Page 11 of Zenith Court

Then he looked at me.

“Your guard’s the same,” he said. “Your scale is wrong. Learn the new scale.”

He went back to the rail. I returned my stave to the rack with both hands.

My father taught me suppression when I was nine, three weeks after Alistair died. He closed his hand over my Mark and taught me pressure. From then on, every strike and every grip passed through that lesson. I learned to measure a handclasp, a sparring blow, the weight I put against a door. When the Mark broke in the Tower, I saw the costs I understood: burnt-copper ink bright on my forearm, impossible to hide. I had not understood that suppression had limited my strength too.

Without it, I no longer knew how hard I could hit.

I spent the day avoiding the question. I set the kettle down before Rev could take it, pushed the breadboard instead of passing it, and turned sideways through the kitchen door. By supper I was barely speaking. Astra noticed and said nothing.

Mid-afternoon, a woman arrived from the Hall’s east country with mud on her boots and a Mark at her collarbone. She had spent eleven years under a Council suppression order. Now every raised voice or dropped pail made the Mark flare, and her hands kept rising to cover it. I knew the gesture. My father had taught it to me first.

I sat across from her at the long table, beyond easy reach. “Don’t grab it,” I said. “Watch it. Force tells it there’s danger. Attention tells it nothing is wrong.” The dog barked twice while we sat there. At the second bark, the flare faded on its own. She thanked me with shaking hands.

I could teach the lesson. I could not make my own body believe it.

* * *

After supper, I went to the barn loft to get away from everyone. Swallows settled in the eaves. The loft door stood open to the west, the last light stretched along the boards, and I sat on the old tack chest beneath it with a folded horse blanket beside me.

Astra came up the ladder without softening her steps. She left the lamp at the bottom and climbed into the remaining daylight, still in her work shirt with the sleeves rolled.

“You turned sideways through the kitchen door,” she said. “You’ve walked through it normally for five weeks. And you racked that stave like you were afraid of it.”

“I nearly broke his wrist.”

“It jarred a wrist.” She stopped just beyond my reach. “Kieran’s had worse from the goat. I’m not here to tell you it wasn’t your fault. Fault isn’t what has you hiding in the loft.”

“What’s my problem tonight?”

“You’re afraid of yourself,” she said. “You spent all day keeping clear of everyone. I watched you.”

“So I came to ask you for something.” Her voice stayed plain. “May I have you, Jonah?”

I was used to being the one who asked—at the salle door, at her wrist, at the edge of every bed. My breath caught when she turned the question on me. She waited.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Then I set the pace. I tell you where your hands go, and they stay where I put them. You’re not holding back tonight. You’re holding still. Understood?”

“To the inch.”

“I’m counting on it.” She took my right wrist, pushed the sleeve above the Mark, and pressed her mouth to the inside of my forearm. “Leather,” she said against my skin. “And you, underneath. I used to notice it after every lesson.”

She placed my hands on either side of her waist. “There. They stay until I move them.”

She undressed between my hands. She unbuttoned her work shirt from throat to hem, the movement of her waist shifting beneath my palms, then let the shirt fall. Bare skin warmed my hands. She unlaced her trousers and stepped out of them with one hand on my shoulder. I looked at the crease along her hip, the three faint lines at her wrist, the gooseflesh rising over her breasts where the evening air touched her. She waited until I met her eyes again.

“Weight, not steering,” she said. She straddled my left thigh, knees braced against the chest, hands on my shoulders. “You hold. I move.”

She moved against my thigh, slow until she found the pressure she wanted, then harder. Heat soaked through my trousers. My hands followed the shift of her waist without lifting her. “That’s good,” she said. “Stay there.” Her breath shortened while her rhythm held. She came with her teeth set in her lip and her full weight against me. I stayed where she had put me, hard against her hip.

“Still with me?” she asked.

“Entirely. If my grip⁠⁠—”

“If anything’s wrong, I’ll tell you. You don’t have to keep checking.”