Page 56 of Zenith Court

He could not. “May I move it?” I asked. His eyes stayed on his wrist, but he nodded once. I lifted his right hand away, turned it palm-up, and rested the left forearm across it. Carried, not pinned. His skin was cold beneath my fingers. It was the first time I had touched him since before the Tower took either of us.

“Like a full can,” I said. “Yours to spill, so carry it level. Don’t crush the handle.”

“Carry it where?”

“Tonight, to a bed. Use the count as rest: in on four, out on six, and leave out the hold. No one here will punish you for what your Mark does.”

He stared at his forearm lying in his open palm. “Who taught you the carry?”

“Nobody. It wasn’t taught.”

I walked him to the third row east, beside the waystation woman’s lamp. At the tent I said, “Would work help in the morning? They need hands on buckles and blanket bales.”

He looked past me toward the tally fires. “Buckles.”

“I’ll tell them you volunteered.”

He stopped with his back to me. Whatever he had meant to say remained unsaid. I did not ask for it.

On the walk back, I kept seeing the frost-pale lines on his arm. Pressure was the only protection he had known, and he had used it until his Mark nearly disappeared. The Tower had taken him anyway. I had given him one kinder instruction than he gave me at nine, and I could not tell which of us I was grieving for. I walked until my breathing steadied.

The wool store stood just inside the western pickets, fleeces baled to the ridgepole against the cold country ahead. A horn lantern hung low over the trestle so its light would not show beyond the canvas. I was halfway through the count when Astra’s steps sounded outside. She never hides an approach she has decided I should hear.

She came in carrying lamp smoke, cold water, and the high note of the basin. Then she tied the flap shut behind her. In a crowded camp, it was as close as we could come to a locked door.

“How many tonight?”

“Nineteen on the breath. A dozen on work. One on the carry.” The line at her wrist would have told her about the last one. The camp showed her the rest.

“Thirty-two.” She crossed the store and stopped within my reach. “And now you’re counting wool.”

“The wool still needs counting.”

“Not by you.” She took the tally from my hand and set it on the trestle. “Come here.”

“You’re tired.”

“So are you.” Her gaze dropped to my mouth. “Let me take care of you.”

“Slowly,” I said.

“Slowly.” She took my right hand and traced the places work had marked it: the stave callus from ten years of salle mornings, the pale seam a linen trolley had left across two knuckles, the groove worn into two fingers during the six days I carried her passport. She turned my hand over and kissed the palm, then the wrist where the rain-dark line brightened at her touch. “Mine,” she said to the line. I stood still and let her.

Her mouth followed the burnt-copper lines up my forearm. She breathed in against my skin. Leather and warm cloth—the scent she had first noticed on me in the salle. She opened my shirt one button at a time, kissing each new strip of skin before opening the next. I wanted to hurry her. Instead I kept my hands at my sides until she took one and put it on her waist.

“You can touch me.”

I slid my palm beneath the hem of her shirt. Her skin was cool from the basin and warmer along her spine. She leaned into my hand as I drew it upward, and the small sound she made went straight through me.

At my shoulder, she worked her thumb into the tight muscle. “Let go,” she said. She pressed her mouth beside my neck and stayed there until my shoulders eased beneath her hands.

She broke the binding on a bale and spread two layers of fleece beneath the lantern. Her own clothes came off quickly and landed across the trestle. Mine she removed with more patience, pausing to drag her mouth across my chest and down my stomach. I was hard before she opened my trousers. She wrapped her hand around me once, watched my hips move toward her, and smiled.

“Down,” she said.

I lay where she pointed, wool giving beneath my spine, the store warm with lanolin and the cold-water scent of her skin. She climbed over me slowly enough that I felt every place her body brushed mine.

“Weight first.” She knelt astride my shoulders, one knee sunk into the fleece on either side of my head. “All of it, Jonah. Don’t hold me up. I want your hands on me.”