The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,247

down. Turns back to the table.

She says, “The worst of it is that I’ve seen copies of this scroll before. So at first I thought it was all for . . . nothing.”

As she finishes the sentence, I walk up behind her. I breathe in her hair, looming over her, hands bracing on the table to either side of her, but I don’t touch her.

She puts her hand on my sleeve to push open the cage of my arms, but I hold, and she doesn’t push hard.

“I need your everything, Fee,” I tell her. “Without you, I am utterly alone in this world. A candle on a rampart with a storm coming. An ox dragged from the path by the weight of the empty yoke where his partner belongs. I can’t do the work set before us without you, heart of my heart. I need your wisdom. I need your kindness. Your perspicacity. Your hand on the oar. I need that strength in you that you’ve always underestimated. Your hidden ferocity.” I kiss her neck softly and am rewarded with a wave of gooseflesh. “You are my compass, my windlass, and my following wind. I need you like a singer needs a voice, like a tune needs a tempo, the chorus its pitch. I need you like a spearman needs his shield, the charger his harness, like the archer his bow. I need you like the crops need the sun, the dyer her colors, a drafter the light. I need you as the stars need the night. I need you as a poet needs words . . .”

Still she says nothing.

“And I want you. I want you like that night out in the vineyard at Stony Brook. I want you like that very unstealthy Sun Day Eve in our tent right next to your parents’. I want you like that morning atop the red tower with the luxiats banging on the door, wondering how it had been locked from outside.” My voice lowers below a whisper of warm breath in her ear. “God, how I want you . . .”

The moment stretches, a privation and a punishment as I breathe the sweet scent of her. I long to grab her and take her, to make the decision for her that I can tell she doesn’t want to make. But I don’t.

Never has our union been of a weaker partner bowing ever to the whims of the greater. Nor can it be. In all the world, she is the one flower I will not crush beneath the wheels of the great siege engine that is my will.

She doesn’t move.

The moment stretches beyond bearing.

I won’t wait forever. I won’t see my need turned to weakness, my hunger turned to starvation. I pull back.

But she snares my sleeve, and as a rider controls all the raging mass of a charging warhorse with a few narrow strips of leather, I am stopped.

Is this a partnership after all?

Sometimes I wonder if she is not far the greater of us.

She doesn’t make me wait long enough to pursue the thought. She wants to know she has my full attention. She tilts her neck a little, to let her hair fall clear of the spot I kissed before.

I know she needs this. I know she wants to punish me a little. I know she needs to feel my pursuit, but it irks me, too, to be bidden like a dog. I am Andross Guile.

I shake my sleeve free of her grip and pull away, but before she can turn, before she can say a word, I grab her hair and kiss her roughly on the other side of her neck. Twisting her, I lift her onto the table and find her lips.

In the tales, every time true lovers come together, it is with such fervency and effortless skill that the heavens and the earth are shaken and nothing can ever be the same. Such is a lie, of course, but it’s another expression of the central flaw of the glass that drama holds up to reality: everything depicted in that glass matters.

In reality, lovemaking rarely changes things. Most isn’t even that memorable. In most lives, the heavens and the earth are shaken rarely by lovemaking, or perhaps never.

But sometimes they are.

Even with the ancestral gift of the Guile memory, the next minutes disappear in the turbulence of feelings unmoored from thought and pulled into the deep waters of passion.

“Sorry,” I mutter, some time later.

I had absolutely intended