Chapter 36: Back to the Nest
The dance ended when the drums changed, an old slow rhythm that emptied the circle of everyone but the priestesses and the lovers who refused to go. Violet was swaying against Evander's chest with her eyes half closed when Cassian appeared at her back and pressed a cup of water into her hands.
"Drink. All of it. Then sleep."
"I'm dancing."
"You're standing. That's different." He took the empty cup and looked over her head at Evander, and something passed between them that she felt in the bond before she saw it. A decision. "The rites are done for us, love. Everyone's drunk and the wagers are settled. Nobody needs a queen until the third day."
"I could stay. See Mira home."
"Mira is currently teaching a twelve-year-old witch a drinking song. She'll be fine." Cassian slid his arms around her waist from behind, and his voice dropped against her ear. "We have a cave. It has furs and wine and no one in it, and we promised it was ours. Come back with us."
"Carry me," she said, meaning it as a joke, and Evander didn't smile. He just bent, hooked one arm under her knees and one across her back, and lifted her off the ground like she weighed nothing, and the nearest wolves saw it happen and the cheering started all over again.
"This is so undignified," she hissed, hands flying to his shoulders.
"This is what a queen is owed," Evander said, and walked into the treeline with her, Cassian grinning and walking backward in front of them to blow kisses at the crowd.
The festival noise fell away behind them. Crickets took over. The path was dark under the oaks and Evander moved through it without stumbling, sure-footed as the wolf he was, and Violet stopped arguing about dignity somewhere around the second bend and put her cheek against his chest and listened to his heart. It beat slow. Under her ear it sounded like a drum from the rites, the same patient rhythm.
Cassian caught up and walked beside them, his hand finding Evander's free one and holding it, and the bond hummed three-voiced and low.
"She's asleep," Cassian whispered.
"I'm not."
"She's almost asleep."
"I'm resting my eyes."
Candles were burning in the cave mouth when they reached it, gold light spilling out onto the ferns. Someone had relit them, laid fresh furs, put water and bread near the wall. Evander carried her across the threshold and set her down on the furs with a care that undid her more than any of the day's claiming had, kneeling to work off her shoes one at a time while she sat propped against the pillows.
"You relit the candles," she said.
"Before the dance," Cassian said. "We planned this. You're the last piece."
"How long has this cave been a plan?"
"Since the moment you said you were tired," Evander said, shrugging off his coat, and there it was again, that quiet gravity in him, the den-feeling, the wolf with its mate and its kill and its shelter all in one place.
She should have been exhausted past sense. She was. But the furs were warm and the candlelight was amber and her two husbands were undressing her with their hands now, Cassian unpinning the loose braid and combing his fingers through her curls, Evander unlacing her sleeves, and her body woke under their touch like a banked fire finding new wood.
"There it is," Cassian said softly, watching her face. "I thought so."
"You thought what?"
"She thought she was done for the night," Evander said. "Her scent says otherwise."
"My scent says nothing. It's bonded to yours, it just agrees with you constantly."
Cassian laughed and kissed the top of her head. Then, over her shoulder, to Evander: "Can I have her first?"
"Ask her. It's her night as much as ours."
They both looked at her. Violet felt her face go hot, that strawberry feeling again, because the question wasn't casual, wasn't a joke, it was two kings arranging the night like a dance they each knew every step of, and she was the music.
"Both of you," she said. "Slowly. I mean it. No performances, no counting. I want..." She stopped, searching for it, and found it. "I want to be learned. Like you're starting over. Like you don't already know everything."
Cassian went still. Something moved through the bond from him, a swell of tenderness so plain it embarrassed them both. "Love," he said. "We've had you for two days. A hundred years from now I'll still be finding things."
"Then start," she whispered.
They undressed her by inches, unhurried, nothing like the hunger of the festival tent. The black silk came off her shoulders one at a time, Cassian drawing the fabric down her left arm while Evander drew it down her right, and they kissed the skin as it appeared, four lips moving over her collarbones, the tops of her breasts, the soft curve of her stomach where the dress had warmed it. Nobody rushed. The candles ticked in their wax. Outside, an owl called once and went silent.
Evander laid her back against the pillows and Cassian stretched out beside her on one side while Evander settled on the other, and they began, in earnest, as if they'd taken her request as a formal commission.
Cassian started at her feet. He unwound the ribbon at her ankle and kissed the arch of it, absurd and reverent, and worked upward, the back of her calf, the crease of her knee, the tender inside of her thigh where she was most ticklish, slowing there until her breath changed. Evander took the other side, mirroring him, and the twin sensation was a rhythm she could fall into, her body turning to listen with its whole skin.
"This is unfair," she murmured. "You know all my..."
"We know your maps," Evander said against her hip. "Maps change."
He pushed the dress down past her hips and she lifted for him, and the cool air touched her, and then his mouth followed it, open and warm against the soft flesh of her lower belly, lower, the top of her thigh, deliberate, nowhere near where she wanted it. Cassian, meanwhile, had reached the swell of her breast and stopped there, his thumb tracing the underside of it, and she arched, offering, and he only smiled against her skin.
"Please," she said.
"Please what, love?"
"You know what."
"We're learning," Cassian said, mild as morning. "Tell us where you want us."
Her whole body flushed. Two days ago she would have died before saying it. Tonight, naked between them in candlelight, wearing their scent and their marks, she reached down and took Evander's hair in her fist and pulled him up her thigh until his mouth hovered a breath away from her sex, swollen and slick and aching, and said, "Here. And Cassian, your mouth is wasted on my feet."
"Noted," Cassian said, laughing low, and moved up her body.
Evander's mouth settled over her and her spine left the furs. He was slow, molten, his tongue learning her in long deliberate strokes, cataloguing, no urgency in it at all except the urgency of a man who intended to be at this for an hour. Cassian took one nipple into his mouth at the same moment, and the bond opened wide, and she felt it doubled and tripled: her pleasure in them, their pleasure in her pleasure, Evander's low growl of satisfaction coming up through the tether like heat through iron.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's. Both of you at once, that's."
"Words, love," Cassian murmured around her nipple, the vibration of it shivering through her.
"Impossible. There are no words. You broke the words."
Evander laughed against her, and the laugh was almost worse than the tongue, and she fisted both hands in the furs and rode it, hips moving without her permission, the slow build climbing her like water climbing a wall. He pressed two fingers into her, curling them, patient, and his mouth closed around her clit, and the wave came up from somewhere near her ankles this time, all the way from where Cassian had started, and broke over her in long shuddering rolls that she heard herself making noise for and didn't care.
They didn't stop. They slowed, carried her down, and then, unbelievably, began again, gentler, and she understood dimly that this was what she'd asked for. To be learned. The night had hours in it.
"I can't," she panted.
"You can," Evander said, lifting his mouth, his beard gleaming, his eyes fever-bright and calm. "Sweetheart. You can. We'll take you there as many times as your body offers. Nothing is owed. Nothing is counted. Only given."
The second one was quieter than the first, a slow long exhale of a climax that rolled through her like weather, and when it passed Cassian gathered her up and turned her so she lay across his chest, her cheek on his heartbeat, and Evander moved behind her, his chest a wall of warm at her back, and the three of them were one knot on the furs, breathing in time.
"The wine," she said, when she could. "The good bottle. The one from the hamper."
"There's a good bottle?"
"There was always a good bottle. You just kept drinking the wrong one."
Cassian reached for it without dislodging her, poured, and they passed the cup in a lazy circuit while the candles burned lower. She was boneless, swimming, deliciously used, and she felt the two of them through the bond, both still hard, both patient, their want banked but banked deep, like coals in a ship's hold.
"Your turn," she said.
"Tonight was about you," Evander said against her hair.
"It's still tonight. Nobody's changed the terms." She twisted between them, and the movement pressed her hip against Cassian and her back against Evander, and both of them made low sounds she felt rather than heard. "I want to watch you again. Or. No." A thought came to her, new, hers, and she surprised herself by saying it before shyness could eat it. "I want to be between you when you have each other. I want to be part of it this time. Not watching."
The bond went very still, and then flared so hard all three of them gasped.
"Say that again," Cassian said, hoarse.
"I want to touch you both while you touch each other. I want my hands in it. I've been the center and I love being the center, but I want to be the third thing too. The third point."
Evander's hand came up and cupped her jaw, turning her face toward him, and he looked at her with something that had weight and heat in equal measure. "You are the third point. You're the point everything balances on. But yes," he said, and the word was a low rumble she felt through her whole back, "yes, sweetheart. Show us."
They rearranged slowly, laughing a little at the logistics, bodies and furs and pillows, until Cassian lay back against the pillows with Evander above him and Violet tucked at Evander's side, her head on his shoulder, one arm free to reach them both. The candlelight moved on their skin. Cassian's hands came up and took Evander's face, and the kiss they exchanged was slow this time, nothing like the fight at noon, a long unhurried collision of two people who had a hundred lost years to spend and had decided not to spend it in a rush.
Violet's hand found Evander's spine and traced it, vertebra by vertebra, down to the dimples above his hips, and her other hand found Cassian's thigh and gripped. Through the bond she felt both of them, doubled, the loop closing through her now, and her own body answered from a place she thought was empty, a slow warm pulse of want that had survived everything the day had done to her.
"Violet," Cassian breathed against Evander's mouth, her name in it like a prayer misplaced.
She reached between them. She took Cassian in her hand first, hard and heavy and hot, and stroked him once, twice, and his hips lifted off the furs, and then she moved her hand to Evander, and he shuddered the length of his whole body. She worked them in turn while they kissed and touched each other above her, her wrist learning a rhythm, the bond pouring their reactions into her until her own breath went ragged again.
"Evander," Cassian gasped. "Now. Please. A century is a long time to wait for this."
Evander reached for the little jar of oil someone, she was now certain, Cassian, had stocked in the hamper, and there was a minute of slick preparation, his fingers, Cassian's low sounds, her hand on Cassian's chest feeling his heart hammer, and then Evander pressed into him, slow, an inch at a time, and Violet watched her stern husband's face come apart above her and felt it all happen through the bond like she was under him too.
She moved with them. Her hand on Cassian's jaw, turning his head so she could kiss him while Evander filled him, and Cassian kissed her back like a drowning man, and his hand found hers and laced their fingers against Evander's hip, and the three of them found a rhythm, the same one from the bonfire drums, slow, deep, patient.
"There," Cassian said, wrecked. "Right there, don't. Don't stop."
"Never stopping," Evander ground out. "Again."
Violet felt Cassian's climax come through the tether a half-second before she saw it, a white-hot bell tolling through her body, and she cried out with him, and the sound pulled Evander over the edge behind them, his arm clamping her tight against his chest, his teeth finding the frosted moon on her neck as he came, and the loop closed one final time, all three of them shaking, the bond blazing gold and frost, no one able to say whose pleasure was whose.
Silence after, but for breath and wax and the owl again, far off.
Evander withdrew with care and collapsed beside her, pulling them both into his chest, one arm over each, and for a long time nobody moved. Cassian's fingers found hers and held. The candles had burned down to stubs and the light had gone low and rose-colored, and the furs smelled of all of them now, layered, permanent.
"You said you'd waited three hundred more years," Cassian murmured eventually, his voice thick with sleep. "For us. Without knowing."
"I did."
"You don't have to wait anymore," he said. "Any of us. That's what tonight was. Nobody's waiting."
She felt the truth of it land in her chest, and before she could answer him, her eyes went heavy and her breath slowed, and the last thing she knew was Evander pulling a fur over the three of them and Cassian's mouth, very soft, against her sun rune, and the bond settling into its sleep-rhythm, three heartbeats braided, keeping time.
She dreamed of rain on a wedding day, and woke once in the deep night to find Cassian tracing her spine and Evander's eyes open in the dark, watching her, and she reached for them both without a word, and they came to her, and no one counted anything at all.