AT long last the crowd dispersed, all but the two dozen attendants who swarmed in and around his tent, and she found herself seated on the pallet with her boots off and Sanglant wide awake beside her, the barest smile illuminated on his face and the rest of him shadowed.
“I pray you, Heribert,” he said softly, “put that lamp out.”
Heribert rolled his eyes, but he rose from the pile of furs he slept on, licked his fingers, reached up to the lamp hanging from a cross pole, and pinched out the flame.
Sanglant sighed heavily.
A hundred thoughts skittered across Liath’s mind, and died.
All at once he enveloped her with his arms and let his weight carry her down onto the pallet, and there he lay with his body half on her and a leg crossing hers at the knee.
“You can’t know,” he murmured. “You can’t know. Not one day went by that I did not think of you. And mourn for you. And curse you. And want you. You can’t know how much I have been wanting you.”
By the feel of him pressed up against her, she had a pretty good idea. She wriggled a little, and his grip on her tightened so very gratifyingly as they kissed again and he eased a hand up under her tunic to brush the contours of her ribs.
Then someone coughed.
“I can’t,” she whispered, going rigid in his arms.
He tensed. “You can’t?” Anger tightened his voice. Whenever they spoke, his anger swam close to the surface, waiting to strike.
Yet this was no battle against him.
“There are so many people in here,” she whispered. A dozen or more, many of them still stirring as they settled down. That cough was likely an honest clearing of the throat, but it had startled her out of her passion nevertheless.
She felt his attention flash away from her. His fingers rapped a beat on her ribs as he puzzled over her words.
“They’re sleeping,” he whispered in reply.
“They’re not! Not all of them.”
“Then they soon will be.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They’ll pretend to sleep.”
It was nothing to him, who had spent his entire life in just such a mob, never truly alone, never knowing privacy and certainly never craving it. The only time he’d known solitude was as Bloodheart’s prisoner, and even then he had been surrounded by Eika dogs, his pack; surely he’d been driven half mad because of his isolation.
“I just can’t,” she repeated, not sure if he could ever understand her. The press of them all around was too much. She could not ignore it. She could not endure it.
“I can stand this no longer,” he said hoarsely, in echo of her thoughts. “I don’t care where, but I do care when. And if I don’t do this now, I swear to you, Liath, I am going to die of frustration.”
He grabbed her cloak, her hand, tugged her up to her feet, and said, commandingly, to the tent at large, “No one follow us!”
Heribert began to chuckle, and then half the tent did as well. She was burning with embarrassment, but Sanglant took no notice because he never did. He dragged her out of the tent, and by the time he had ordered off half a dozen startled but swiftly amused guards, she was laughing, too, running with him out into the grass in her bare feet. She had left her belt behind, so the hem of her tunic lapped her calves.
When they reached the crest of the hill, she tripped him and they rolled, tumbling, wrestling, giggling, until the slope of the ground shifted and they came to rest where the ground cupped into a man-sized hollow. He kissed her so long and hard that she got dizzy. There was grass in her hair and up and down her sleeves and between her toes, and for a miracle the grass distracted him more than it did her. He cursed as he brushed himself off, and he shook out the cape and settled it over a swath of grass. After trampling the cloth to make a flat resting place, he drew her down.
She unbuckled his belt, suddenly intent on her task, on wanting to caress him, to feel his skin naked and pressed against her own, but he caught her hand in one of his.
“Nay, not yet. Not yet.” He kissed her knuckles before clasping her to him. “Ai, God. Let me savor it.”
They lay there for a while. She closed her eyes and let the chill spring breeze kiss her face. Nothing could make her feel cold now, with her arms wrapped around him and his around her. He breathed, as silent as the brilliant stars that blazed above them.
“Liath,” he said after a long time, “do you still love me?”
“You asked me this before. Weren’t you content with my answer the first time?”
“You don’t ask whether I still love you.”