Calvis looked war-weary, battle-scarred, and yet unchanged. His dark hair had grown overlong, with streaks of silver at the temples and threaded throughout. He’d grown a full beard. He looked as different from Cassian, shaved head and face, as any man could look from another.
There were other changes, too. Calvis had ever moved with grace and strength, but now he limped from a wound he refused to describe. His ready humor, as irritating as it could be, hadn’t vanished entirely but had been pushed so deep it rarely surfaced. The flash of white teeth against the dark of his beard most often signaled a grimace, not a grin.
He didn’t say where he’d been, just showed up in the dining room one evening as the family supped, and sat at the table as though he’d never gone. He accepted his mother’s tears and hugs, the shake of his brother’s hand. To Bertricia he said nothing, and later, when Cassian and his wife lay abed, her fierce whisper had cut through the darkness as a knife slices bread.
“Is he going to stay here?”
“I imagine so. He’s my brother. This is as much his house as it is mine.” Cassian, who had to rise with the dawn to serve at the temple, yawned and closed his eyes.
Bertricia wasn’t interested in sleep. “For how long?”
“Love, I don’t know. As long as he wants to. As long as he needs to.”
The bed shifted as she did, rolling onto her side to face him. “Where was he? He was gone for a year, now he’s back, just like that? And looking that way . . .”
“Looking what way, Bertricia?”
“So hard,” she said quietly. “So used.”
Cassian put his hand on her shoulder beneath the weight of her hair. Her skin, warm and fragrant, called him to touch and stroke it, but when he moved closer to kiss her, Bertricia turned her face. She buried it against his chest, her shoulders shaking.
“He frightens me,” she whispered.
There’d been few times during their acquaintance that Cassian had ever seen Bertricia weep. Now he heard the sound of tears in her voice, but when he lifted her face with a finger to her chin, her eyes were dry and bleak in the faint moonlight shining from the window. He was selfish enough to be grateful. He never knew how to react to the grief of another.
“Would you have me send him away? Would you have me put my brother from this house, which is his as much as mine?” Cassian sat to gather her against him, and Bertricia settled herself into his lap, her head on his shoulder.
“No.”
“I know you’ve never approved of him—”
She laughed. “Oh, it’s not I whose approval wasn’t won.”
Cassian knew his brother had never liked her, but he refused to say so aloud to his wife. “He’s said naught of his intentions. It’s likely he’ll not stay longer than a day, a week. He never has before.”
But it was longer than a day, a week. Longer than a fortnight. In fact, Calvis woke every morning long after the rest of the household had risen and stayed awake long after they’d all gone to bed. He attended meals inconsistently and without apology for any absences.
“It’s like living with a ghost,” Bertricia said at night when again Cassian sought sleep. “He comes and goes without a word to anyone. I came upon him in the garden and he looked right through me as though I didn’t exist.”
“Again, love, what would you have me do? Demand he converse with us in the parlor of nights, play at snap me? What? Wherever my brother has been, whatever he’s seen or done, those are his burdens to bear.”
“He’s your brother, Cassian. Have you spoken to him?”
“I speak to him every day.”
Bertricia scoffed. “About what? Mindless things.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you,” she said, and for the first time since she’d softened to his courtship, Cassian heard disdain in her tone. “I know you won’t ask him what you’re afraid to know.”
He didn’t tell her he already knew much about his brother’s life and the crimes he’d committed. For the first time in their marriage, Cassian turned his back on his wife, rolled to face away from her, went to bed with anger seething between them upon his part.
“Mayhap if you’re so concerned,” he told her, “you should ask him yourself.”
He would ever wonder if it had been his fault, what happened later. When everything had fallen down around them, when it all ended, broken, Cassian blamed himself. He still did.
Yet he was the one who was still alive.
A
h, Annalise. I’m pleased to have caught you.”
Mayhap Serenity meant her smile to set Annalise at ease, but it only set her back a step.
“Yes?”
“I carry a message from Mother Deliberata as regards your current assignment to the afternoon Faith studies with Master Toquin.”
Annalise narrowed her gaze. “Oh, and aye? What does Mother Deliberata say of them?”
“You’re to be granted your wish and moved from his class to another more suited to your abilities.” Serenity’s smile thinned a little, her gaze not so serene.
“I see.” Annalise had been on her way to that very class, her stomach already churning with thoughts of what she might say to him. Her teacher. Her lover. “At whose request?”
Serenity’s gaze flashed, revealing herself not as puzzled by the question as she next pretended to be. “Your mercy, I’m uncertain as to your meaning.”
“Who asked it? At whose request was I removed from Master Toquin’s instruction?” Annalise paused. “Yours?”
“No, certainly not. I have no say in the manner of such things. At any rate, even if I did, I’d not have asked it.” Serenity wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Think otherwise of me, but I’ve no reason to interfere.”
“His lady wife? Was it her?”
Serenity blinked rapidly, her cheeks coloring. “His lady—oh, no. I daresay not hers, either. What exactly did Cassian tell you?”
“Not enough. So it was him, then, yes? He asked for me to be removed from his class, no longer to be his assistant. He did it. Yes?”
“Yes,” Serenity said quietly. “But judge him not overharshly, Annalise, unless you know his reasons.”
“I can think of reasons aplenty for him to dismiss me from his class, and yet though I requested multiple times in the past to be so removed, no one listened to me. His claim was the Mothers knew best, and you tell me now he was able to petition them for my removal? How convenient!”
“He must’ve had good enough reason, else they’d have kept you there the way they’d done before. Somewhat must’ve changed.”
Annalise’s mouth twisted. “I wonder what that could’ve been?”
Serenity sighed. “Sister—”
“I’m no Sister of yours. Not yet.”
“Annalise,” Serenity said with a bit of bite to her reply, “whatever Cassian’s reasons for dismissing you, it might be worth your consideration. I’ve known him a long time and never found him to be unfair.”
“No? Unkind, perhaps? Unwilling, unyielding? But not unfair.” Annalise swallowed to keep her gorge from rising further. “Was it fair of him to go to the Mothers and ask for what I’d been denied already, and do so without the small, bare consideration of telling me himself ?”
“I believe it was his thought you’d be pleased.”
“Then he is also unwise.”
Serenity looked ’round the empty hall and sighed. “She is not his lady wife. Not any longer, and hasn’t been for all the years he’s spent here.”
“He called her his lady wife. He said naught of a dissolution.”
“I believe Cassian carries a great weight within himself as regards the ending of his marriage. One might imagine someone who cared for him would seek to discover it and ease it rather than burden him further.”
Annalise choked back a reply. Selfish is the heart, and yet again she thought first of herself. Serenity moved close enough to put a hand on Annalise’s arm, though only briefly.
“I believe you are good for him, Annalise.”
Annalise shook her head.
“You have ever been his friend since you arrived here. Even when he refused to allow it. And believe me, I do know how fiercely he refuses friendship, for I’ve tried to provide it.”
The women stared at each other. Serenity smiled, finally. Annalise wasn’t sure she could have, even if someone lifted the corners of her lips on her behalf.
“I believe he’s gone walking,” Serenity said at last. “Into the forest, by the waterfall.”
“Thank you.” Annalise was already moving.
“Annalise!”
She turned to look back. Serenity had clasped her hands in front of her. She unlinked her fingers now to give a small wave.
“Good mazel to you.”
Annalise nodded and continued, not toward the Motherhouse’s large double front doors, but to a small side door that led ’round to the back. She’d come through the forest on her journey here and hadn’t been through it again since then, but she was certain she could find her way.
By the time she reached the forest path her stomach had eased in its twisting. Something in the air’s fresh scent, the pungent odor of the trees and earth, calmed her. Or mayhap it was knowing that no matter what happened, it was beyond her control. She could do naught to make him love her if he did not.
Just as she could do nothing to make herself cease.
She let the rushing sound of water lead her past the rock and fork in the path where she’d first met him. She paused only a moment to stare down the long trail he’d sent her on, then back at the way she’d walked. The difference between a few minutes, walk and a full day’s journey.
She laughed, finding humor in it for the first time, and kept on. Her slippers were too thin to make this an easy trek. She slid in soft pine needles and snagged her gown on briars and claw-fingered tree branches. Her hair got loose from its braid and tangled about her face. By the time she pushed into the clearing where a small, bright waterfall fell into a tiny pool, her mouth had gone dry.
He was there, as Serenity had said, but Annalise didn’t go to him right away. She went to the pond, hardly larger than a puddle, really, and dipped her fingers in the clear water. She drank. She bathed her cheeks and wrists and the back of her neck. She took the time to tidy her hair, though she’d lost the cord with which to bind it and settled for leaving it loose down her back.
Then she turned to him.
Cassian had never looked more severe than he did in his high neck and long sleeves, jacket black as despair. Not even the buttons flashed or glinted. His hair was the only part of him in disarray, and that only from the occasional gust of breeze that swayed the grass and flowers and shook the trees.
He sat on a boulder surrounded by soft grass, both his feet on the ground, boots planted solid. His hands gripped the rock at his sides. He was watching her now, likely had been the entire time.
Annalise went to him. She got on her knees. She Waited, buttocks resting on her heels, the back of one hand resting inside the palm of the other. She Waited for him.
“Get up, Annalise.”
She looked at him. She didn’t get up. She leaned just enough to press her forehead to his knee.
With a muttered curse, Cassian jerked away and got off the rock. His hands gripped her shoulders, pulled her to her feet. Annalise went readily enough without fighting him, and when he let her go, she was steady enough to keep her feet.
“Don’t put me aside,” she warned, submissive perhaps in demeanor but not in tone. “I’ll have an explanation from you, Cassian. After.”
“After . . . what?” he asked, wariness in his dark eyes.
She kissed him. She had to stand upon her toes to reach his mouth and fist her hands in the spare amount of loose fabric on his sleeves. She nudged a knee between his legs, sliding her tongue inside his mouth, open in surprise and not passion.
At least, not at first.
A noise very much like a growl eased from his throat, vibrating on her lips. His hands gripped her hard, one between her shoulder blades and the other buried into her hair at the base of her neck. Cassian kissed her more fiercely than she had him, and Annalise took what he gave.
He broke it first, breathing hard. She was no longer on her toes, but had softened against him as he bent for her. His gaze searched hers.
“Why?” he asked. “Why this, here? Now?”
“Wherever you are, I will go to find you. Think you I would allow you to send me off without a word? Without telling me yourself ?” She leaned against him, mouth seeking his again.
His kiss deepened, his hands guiding her as he sat again on the boulder and took her with him. Her feet still on the ground, Annalise leaned into his embrace. Her hands went to his shoulders to keep herself steady.
They kissed for a long time.
She felt his hardness against her and moved her hand to the hem of his jacket, then his trousers beneath. She made swift work of the buttons and slipped her hand inside to grasp him. Cassian moaned into her mouth and made as though to move, but Annalise shook her head and silenced him with another hard kiss.
“Hush,” she said against his mouth when he made to protest again.
She couldn’t forget the day in the closet, when he’d used his mouth to please her without any for himself. Now she stroked his erection, freed from his trousers, and kissed him until all his protests fell away. Until he gave up to her. Gave in.
Until he broke.
His cock, sleek and hard under her fingers, throbbed as she stroked him. She would gladly have continued, gone even to her knees again for him to take him in her mouth, but Cassian captured her wrist and stopped her hand from moving.
She opened her eyes. He licked his mouth, also licking hers. He slowed the pace for a moment and she thought he meant only to instruct her on his preferences. In the next moment he’d pushed her away just enough to move off the boulder and turn her so her hands went flat against it.
Behind her, Cassian lifted her skirts and slid his hands along her bare flesh. He found her center, already slick with desire; his fingers slid inside to probe and tease. Annalise made a low cry and bent forward as he entered her with his cock next.