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And I go right over the edge with her, pouring into her, my knot swelling and locking us together, and I hold on to her while we both shake.

Then it’s quiet.

I’m still buried inside her. Still locked. And for the first time all evening, she’s calm. The fever’s still there, but it’s not burning her anymore. She’s just lying there with her cheek on my chest and her eyes half open, breathing slow.

“Better?” I ask.

“So much better.” She sighs. “Your knot feels so good, Rowan. I’m so full. I don’t want it to ever go down.”

I think about the storehouse. About sitting on the floor for an hour while the miller looked for his sack.

“It won’t for a while,” I tell her.

She smiles without opening her eyes. “Good.”

She falls asleep like that. Tied to me. And I lie there in her nest with her whole weight on my chest and her heat soaking into me, and for the first time I understand that my long knot is not a joke.

It’s a gift. For her.

I’m going to hold her through every single one of these.

* * *

The first day is a blur.

She wakes up burning, and I fuck her until she’s calm. She sleeps on my knot for an hour, sometimes two. She wakes up, and I feed her, and she’s burning again before she’s done chewing.

I learn fast.

I learn that if I leave the nest, even to get water, she’ll start crying. Not sad crying. Frantic crying, her hands reaching for me, her scent going sour and scared. So I bring a bucket of water from the pump before the sun’s even up, and I bring the bread and the honey and the cheese, and I put it all right next to the bed where I can reach it without letting go of her.

I learn that she needs to eat, even when she says she doesn’t. I tear bread into little pieces and dip them in honey and feed them to her one at a time while I’m still knotted inside her. She grumbles and pouts and eats every single one.

“I’m not hungry,” she mumbles around the fourth piece.

“You’re chewing.”

“I’m chewing because you put it in my mouth.”

“Then keep chewing.”

She glares at me. Then she opens her mouth for the fifth piece.

I learn that she loves a cool cloth on the back of her neck more than she loves almost anything in the world. More than honey. More than her bees. Maybe more than my knot, but I don’t push my luck asking.

I learn that she gets mean between waves. Funny mean.

“If you get up to stoke that fire,” she tells me, flat on her back, sweating, eyes closed, “I will die. I will die right here in this nest, and the aunties will find my body, and Auntie Bess will tell everybody I died of wood.”

“You won’t die.”

“I’ll die out of spite.”

I don’t stoke the fire. The cottage is plenty warm. It’s mostly her.

* * *

The second night, somebody knocks on the door.