The First Crown

Ash and Honey

Reade

After she slipped back toward the keep, the orchard felt too quiet for the noise in my blood.

I stood beneath the old barred gate, palms open to the night air, and tried to breathe like a man who remembered how. The lanterns I’d doused left the clearing silver-dark; the apple boughs whispered to one another like gossips who had seen too much. The rug was still warm where her knee had pressed into it, the grass bent where her heel had dug in. My cloak smelled like her hair.

“Saints,” I muttered, scrubbing both hands over my face, which did nothing to steady me.

I’d meant to be made of iron. I’d meant to be caution and patience wrapped in skin. Instead I’d kissed her like a prayer I needed answered now and held her until the world made sense again. It hadn’t, not really. It had only narrowed to the way she trembled when I found the soft place beneath her ear, to the sound she made when my mouth left her throat and returned to her lips, to the way she whispered please and made it sound like blessing.

I had pulled back because I must. Because I have spent too many nights learning where the cliff edge is and how to stop before I take both of us over it. Even so there are limits to a man’s control. I’d shifted her off my lap and wrapped the cloak around her because I needed a barrier the size of a continent between us, and still the ache flexed hard enough to take my knees. When she left the cool night air hit skin still hot with her I shuddered once, helpless and silent, and spent myself in my trousers like a green recruit who’d never been kissed.

I breathed until my hands steadied. I folded the rug, rubbed dew-darkened grass over the wax drips on the lanterns because some part of me needed the small order of cleaning what our want had scattered. My senses still ran sharp and wild, my blood singing with the memory of her. The world felt too loud, too bright every trace of her scent clinging to the air until it filled my lungs, until I almost sank to my knees and pressed my face to the grass where she’d sat.

I made myself stand, made myself breathe, made myself act like a man who could still be trusted with guard duty.

By the time I reached the yard the horizon had found its grey. The keep’s upper windows glimmered like dull coins, and I caught myself staring too long, wondering which one was hers. Was she awake still? Was she lying in bed with her hair loose, thinking of what we’d done?

I didn’t sleep. I didn’t want sleep. Sleep meant closing my eyes and finding her again without hands to touch her. I stripped in the wash-room, sluiced cold water over myself hard enough to bite, and worked lye into the cloth like penance. When the worst was rinsed clean and the ache had settled to a low, constant thrum, I dressed and went to the yard.

Aedan was already there, which meant either he hadn’t slept or he had woken out of habit and annoyance. His grin lit when he saw me, which made me wish briefly for a bow instead of a wooden practice sword.

“You look like a man the saints kissed and the devils envied,” he said, tossing me a blade. “Fancy a dance?”

“I fancy you shut your mouth and keep your guard up,” I said, but I couldn’t quite scrape the rasp of satisfaction from my voice.

We bowed. Ronan wasn’t out yet; Thorne wasn’t either. A blessing in both cases. Aedan came in light and clever, trying wrists and ankles first, like always. I fed him a neat, ugly parry, let him see the opening he wanted, and closed it with a twist that bit the meat of his thumb. He yelped, delighted.

“Oh, she was worth every blister,” he crowed, circling. “Come on then, lover of moons, show me how a man fights when his knees nearly failed him for… religious reasons.”

“I will choke you with your own charm,” I said, and drove him back three paces with a flurry that rattled his teeth.

We set to it properly then. Aedan is quicker than he looks; he’s also lazy when he thinks he’s winning. The yard woke around us boots scuffing, breath fogging, the scrape of benches, the coughs men pretend are not weakness. Our sticks cracked and rang; we traded sweat and curses and the kind of grin only earned when a man you trust is trying, in a controlled and friendly manner, to bruise you into honesty.

It helped. Not enough, but enough to let me breathe without her name catching in my throat.

Ronan watched the last exchange from the doorway, beard shadowed, eyes unimpressed in the way that means he’s quietly pleased.

“You’ll bleed a boy into shape yet,” he said dryly. “Or bleed him out entirely and save me bread.”

Aedan, panting, saluted with his stick. “Captain, if I die, bury me under a cider barrel. It’s what I would have wanted.”

“Noted,” Ronan said. His glance slid to me and paused the way a whetstone pauses when it finds a nick. “Again. Then drills. Then oil every hinge on the north wall because whoever swung them last night had ale for hands.”

“Yes, Captain,” I said, and Aedan’s groan earned him a swat across the arse that sounded like applause.

After drills and a breakfast, Aedan trailed me to the edge of the yard like a dog inviting kicks. He swung his stick idly until I glared at it hard enough to still air.

“All right,” he said, conceding before I could threaten to break his fingers. “No questions. A fact, then a favour."

“Out with it.”

He glanced around. We were alone enough the wind carried the oil-smell from the hinges; the men at the far end were cursing a stuck latch. Aedan pitched his voice low. “The others are restless.”

The wolf in me turned its head. I kept mine still. “Which others.”

“The kind of others who prefer their cider with raw meat,” he said, mouth quirking. Then, sobering, “The valley. The hills to the east. A few from the river villages who keep their heads down until they shouldn’t. They’re talking. Saying the old stories will come back if we call them hard enough. Saying we’ve crouched long enough and let men like Lockwood tell us how to breathe.”

My jaw set. “They’re fools.”

“They’re hungry and angry,” Aedan said. “Fools make the same noises. Talfryn wants to speak to the Alpha.”

“Talfryn can speak to a tree and see if it answers.” The anger came up too quick; I shaped it into ice before it could steam. “There is no Alpha.”

“There’s always an Alpha,” Aedan said softly. “Maybe we just haven’t let him say the word out loud.”

“I am not my grandfather. I do not call, and men come. I do not lift a hand, and the hills bow. Those days got good men burned and worse. If Talfryn and his friends want to live to see their pups grow, they will keep their heads down and their teeth out of sight.”

Aedan’s grin slipped sideways into the worry I’ve seen on him since the first time a lash fell in the yard that wasn’t his to bear.

“They’re done keeping their heads down. I can’t make them hold. Not without something to offer.”

“You have something to offer.” I stepped closer, and if my voice went too quiet it was because that’s where men hear you best. “Bread. Work. Warnings before a sweep. Ears in the wrong places. That is how we keep pups safe. Not by howling at the moon until the wrong ears hear their names in it.”

Aedan’s gaze searched mine. “And if it’s not enough?”

“Then you keep the ones you can. You get the stubborn and the brave and the stupid through winter and hope spring makes them wiser. And you stop asking me to be a man I watched die with a smile on his mouth and ash in his throat.”

The silence after that carried old ghosts. Aedan nodded once, jaw hardening. “I’ll tell them no Alpha. I’ll tell them the gate stays barred.”

“Yes.”

“Because of her?”

“Because of all of us,” I said. Then, because he would hear the other truth even if I didn’t say it, “And because of her.”

For a moment his grin came back, softer. “Luna,” he said under his breath, a word like a pebble dropped into deep water. It rippled through me whether I liked it or not. He clapped my shoulder. “All right, then. I’ll be your bad news. You be our good sense.”

“Try not to get yourself killed in the trying,” I said, and he flashed that bright fool’s smile that makes men love him and want to strangle him in the same breath.

Ronan called his name; he jogged away, whistling something filthy under his breath because that’s how he keeps from breaking.

I stood a while longer at the yard’s edge, letting the wind cool my skin. My body still thrummed with the urge to move, to run, to scent every tree where her skirts had brushed, to mark this place so every man who passed would know she was mine. The want clawed at me, sharp and restless, until I closed my eyes and held fast to the only thing that would quiet it the memory of her in my lap, light and warm and certain; the sound of her whispering touch me as though no one else in the world would ever hear her say it.

It settled something in me. Not enough. But enough to make me turn toward duty instead of doubling back to her.

I washed my face at the basin and changed my shirt because even clean cloth remembered what happened when a man kisses the woman he was made for under moonlight. I checked the buckles on my cuirass, oiled the strap that always creaks on the fourth hole, and made my way to the north wall to look, very carefully and with great seriousness, at a hinge that had been fine yesterday and would be fine tomorrow.

From up there, Lenweil stretched dark and familiar. The village roofs were hunched shoulders; the river was a black ribbon where the moon snagged and ran on. Somewhere a dog barked once and thought better of it, a woman scolded in a voice that would raise wolves from their bellies to do as they were told.

By midday the sun burned the last of the fog off the river and left the stones hot underfoot. I stripped armor, ate bread because my body expects it even when my hunger belongs to other things, and let my eyes fall shut for an hour. Not sleep. Not exactly. A doze that ended with my hand reaching for a weight not there and my throat sounding her name without clearance from my head.

Evening would come as it always does. The path to the orchard would still be where the grass shows men’s habits. The barred gate would still be old and still. She would come with her hair unbound and a gown soft as a breath and a look on her face that made a vow out of everything in me that wasn’t yet one.

If the hills wanted their Alpha, they could howl at the wind. Tonight, I belonged to the apple trees.