Page 95 of Wench

Her pulse trips over itself. The ore is anything but silent – a chorus of veins singing at once. It floods her system until she tastes metal on her tongue. The tone crescendoes, climbing higher, until she can barely think. Every pulse of ore, every golden thread in the clearing, it all collides inside her until she’s a vessel spilling over. She squeezes her eyes shut but the glow remains etched into her vision. Every vein is a bright scream. They press against her skin, begging to be pulled, to be commanded.

Her knees buckle as she staggers from the hollow. She clutches at her ribs in the hopes of holding herself together while the current threatens to shred her apart. She sways, desperate to find a lighthouse within this storm.

And then she sees him.

Lox sits a few paces away, at the tree’s base. His hands rest steady on his thighs, palms upturned and lips moving wordlessly in prayer. His body is a storm of golden ore, bright currents moving through muscle and bone, veins burning so bright that she’s forced to squint. His heart smoulders like a forge. To look at him is almost unbearable.

Marian is staring at the sun made flesh.

She starts to turn away from it, before remembering something Wodenna said:He will take what overflows, reminding you where you end, when the flood would convince you otherwise.

This time, when she looks again, she does not try to see all of him at once. She lets herself notice a single thing – the steady cadence of his pulse. In, then out. The rise and fall is a rowboat on the black lake of her insides, each oar pushing and pulling through the flood that surges in her veins. She fixes on the rhythm until the blaze in him softens from sun to hearth.

The moss hushes underfoot as she moves toward him. She keeps Lox’s breathing in the front of her mind the way Little John taught her. The gold threads clamouring at her edges don’t vanish, but they follow that pulse, as if the current wants a channel and he is giving her one.

Lox is the tether.

Marian sinks to her knees before him. ‘Robin,’ she whispers.

His head snaps up. For a heartbeat, he doesn’t move, as though he doesn’t trust his own eyes. Then his mouth parts, breath trembling out of him.

‘M-M-Marian?’

His eyes are wild-bright, wet at the corners, relief and terror braided tight. He seizes her, hands roaming her arms, her ribs, as though checking she’s real. When he cups her face, his thumbs press almost painfully into her cheekbones, as if the world were a rocking ship and he was desperate to keep her from being pitched into black water.

Her throat closes. Words scatter uselessly, so she answers the only way she can: her lips crush into his.

The kiss is a wildfire. Her magic slams through her veins, wild and unbound, and the instant their mouths meet, it leaps into him. The air sparks with it, sharp as ozone. The moss beneath them hums. Even the roots stir, restless, as though eager to curl around them both.

Lox makes a strangled sound in his chest, half-growl, half-prayer, as the ore within him flares. His teeth catch her lower lip and he swallows her gasp.

Her body arches into his, craving more, craving everything, as if no barrier of flesh or bone could be enough. She wants to be one with him, marrow braided into marrow, two Verdant Guardian halves finally rejoined.

It is too much – too much hunger, too much magic – and yet not enough.

He tears his mouth away long enough to mutter against her jaw. ‘You’re alive. Marian, I can’t believe it . . .’ His words dissolve into another kiss: rougher, wetter, so deep that she feels it in the base of her spine.

She moans into him, hungry, desperate, needing more than lips. Needing to be threaded through him, stitched into his skin. She fists his tunic and drags him closer until their bodies collide.

Every point where their flesh meets, magic bursts brighter. He grips her waist, his fingers digging in, pulling her flush against him. Her thighs tremble, her fingers claw at his shoulders, her breath catches with the ache of wanting. She feels every bit of him through the tether that snaps taut between them.

Marian wrenches away and falls back, forcing them apart in the hopes that it will help, but distance only makes her hunger surge.

‘How is this possible?’ he pants, golden eyes burning.

She opens her mouth to tell him everything – the smouldering ember-heart, meeting Shéruel and Wodenna, what Sherwood asked of her – but when she reaches for it, the memory slides away like sand in an hourglass. Her lips part, trembling with the need to explain, but no words come. Only the hollow echo of something immense she knows she should remember.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispers, broken. She cups his jaw, her thumb brushing the wild stubble there, and it takes a concentrated effort not to throw herself on top of him again. ‘But perhaps I can show you.’

His brow furrows, golden eyes blazing, but he rises without question.

* * *

They don’t travel far. The air is thick, the char biting at Marian’s throat with each inhale. Where once there had been a clearing with scattered flame, now ash carpets the ground, soft as snow but acrid, clinging to her boots.

Lox stares at the ruin. A cord in his neck dances as he squats on the layer of ash. ‘I don’t know how Sherwood will recover from this. Even the oldest roots might not wake from such burning.’ He looks at the soil like it is a corpse he must bury. ‘I don’t . . .’ His hands clench. ‘I don’t think I can fix this.’

But perhaps Marian can.