Chapter 33: The Bath and the Moonrise
Lucien did not let her walk. He gathered her off the bed with her spend still sliding down the inside of her thigh, one arm under her knees, the other cradling her shoulders, and carried her through his bedchamber like something both breakable and owned. Blair's legs trembled without being asked to hold her. She felt every slow drip of him leave her as she moved, a warm slick trail she had no interest in hiding.
"You're leaking on my floor, wife," he murmured.
"Your floor should be honored."
"It is. My floor has never been so blessed."
The bath room beyond his bedchamber was carved from the same black marble, but heat lived here. A great sunken tub already steamed, fed by some clever pipe from the palace kitchens below, the water clouded faintly with milk and salt. Candles lined the ledge in gold dish after gold dish, and their light broke apart on the water's skin and reassembled, shivering.
"You had this drawn before moonrise," she said.
"I had this drawn before I took my fingers out of you. Some things a man plans ahead."
He set her down on the tub's edge, kneeling to unlace her slip where it clung, damp with sweat, to her ribs. He peeled it over her head slowly. His knuckles dragged along her spine on the way up, an afterthought of a touch that made her shiver anyway. Then he lifted her again and lowered her into the water.
The heat went through her like a kind hand. Every ache the day had planted in her, the four fingers, the stretch of him, the long hours of being filled and emptied and filled again, the heat found each one and loosened it. Blair sank until the water touched her chin and let out a sound that was not a word.
"Better?" Lucien asked, shrugging out of his shirt.
"Almost."
"Almost?"
"Get in."
He laughed low in his chest, the sound she was starting to collect like coins. He stepped in behind her, the water surging around them both, and settled against the marble backrest with his knees bent on either side of her hips. She leaned back into his chest. His heartbeat came slow, one beat to her twelve, a patient drum under her ear.
For a while he only washed her. He worked oil through her coiled curls with careful fingers, section by section, unknotting what his hands and Vespera's had put knots into. He worked the curls wet and heavy, watching them slick against her scalp, then spring half back when he let go. He washed her shoulders. He washed the column of her throat where his marks had faded to nothing on Made skin, though the memory of each bite stayed.
"You like my hair," she said.
"I like everything I put my hands on tonight. The hair is simply nearest."
She turned in the water to face him, kneeling between his knees, her arms folded on his chest. His eyes were that blood-orange color in candlelight, and they did not look away from her, and after eleven days of being looked at by this man she still had not learned to stand it still.
"Say the thing you're circling," she said. "You've been circling it since supper."
He was quiet long enough that a candle guttered. His hand found her hip under the water and stayed there, thumb moving in a small absent arc.
"Four hundred years," he said, "is a long time to eat alone."
"Lucien."
"I'm not speaking in riddles. I mean it plainly. I have had every appetite a body can have fed by better hands than most kings ever see. Food, war, flattery, flesh. None of it touched the thing that was empty. And the thing that was empty got very good at pretending it wasn't. I built an empire on that pretending."
"And now?"
"And now a scullery maid with stolen eyes read a book she shouldn't have in a hall she should have been dusting, and my pretending ended in about ninety seconds."
Blair rested her forearm on his chest and her chin on her forearm. The water lapped at them both. She could feel his skin, fever-warm as ever, cooler now where the bath had worked into him.
"Was it loneliness?" she asked. "Or was it Vespera?"
He tilted his head. "Both. Neither. Ask it the way you want to ask it."
She blushed, which she had not done since her making, and the fact that she blushed now, naked in a king's bath, annoyed and delighted her in equal measure.
"Fine. Did you ever love her?"
"No," Lucien said. "Not the way your question wants."
"Then what is she to you?"
"The oldest friend I have. The dearest. The only creature in four centuries I have trusted with the whole of myself, every ugly room in me, unlocked. We married for power and found we liked each other, which is rarer than love and worth more in some markets. When she bleeds, I bleed and I don't ask why. When she is in a room I stand straighter." He smiled, and there was old hurt in it, worn smooth like river stone. "But having a best friend is not choosing who you love. She and I learned that a long time ago. We chose each other anyway. The throne demanded it, and then we kept the choice."
"But you wanted love."
"I wanted it the way a starving man wants bread he cannot afford. From a distance. Elegantly." His thumb pressed harder into her hip. "Vespera wanted it too, though she'd gut me for saying so. Two people keeping each other company in a large cold house, both pretending the cold was the weather."
Blair let that sit. The water stilled around them. Somewhere below, a kitchen pipe knocked and went quiet.
"I'm not her cure," she said carefully. "And you're not mine."
"No."
"But I'm not nothing to you either."
"You are the first thing in four hundred years I have wanted and not known how to take." He said it flatly, like an inventory item, which somehow made it worse and better. "I know how to take. You've noticed. I take with great skill. You, I keep checking is still there. It's a humiliating habit. I check Vespera that way too, lately. She thinks I've noticed."
Blair laughed, and the laugh shook water against his chest, and his face at the sound of it did something complicated that she pretended not to see so he could keep his dignity.
She shifted lower, laid her cheek on his bare knee where it rose from the water, and looked up at him. Her wet curls hung heavy against his skin. His hand came off her hip and settled on her head, fingers in her hair, and she let her eyes go soft.
"I want to really love you," she said.
The words came out smaller than she meant them, so she said them again, steadier.
"I want to really love you. And her. Not just as your princess. Not just as your spoiled concubine who eats your food and takes your cock and signs her name in blood on your writ. I mean the real thing. The bread-you-can't-afford thing. I want to love you the way the old poems lie about, and I want Vespera in it, not outside it. Both of you. That's what I want."
Lucien's hand stopped moving in her hair.
Blair kept her cheek on his knee and her eyes up. "You've spent four hundred years eating alone," she went on. "So has she. I've got one week of living and I already know I'd rather starve than do that. So I'm telling you what I want out loud, in your bath, in your wing, on my King's day, where the writ can't reach. The day is yours. But this isn't the day's business. This is mine."
"Blair."
"No, hear the whole thing, since I'm being brave and embarrassing."
His mouth curved, faintly. "By all means."
"I don't know how to love a man who's four hundred and fifty," she said. "I don't know how to love a queen. I've been alive eleven days. My lessons so far are how to swallow without counting, how to sit at court without murdering the Arch-Duke, and how to beg in two languages. Nobody's taught me the rest. So you'll have to teach me that the way you teach me everything, slowly, with your hands, and I will be infuriating about it, and I will steal glances I shouldn't, because I'm still me and turning me didn't fix that."
"No," he said quietly. "It confirmed it."
"But I'll get there. And when I say I love you I want it to be true all the way down, not just in the bed. The bed is easy. The bed, we've got."
Lucien drew her up out of the water then, both hands under her arms, and set her on his lap facing him, her knees astride his hips, water sheeting off them both. She felt him half-hard against her belly and ignored it deliberately, which he noticed, and which made him smile wider.
"You're refusing me," he said.
"I'm finishing my speech."
"Then finish it fast, wife, because you're sitting on a very distracted throne."
"I want romance," she said. "From both of you. Ridiculous, wasteful, hundred-year-courtship romance. Flowers I can't name. Poetry in the language you read to me when I couldn't speak. Suppers for two, for one, whatever fools do. I want you to court me like I'm not already yours. I know I'm yours. The writ says so. Your spend is literally still in the bath water. I want to be won anyway."
He was silent. His golden eyes moved over her face as if reading a writ of his own, line by line, looking for the loophole, finding none.
"Vespera said something like this once," he said at last. "Three hundred years ago. At our wedding feast, drunk on my family's oldest vintage, she said the marriage was perfect and perfectly empty, and that if I ever found something to fill it, she'd want to watch it fill." His thumb traced her jaw. "She's going to want to hear you say exactly what you just said. Word for word."
"Then I'll say it to her."
"On your next Queen's day."
"Why wait?" Blair said. "It's not even moonrise. My law says I can knock on her door any hour, any day. It's law. You sealed it."
Lucien stared at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed, a real one, loud enough to knock echo off the marble, his arms locking around her so she rocked with the shaking of him. She clung to his shoulders and laughed too, wet and naked and ridiculous in the steam.
"You built yourself a door into her wing and you're spending it tonight," he said.
"You gave me the law."
"I did. And I thought I was being generous." He stood with her, water cascading, lifting her like she weighed nothing. "Out, wife. Dry. Dress. You're going to knock on the Queen's door and say all of that again while I stand behind you and watch her face do whatever it does, because I have waited four hundred years to see it and I am not missing it for anything between here and eternity."
"You could stay," Blair said, arms around his neck, his half-hard cock brushing her thigh with every step he took toward the towels. "It's still my King's day for hours. I'm told I'm owed filling through moonrise."
"Vespera can owe you a night. That's in the terms too. One full night, spouse to spouse." He set her on the towel bench and wrapped her in linen, rubbing her curls with unkingly roughness, his eyes bright and hungry and something older than hunger underneath. "Tonight I'd rather watch you say a thing I never thought anyone would say to me in this palace, in this lifetime, and watch it land on the only other person alive who was waiting for it."
He crouched to her level, caught her chin, and kissed her, slow and deep, tasting of cedar and warm water and the rest of the day.
"But first," he murmured against her mouth, "say it once more. Just to me. I want to hear it twice before it goes in the record."
Blair pressed her forehead to his. Her amber eyes, red-ringed, held his gold ones, and she did not bow her head, not this time.
"I want to really love you, Lucien Ravenwood," she said. "And I'm going to. You'll be infuriated at how well I get there."
He closed his eyes briefly, like a man taking a first sip after a long siege.
"Infuriated," he agreed. "Through moonrise and the next four centuries. Go dry your hair, wife of the blood. We have a Queen to disturb."
He held the towel out. She stepped into it, and into whatever came next, already planning the exact knock she'd use on Vespera's door, one she'd invented herself, hers alone, a knock that would mean, from now on, it's me, and I mean it.