She pushed against him, ready and more than ready. She’d thought to please him only, but gave him what he wanted without argument. His fingers found her clit and pinched in gentle counterpoint to the thrust of his prick inside her.
She never would’ve said something as frantic as this, in such a place instead of slow, well-made love in a comfortable bed, could ever have satisfied her. Annalise crested in moments, body tightening on his. Orgasm danced just out of reach, teasing for only a breath or two before she tipped over the edge into the depths of pleasure.
Cassian followed her, crying her name in a low voice. His thrusts eased. His finger circled gently on her clitoris to ease a small set of new ripples through her.
Her hands had clutched so tight upon the rock she’d scraped the tips of her fingers. Blinking, Annalise eased her grip on the stone. Cassian withdrew, and before she could move even to let her skirts fall around her ankles, she felt the soft press of material between her legs.
She put her hand over it and turned. “Your handkerchief?”
“I thought you might need it.”
She raised a brow at him as he tucked himself away. “Anything else would be . . . unseemly?”
Cassian paused, studying her. Then he cupped her face and kissed her softly. He looked into her eyes. “I would never be the cause of your discomfort, Annalise.”
“But you are.” She arranged her skirts and handed him the handkerchief, watching with concealed amusement as he considered if he should return it to his pocket. “Give it to me.”
She took it from him and rinsed it in the basin of rock at the waterfall’s base, then spread it on the rock to dry. She turned to find him watching her, obvious admiration in his gaze. She put her hands on her hips.
“You’ve changed a great deal since first you came to the Order, Annalise.”
“Have I? Have you?”
“Yes . . . I think so. I think you’ve made me.”
She sighed and rested, weary now, against the boulder that had so conveniently supported her during their lovemaking. “At least there’s that.”
He sighed, too, and sat beside her. The boulder wasn’t large enough for them both, but Annalise didn’t mind sharing the space. It pressed her close to him, and for now she would take every opportunity to be so forced.
“You sent me from your class because we have become lovers.” She didn’t make it a question.
“I requested once more you be removed from my class because your level of learning was too far advanced for it. This time, the Mothers saw fit to allow the request. It had nothing to do—”
She twisted to stare at him. “Please don’t lie to me, Cassian. Above all else, don’t lie.”
He drew a fingertip across her forehead to push a few curls away. “Your mercy. I should be better spoken when it comes to you.”
“Yes. You should.”
He cupped her face again. Kissed her. “You have ever been so blunt with me, Annalise. You’ve never suffered my whims, have you? Even though so many have.”
“Whims? Eccentricities, I’d call them. Arrogances, mayhap. I might go so far as to name them hum-grumblies.”
His low rumble of laughter lit a fire in her belly, though he’d already so satisfied her moments before. “You have ever been unafraid to say to me whatever was on your mind. You never let me frighten you.”
“I’ve faced more frightening faces than yours.” She paused as though thinking. “Not many, true, as yours is fair fearsome.”
Again, he laughed and kissed her. His gaze held many emotions, joy not among them. “It’s why I . . . care for you so.”
“You care for me?” She leaned into him, her head on his shoulder. “You have a most troublesome way of showing it.”
“I plead your mercy, sweetheart. I am not . . . I have never been . . .”
“Hush,” she told him with a finger pressed to his mouth.
He kissed it and folded his fingers ’round hers to pull them from his lips. “I would tell you, if you’ll listen.”
“I will gladly lend my ears to anything you have to say,” she told him.
And he began.
Chapter 22
C
alvis had been gone and now was back; Cassian had been content in his life and now was not.
His time in the Temple fulfilled him, at least parts of it did. He found great satisfaction in bringing the Word of the Book to those unable to decipher it for themselves. Children, mostly, but also those whose minds were incapable of great understanding. He spent his days teaching the simplest concepts, taking the tasks his Brothers-in-Faith found too dull or not challenging enough.
Home was another matter altogether. He had, as he’d told his lady wife, not found it necessary to put his brother from the house in which they’d grown up. Calvis, after all, had a full half share of the house and lands, no apparent desire to buy out his brother, and no obvious means of procuring the funds even if he had.
Living with Calvis
was
a bit like living with a ghost.
He ate and drank at their table and spoke when spoken to, but of the joyous, raucous brother who’d loved to drink and whore and gamble, Cassian saw no sign. He’d once have said he’d be happy to have his brother lose those vices, but now, watching his brother push his food ’round his plate, eyes shadowed, cheeks hollowed, Cassian found himself thinking he might take his brother to a brothel simply to see if he could liven him again.
As summer turned to the harvest and then winter beyond it, Cassian came home from the Temple with night almost fallen. As he crossed the yard he came to his brother, stripped to the waist, breathing plumes of frost into the chilly air. He moved silently, each step precise and certain and lovely.
Striking Serpent.
Leaping Tiger.
Biting Dog.
Cassian didn’t know the names of all the forms, just knew his brother had mastered them all. Even without weapons he was deadly. Graceful. Lethal. Those hands had killed. Even now as Calvis finished, panting, Cassian saw his brother scrub his palms against his trousers.
Some stains are never washed clean.
“Cassian,” Calvis cried at the sight of him.
It was the first time in a long while Calvis had been the first to speak upon their meeting. The sound of his name in his brother’s voice, so much like and yet so different than his own, warmed Cassian more than a slug of liquor.
“Cal.”
“Brother . . . you’ve caught me at my work, I’m afraid.”
Cassian leaned on the fence railing to watch as Calvis slipped on his shirt. The warmth had frozen inside him at his brother’s words. “Your work? You plan on leaving us?”
Calvis paused, expression unreadable. “I would never leave you, brother. Not entirely.”
Cassian forced a laugh to shadow the hint of tension. “When you said your work—”
“Ah, I should’ve said my Art, but it’s not mine, is it? I use it now and again, but I shouldn’t claim ownership of what belongs to everyone.”
“Not to everyone. Not to me.” Cassian laughed, shaking his head.
“Oh, and aye, even to you, brother. Come here and let me show you.” Calvis gestured.
Cassian moved forward, reluctantly. “You’ve ever been the fitter of us.”
“Bollocks. We’re the same, as the Allcreator made us. Yes? What I have, you have.” Calvis tugged Cassian by the wrist to stand beside him. “Now. Plant your feet like so.”
It felt awkward, the stance, the stretch. It had been too long since Cassian had even tried these positions. The first few passes left Cassian unsteady and easily knocked off-balance by Calvis, who even pulled his strikes. By the fifth or sixth time, though, Cassian managed a block.
“Most well, brother! Most well indeed!” Calvis looked happier than Cassian had seen him in years. Since they were boys, perhaps. It was better than anything, to see his brother with such joy in his eyes.
“Again,” Cassian said. “This time, I’ll knock you on your arse.”
They went again, in darkness that deepened. Lights from inside the house provided some bare illumination, enough to make this battle all the more challenging. It still ended up with Cassian on his back and Calvis atop him, fist at his brother’s throat.
“Stop that!” Bertricia’s voice, acrack with fright, rang throughout the yard. She lifted her lantern to shine the light on the brothers. “Stop that at once!”
“We were only playing,” Cassian tried to tell her as his brother helped him to his feet. “Naught more.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She strode toward them, a picture of feminine fury. She lifted the lantern, and in its flickering light Cassian could see her features had twisted, making her a woman he didn’t know.
She slapped Calvis across the face so fiercely his head rocked back. For a man so well-versed in the Art to take a blow he could so easily have sidestepped meant much, if only Cassian could determine the meaning. When she slapped him again, blood trickled from Calvis’s mouth. It looked black in the lantern light, black but bright.
“Enough!” Cassian stopped his wife’s hand from a third blow. “By the Arrow, Bertricia, what are you about? Have you gone mad?”
She was shaking, indeed, as though madness had overtaken her. She even snapped her jaws at both of them. Her eyes rolled, a wild horse at the first touch of a saddle.
“I told you I would never hurt him. I told you that.” Calvis spit a mouthful of blood into the dirt at her feet. It left a mark in the frost.
Mayhap Cassian had always known from a place deep inside, even back in those garden days when Calvis had called her she-hound the second. Mayhap later when Calvis had hired a whore for his brother’s pleasure. But if he had not known so long ago, Cassian surely knew it now.
He stepped away from both of them and tasted sickness so sour he thought he might spew it. “Calvis?”
Calvis’s shoulders slumped, but he never looked away from his brother’s face. “I will not plead your mercy, brother, for I deserve it not.”
“Plead you nothing,” Bertricia said in a low, haunted voice. The lantern shook, making shadows dance among the three of them. She wasn’t wearing a cloak against the cold.
Cassian held his place on the surface of the world only because to lose it would mean perhaps losing his mind, as well. And that he refused to do. Not over this. Not for her.
“Go into the house, Bertricia.”
“I will not! I will not stand aside and let you—” She choked and wept.
Both brothers looked at her, but her husband was the one who spoke again.
“Inside the house, or by the Void, I will make you wish you’d gone of your own accord.”
Bertricia went.
Cassian looked at his brother. “What’s yours is mine and mine yours, is that it?”
“No, brother. Not like this. Believe me, a thousand times I’ve regretted this.”
“Yet you didn’t end it. What did she think you were going to do? Kill me so that you might wed her in my place?”
“By the Void, never. I told her as such.”
“She asked it of you?” Horror tried to sweep him into silence, but Cassian forced it away. “Did she?”
Calvis gave him no insult with lies. “Yes. She was crazed. She loves me overwell, brother. Again, I can plead no mercy for it.”
“Did you mean for her to love you overwell, Calvis? Did you seek to make me the cuckold you warned me I’d be even before I married her? Tell me you sought this to hurt me, or to . . . compete with me . . . or to have me,” Cassian said unsteadily. “Tell me even that, and I will forgive you.”
“I would tell you if it were true, but I swear to you, Cassian, she came after me. Always. The first time she acted as though she thought I were you, and I let her because I wanted you to see what a bad choice she would be.”
“And now? Surely she can’t pretend she thinks us the same now.”
“No. Nor did she so believe then, I’d be willing to wager any amount of coin. But I found myself weak, brother. She is very lovely, your lady wife. And well-skilled. And I thought she would never be able to ask of me what other women might—to give myself more to her beyond my cock. I thought she’d be unable to ask such of me.”
“But she has?”
“Yes.” Calvis shuddered. “Sinder’s Blood, I wish . . . I had never gone with her.”
“Still? You’ve been with her recently?” Cassian shuddered, too, throat closing on bile but needing to know.
“Every day.”
Cassian muttered a curse so vile he’d never have thought himself capable of taking the Invisible Mother’s name in such a fashion. “Why? By the Blood, Calvis, how could you?”
“She threatened to tell you if I stopped, and brother, I didn’t want to hurt you. I could not bear it if you hated me. I simply could not bear it.” Calvis’s eyes flashed. “I already know there’s no place for me in the Land Above, but by the Arrow I swear to you, no crime I’ve committed has sliced me as much as this I’ve done against you.”
T
he clearing wasn’t silent. The breeze soughed through the trees. The waterfall pattered into the basin. Still, Cassian could hear the sound of Annalise’s breathing. He turned to her.
“I was angry, and I turned away. My brother left in the night. I never got to tell him I forgave him, or that I would ever have had him in my life rather than her.”
Annalise leaned against him, her small hand warm in his. “He betrayed you as much as she. Mayhap more.”
“It didn’t matter. I could find another wife. With my father passed into the Land Above, I could never have another brother.”
She stroked his hand. “What happened to him?”
“He died in a bar fight a few days after he left. He could’ve easily won any fight against any man. The one who killed him said, in fact, it was as though Calvis fell upon his blade apurpose. It was an argument of no consequence, a drunken fight over dice. The man who killed him hadn’t meant to do more than threaten. Witnesses held out his story. He never was convicted.”