tight ache. I liked the feeling of him deep in me. He was panting in long ragged breaths. His thumbs were pressing tight on my hips.
I held on to his shoulders and rocked against him. “Sarkan,” I said again; I rolled it on my tongue, explored all the long dark corners of it, parts hiding deep, and he groaned helplessly and surged up against me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging, and he put an arm tight around me and bore me over and down into the bed.
—
I lay curled snugly against his side to fit in the small bed, catching my breath. His hand was in my hair, and his face staring up at the canopy was oddly bewildered, as if he couldn’t quite remember how all of this had happened. My arms and legs were full of sleep, heavy as if it would have taken a winch to lift them. I rested against him and finally asked, “Why did you take us?”
His fingers were carding absently through my hair, straightening out tangles. They paused. After a moment he sighed beneath my cheek. “You’re bound to the valley, all of you; born and bred here,” he said. “It has a hold on you. But that’s a channel of its own in turn, and I could use it to siphon away some of the Wood’s strength.”
He raised his hand and drew it flat over the air above our heads, a fine tracery springing up silver behind the sweep of his palm: a skeletal version of the painting in my room, a map of lines of magic running through the valley. They followed the long bright path of the Spindle and all its small tributaries coming in from the mountains, with gleaming stars for Olshanka and all our villages.
The lines didn’t surprise me, somehow: it felt like something I’d always known was there, beneath the surface. The splash of the water-bucket echoing up from the deep well, in the village square at Dvernik; the murmur of the Spindle running quick in summer. They were full of magic, of power, there to be drawn up. And so he’d cut irrigation-lines to pull more of it away before the Wood could get hold of it.
“But why did you need one of us?” I said, still puzzled. “You could have just—” I made a cupping gesture.
“Not without being bound to the valley myself,” he said, as if that was all the explanation in the world. I grew very still against him, confusion rising in me. “You needn’t be alarmed,” he added, dryly, misunderstanding dreadfully. “If we manage to survive the day, we’ll find a way to untangle you from it.”
He drew his palm back over the silver lines, wiping them away again. We didn’t speak again; I didn’t know what to say. After a while, his breath evened out beneath my cheek. The heavy velvet hangings’ deep dark closed us in all around, as if we lay inside his walled heart. I didn’t feel the hard grip of fear anymore, but I ached instead. A few tears were stinging in my eyes, hot and smarting, as if they were trying to wash out a splinter but there weren’t enough of them to do it. I almost wished I hadn’t come upstairs.
I hadn’t really thought about after, after we stopped the Wood and survived; it seemed absurd to think about after something so impossible. But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I’d half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.
I’d already known without having to put it into words that there wasn’t a place for me in my mother’s house anymore. But I knew I didn’t want to spend my days roaming the world on a hut built on legs, like the stories said of Jaga, or in the king’s castle, either. Kasia had wanted to be free, had dreamed of all the wide world open to her. I never had.
But I couldn’t belong here with him, either. Sarkan had shut himself up in this tower; he’d taken us one after another; he’d used our connection, all so he wouldn’t have to make one of his own. There was a