

Hammer made a sound like a hammer hitting earth. “You could have had a life,” he muttered. “Winter will be here quick.”

I glared at him. “I didn’t want ‘a life’. I wanted you.”

He rolled his eyes and stood. “We’ll camp here one more night before we go westward. There’s game around here. I’m going to set snares.”

I sighed and stood. “We’ve got game, and we’ve got jerky. Stay around camp tonight, Hammer.  It’s getting cold and dark longer, and I fear for you in the dark like that.” I flushed as I said it. We weren’t girls, and gods help anyone who implied Hammer were such a one.

His lips twisted. “Worried about me, Eirn?”

I sighed and gazed at him helplessly through the fire. “Shouldn’t I be?”

He shook his head and looked away. “Maybe you should simply run, you know. You can convince them it weren’t you.”

“Wanting to get rid of me, Hammer?”

He sighed, clearly frustrated to have his words turned back on him so neatly. “Shouldn’t I be?” he asked gruffly, and I smiled, because I’d won.

We cleaned up our dinner and slung our rucksack of food up from a tree—there were bears in the woods, we both knew that—and set our bedroll by the fire, with the extra blankets I’d brought from town. Hammer had brought a thick sweater a piece for us from the orphanage, but once we were tucked into the bedroll, we didn’t need them. I lay on my stomach, my head pillowed on my arms, and watched him settle himself on his back, his interlaced hands behind his head.

“Hammer?”

“Mmm?”

“If we find a new town, then what?”

He blinked hard. This weren’t a question he’d answered in his head before. “I get a job smithing, you get a job at the printers. We find a flat together. Like we were, just somewhere different.”

“There will always be us?” I asked, wanting to know for certain. He turned to me then, his profile lit by fire, and his eyes shadowed and opaque.

“You want there to be?” I could not tell if it were his wish as well. I answered him honestly anyway.

“Yes.”

He rolled to his side then, and I to mine, and he held my chin firm as he kissed me. I kissed him back, hard and hungry, and he bruised my lips against my teeth with his want. I didn’t complain. His wanting didn’t stop at the kiss. He were hard and hungry throughout, turning my body roughly, prepping my arse with a bit of pain and haste, pummeling inside me with enough force to make me gibber into our blankets.

He finished before I did, a rare thing, and after he groaned and roared into my shoulder, and spent, he flailed for a moment blindly, before his hands found their surety and began to stroke my body with some tenderness. For minutes there were just him, still buried in my dripping arse, stroking me—my stomach, my chest, my back, my shoulders, along my neck, the planes of my jaw, my quivering thighs.

I began to squirm, my prick hard and unsatisfied and my body set to blazing by his touch. His cock were still mostly hard inside me, and that made me tremble and squirm. He laughed softly as I started to shake and grunted “no” when I tried to take my own cock in hand.

“Mine,” he growled.

“I’ll beat it myself,” I threatened on a whine, needing release so badly I almost wept with it.

“Mine!” he snapped. His fingers came up to my nipples and pinched. Not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to make my whole body tremble with the fire of want and need.

“Ohhhh…
gods…
Hammer… bring me… please… I need… I need you… I need to come….”

He reached down under our bodies and pulled out a little, enough to let his spend trickle into his palm, and enough to make me wild with him all over again. I were practically sobbing by the time he brought that hand to my front and engulfed my jutting cock with it. His other arm went around my chest, keeping my back flush against him, and his hips started to move again, his prick staying hard enough to make me shiver as he moved inside me.

That slippery, rough hand on my cock were enough, but the fact that he were still hard and moving… oh… oh gods….

I screamed like a mountain cat and snarled like a bear. My skin exploded, and I were remade, there in his arms as he clenched me to him and held me, sobbing in climax, weak with my come.