Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [63]
“I’m trying to patch a bit of ground reinforcement into you that will dance with my ground in your cord. Shaped inside your own ground—pretty ground! If you—as you—grow open to me, I think I can coax it in through natural channels. Not sure exactly what the effect will be. Just…”
She opened eyes, heart, and body to him, wide and vulnerable. “Need blood?” she asked breathlessly.
She wasn’t sure if his huff was a laugh or a sob. “Don’t think so. Just…just love me…”
She found their rhythm again, taking over the lovemaking, abandoning the magic-making to him. His eyes were as wide and black as she’d ever seen them, pools of night with liquid stars in their depths. His left arm continued its rounds, more slowly but somehow more intensely. It ended laid diagonally across his belly just as his back began to arch. Her eyes squeezed shut as the wonderful, increasingly familiar wave of sensation coursed up from her heated loins, stopping her breath. A stranger, sharper wave of sweet warmth wound with it, rising up through her heart and down her arm in time with the pulse of her blood.
Oh. Oh!
Then, as he sank beneath her, the ecstatic shudders in his own body damping out, she said “Oh!” in quite another voice of surprise. She clapped her right hand to the cord encircling her left wrist. “It—it tingles. It feels like winter sparks.”
“Too much? Does it hurt?” he wheezed anxiously, opening his eyes again.
“No, not at all. Strange…oh! It’s fading a bit. Am I losing…?”
“You should be able to call it up to you when you wish. Try.”
She bit her lip and concentrated. The warm sensation faded. “No…no, oh dear. Am I not doing it right?”
“Instead of concentrating, try relaxing. Make yourself open.”
“That,” she said after a minute, “is a lot harder than concentrating.”
“Yes. Not force, but persuasion. Enticement.”
She sat astride him with her eyes closed, right hand wrapping her wrist, and tried again. She imagined herself smiling wordlessly, trying to attract Dag over to her for a kiss and a cuddle. I love you so much…
A prickling heat around, no, inside her wrist seemed like an answering whisper, Yes, I’m here. “That’s you? In the cord?”
“That’s a bit of me that’s been in the cord since that night in your aunt Nattie’s weaving room,” said Dag, smiling up at her.
“And you can feel a bit of me in your cord like this, too?”
“Yep.” He added in caution, “It may not last more than a few weeks, as you absorb the ground reinforcement.”
“It’ll do fine.” She vented a long, elated sigh, and slumped down across his chest. But since he couldn’t kiss any more of her than the top of her head in this position, she roused herself and reluctantly parted from him. They cleaned up briefly and lay back down just as the candle guttered out. Dag was asleep before she was.
She woke in the dark and rolled over to clutch an empty bedroll. Her heart lurched in panic. Feeling around frantically, she found Dag’s dented pillow still warm. She gripped her cord, calmed her breathing, and tried to sense him. Alive, of course, the reassuring prickle told her; just over…thataway.
He’s just gone out to the slit trench, you fool girl, she scolded herself in relief. She rolled on her side, bringing her hands up to her breasts, and bent her head to kiss the heavy, twice-blessed braid.
The tent flap lifted in a few minutes. The shadows outside were nearly as inky as in here. Dag slipped his bare, chilled body into their bedroll again; they wound their arms around each other, and Fawn did her best to share heat through her skin so that he might ease swiftly into whatever space of sleep was left to him this night. But before his breathing slowed, a slap sounded on the leather of their tent flap, and a low voice called, “Dag?” Utau, Fawn thought.
“I’m awake,” Dag groaned.
“Omba’s girls just brought our horses around.”
“Right. Be right with you.”
From the middle distance sounded a muffled equine snort, and Copperhead’s familiar, irritable squeal. Fawn slipped her shift on in the dark and went out to coax a bit of flame from the gray ashes