Chapter 15 - The Morning After

I looked at Kit’s hand on my knee for a long time.

It was filthy. There was blood dried in the creases of his knuckles and under his nails and in a brown crust up to his wrist, and some of it was mine, and most of it belonged to people lying out on the ice by the landing. It was warm and heavier than I remembered from the hearthstone. It didn’t flicker. It didn’t fade. I put my good hand down on top of it, and my fingers stopped on the back of his hand instead of going through. I pressed down hard, to check.

My cock got there before I did. It went stiff in my ruined trousers on the front step of my own inn, and I would like to say I was ashamed of it. I was too tired to be ashamed of anything.

“Say something,” said Kit.

“You’ve got a shadow.”

He looked round at it, stretched out long behind him across the bloody snow. He lifted one arm, and the shadow lifted one arm. He waved, and it waved.

“Jory,” he called across the yard, without turning his head. “Jory, I’ve got a shadow.”

“I know,” said Jory. He was at the gateway with a dead hired man in a leather coat slung over his shoulder. He stopped and looked at his own shadow on the snow, and then at Kit’s, and for a moment he didn’t move at all, and after that his mouth started to shake. “I know. I’ve got one too.”

He put the dead man down carefully in the snow, and sat down beside him, and put his face in his hands.

Kit went to him. He walked across the yard to Jory on bare feet that left prints and crunched in the snow, and dropped down next to him and put both arms round him, and they sat there by the broken gate with a dead man at their feet, holding on to each other and rocking, and neither of them said a word. I looked at my boots. I’d have watched those two fuck all day, gladly, but I couldn’t watch this.

Kaniz put her head back on my shoulder.

“They are going to be very hungry,” she said.

They were.

There were three of Maple’s pies left in the basket from moving day, stiff as boards, and a crock of salt pork we had brought from the Nail, and the two of them ate all of it. I didn’t get a bite. I didn’t ask for one either. They ate standing up in the kitchen with their bloody hands, one pie each and the third torn in half, and the salt pork in strips straight out of the crock, and when that was gone Kit looked at the sack of Bertha’s oats with real longing until Jory took it away from him.

“There’s ale,” said Jory. “In the cellar. We laid it down for opening night.”

“It’ll have turned,” I said.

“I don’t care if it’s turned.”

It had turned. It was three years old and sour and they drank half a barrel of it between them, out of the two cups from the bar, and Kit cried when he tasted it, and Jory pretended he wasn’t crying too.

Jory set my hand after that. He did it at the kitchen table, with my arm laid out on the boards and Kaniz holding my shoulder. He had set a horse’s leg once, he said, and a mason’s thumb, and my hand was smaller than both. Two of my fingers had gone the wrong way under the clubman’s boot, and Jory took hold of the first one and looked at me, and I nodded, and he pulled.

I don’t know what I said. Kaniz told me later I had called him a name the Tome had never heard, and the Tome confirmed this from upstairs, through the floor, with real respect. Jory did the second finger before I got my breath back. He splinted them both with two straight sticks of kindling and the last clean strips torn from the hem of Kaniz’s shift, and wound it tight, and his hands on my wrist were warm and steady, and calloused across the palms from three years of nothing and a lifetime of work before that.

He was the second of them to touch me without the fire. I sat there with my hand throbbing in his and my stomach turning over, and I couldn’t stop looking at his hands.

“There,” he said. “Don’t make a fist for a month.”

“A month?”

“You’ve got a left hand.” He let go of my wrist. He looked down at himself, at his shirt, which was stiff and brown with blood from the collar to the hem, and at his arms. “We need to wash.”

Kaniz heated the water. She filled every pot in the kitchen at the well and set them on the fire, bending over the hearth in what was left of her shift, which wasn’t much after my hand had used up the hem, and I watched her ass instead of helping. When they boiled, she poured them into the big copper tub Kit and Jory had bought for the guest washroom and never once used. Jory had already dragged it in front of the kitchen hearth by himself, one-handed, and set it down without a sound.

Kit and Jory stripped.

They did it in front of me without a word. It had never once crossed their minds that a man might look away. Jory pulled his shirt off over his head, and it came off him stuck in places, and underneath he was broad and pale, hairy across the chest, with thick arms and a hard belly, and under his ribs on the left side there was a scar. It was old, white and puckered, the size of a coin. It didn’t bleed. Kit got his half-laced shirt off and his trousers down and kicked them away across the kitchen floor, and stood there naked and long-boned in the firelight with his cock half hard already and blood dried in streaks down his stomach, and under his jaw, round his throat, there was a faint pale ring where the bruise had been.

He saw me looking at it. He put his hand on it.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

My mouth had gone dry. He was the prettiest thing I had seen in my life, standing there in my kitchen with his ribs showing and his hair in his eyes, and he was real, and he was mine. I owned him. I had signed a paper. The thought went through me hot and ugly and I couldn’t stop it.

Jory got into the tub first. The water went over the side. Kit climbed in after him, between his knees, and sat back against Jory’s chest, and the water went over the side again and ran across the kitchen floor toward my boots, pink.

Jory washed him. He did it with a rag and a cake of Maple’s soap, slowly, from his hair down. He scrubbed the blood off Kit’s shoulders and his chest and his arms, one at a time, holding each wrist up out of the water to get at it, and Kit lay back against him with his eyes half shut and let him do it. I had never seen one man wash another that slowly, and it made my throat tight, and I didn’t know why. When Jory’s rag got down to Kit’s stomach, Kit made a sound. Jory’s hand went lower under the water. Kit’s head went back on Jory’s shoulder, and his mouth opened, and the bathwater started slopping against the copper.

I had heard them through the wall my first night in the house, and I had never once watched. Now I stood in the kitchen doorway with my splinted hand held up to my chest and watched Jory jerk Kit off in a copper bath, slow and wet, with his mouth against Kit’s ear, and my cock pushed so hard against my trousers that I felt my pulse in it.

“Samuel,” said Kit, with his eyes shut.

“What?”

“Get in.”

“I’ve got a broken hand.”

“Keep it out of the water,” said Jory, without looking up. “Hold it on the side.”

I don’t remember taking my clothes off. Kaniz did most of it. She was there behind me, and my belt was open, and my shirt was coming off over my splint, and my boots came off, and my trousers went down, and her hands were on my back pushing me forward toward the tub. I climbed in on my knees between Kit’s legs, facing him, with my right hand held up out of the water on the rim of the tub, and the water was hot, almost too hot, and full of blood and soap, and it went over the side a third time.

Kit opened his eyes. He looked at me from six inches away, lying back on Jory’s chest in the steam with Jory’s hand still moving under the water, and his face was so greedy I nearly went off right there.

“No fire,” he said. “Look. Nobody’s holding my hand.”

He put both his hands on my face. They were wet and hot, real, and they stayed, and he pulled my mouth down to his.

On the hearthstone I had been holding him there, and I had felt every second of it slipping, and I had been afraid to breathe. Now there was nothing to hold. I kissed him, and he kissed me back hard and open, with his tongue in my mouth and his teeth on my lip, and he didn’t fade, and I didn’t have to keep anything going. I could have him. I put my good hand down under the water between us, and found his cock, and Jory’s hand was already there, wrapped round it, and Jory moved his hand down and left me the top of it without a word. Very polite, for a man with his hand on another man’s cock.

Kit moaned into my mouth. He reached down under the water too, and got hold of me.

I would like to tell you I took charge. I tried. I had a plan, which was to get Kit off in my hand and watch his face do it and keep at least one part of myself under control, and it lasted about as long as my plans ever do. Jory’s other hand came up out of the water and took hold of the back of my neck. It was big and wet and warm, and it held me there against Kit’s mouth, and Kit’s fist was going on my cock under the water, fast and clumsy, three years out of practice, and Jory said in my ear in the even voice he used behind the bar, “Slower, Kit, he’ll go off,” and Kit said, “I want him to go off,” and I went off.

I came under the water in Kit’s hand with my forehead against his and my broken hand clenched on the rim of the tub, so that the splint creaked, and I swore and came at the same time, and Kit laughed into my mouth and kept his hand going on me until I begged.

Kit came a moment after, in both our hands, and arched back against Jory with a shout that went round the kitchen and up the chimney, and out front, over the inn door, the bell rang once, hard.

I knelt there in the pink water with my head on Kit’s shoulder and my hand up on the rim, breathing. Jory still had his hand on the back of my neck. He hadn’t come. I could feel him behind Kit, hard against his back, patient, waiting his turn. He had waited three years for a guest.

“Later,” Jory said, before I could ask. “There’s a gate to hang.”

Kaniz was sitting on the kitchen table with her knees drawn up and her chin on them, watching us. She looked pleased and hungry, and careful too, and she was looking at Kit and Jory instead of me. I noticed, and I should have known right then what she was going to ask me for.

From upstairs, through the ceiling, the Tome said, “AT LAST.”

Kit and Jory hung the gate.

They did it in the afternoon, the two of them, with no help from me, because I had one hand and it was in a splint. Jory pulled out what was left of the old post, where the axes had chewed through the top. He dug a new hole himself through the frozen ground with Lily’s spade, swearing at it, and set a new post in it from a beam in the stable, and Kit carried the gate. He lifted it up off its face in the snow, the whole iron-bound oak gate that two hired men with axes had chopped at for an hour, and he walked it across to the post and held it there, shaking and laughing, while Jory drove the bolts. I watched his ass the whole time and told myself I was supervising.

I stood in the yard and watched them. I kept thinking that Felix would have stood exactly here, and watched exactly this, and said something cutting about my posture. Felix was gone. I was surprised how much I noticed.

I found Lily’s ribbons while they worked. Three were in the trampled snow by the stables, torn and filthy, and the fourth was on the handle of her spade where Jory had leaned it against the stable wall. I washed them in the horse trough, one-handed, and tied them back on to the hitching ring and the drainpipe and the lamp bracket and the spade, which took me nearly an hour, and I didn’t let anybody help.

When the sun went down, the gate was hung and barred, and the yard was empty, and the snow by the stables was white again where the wind had smoothed it, and Lily’s four ribbons hung wet and red over it. By the stables, at least, you couldn’t tell anybody had died, and I stood looking at that one clean corner for longer than I’d admit.

Kaniz came to me that evening at the common-room hearth.

I was sitting on the hearthstone with my back to the fire and my splint in my lap, and Kit and Jory were at the bar with the last of the sour ale, arguing about whether Jory had driven the third bolt straight. The egg was back in its crate by the fire, warm. The Tome had come down. Kit had carried it down from the warm room for me, at my say-so, and it lay on the end of the bar under the carved birds, with its eye on the room, purring to itself about the reading.

Kaniz came and knelt down in front of me on the hearthstone. She knelt properly, as she did when she wanted me to know she meant something: back straight, hands on her thighs, chain gathered in her lap so it didn’t ring. She looked up at me.

“Master,” she said. “Rule four.”

My stomach dropped. My cock rose. They did it at the same moment, and I sat there on the hearthstone and felt it happen and couldn’t stop either one.

At the bar, the two of them had stopped arguing.

“I am asking,” said Kaniz. Her voice was steady and clear, and it carried. “I would like them. Both of them. In the cells, where they built the rings for it. I have wanted it since the one in the shirtsleeves flicked my hem.” She kept her eyes on me. “I would like you to say yes. And I would like you to hold my chain while they do it.”

Kit had his cup halfway to his mouth and left it there. Jory had put his down on the bar.

I wanted to say no so badly that I could feel the word stuck behind my teeth, and I didn’t know if it was because she was mine or because I was frightened of what it would mean if she wasn’t only mine, or because I knew what I would feel watching it. I knew. I had felt it in the kitchen doorway that morning with my splint held up to my chest, watching Jory wash Kit. I had felt it in the yard, watching the two of them tear the cult to pieces, sick and hard both at once.

Kaniz waited. She could see all of it on me, and she waited on her knees with her hands on her thighs, and didn’t help me at all.

It was my house. They were mine. All of them were mine, the slave on her knees and the two dead men at the bar, and every single thing that happened in this house tonight was mine to allow or mine to forbid. I had said so on a deed. I had said so to the Tome with my back against a door. I had said everything.

“Yes,” I said.

Lily wasn’t there to see through me, and Felix wasn’t there to dare me, and the Tome was purring at the end of the bar and hadn’t said a word. I said it on my own, because I wanted to, and the wanting to was the worst part.

Kaniz smiled. It went right across her face, wide and bright, and she bent forward on her knees and kissed my splinted hand. It hurt like hell, and I let her. She put the end of her chain into my good one, and closed my fingers round it.

“Yes, master,” she said, and licked her lip.

The end cell was lit with three candles. Kit had lit them. He had lit them one after another with his own hands, and stood grinning at each flame he had made, and I didn’t have it in me to hurry him.

Kaniz walked to the middle of the cell and turned round. She lifted her shift off over her head and dropped it on the stone, and stood naked in the candlelight in her collar and her manacles and her ankle chains, tits out and nipples hard, with her black hair down her back and the chain running from her wrist to my hand, and she looked at Kit and Jory in the cell door with her chin up.

“Well?” she said.

Jory came in first. He came in slowly and stopped in front of her, close, and looked her over from her face to her feet, the way he had looked at her in the common room the first day with her hem round her ribs. He lifted his hand. He stopped it an inch from her breast and looked back at me in the doorway.

“Yes,” I said again. It was easier the second time. That was worse too.

His hand closed on her.

I stood in the cell doorway with her chain wrapped round my good hand, and I watched two dead men I owned take my slave apart in the dungeon they had built for it. I am not going to pretend I looked away. Jory was slow and thorough and certain. He knelt in front of her and put his mouth between her legs and took his time about it, with his big hands holding her hips still, while Kit stood behind her and held her up against his chest with his arms round her and his mouth on her neck, his fingers on her nipples, whispering to her. I couldn’t hear what. She came on Jory’s mouth with her head back on Kit’s shoulder and her eyes open, looking at me down the length of the chain. Every time she came, she looked straight at me, and pulled on the chain, and I felt it in my wrist.

They put her on the frame. Jory took her from behind with his hands on her hips, slow and deep, the bolts creaking in the floor, and Kit stood on the other side of the bar in front of her with his cock in her mouth and his hands in her hair, and the two of them looked at each other over her back and grinned, and they fell into a rhythm so fast it was obvious they’d done this before. With somebody else, years ago, or with each other. I didn’t ask. The cell rang with it. The chains rang, and the frame knocked against its bolts, and Kaniz made wet, happy noises round Kit’s cock, and every so often she pulled on the chain in my hand, twice, hard, still here, still yours, and I pulled back.

I was hard through all of it. I didn’t touch myself. I stood in the door with her chain in my hand and my splint against my chest and watched. I wanted to join in. I wanted to stop it. I did neither.

The bell rang three times that night. I counted.

When it was over, Kaniz hung in the frame with her head down and her hair hanging, breathing, and Kit and Jory were both sitting on the stone floor of the cell with their backs against the wall, wrecked, Kit with his head on Jory’s shoulder. Kaniz lifted her head. She looked at me in the doorway, and her face was flushed dark and wet, and she smiled at me with her whole mouth.

“Thank you, master,” she said.

I unbuckled her. I held her up while her knees came back, and she leaned on me, all her weight, warm and sticky, smelling of the three of them, and she put her face in my neck.

“You held on,” she said. “The whole time. I could feel you.”

“I know.”

“You hated it.” She sounded pleased with me. “And you liked it. And you said yes.” She bit my neck, lightly. “That is what a master is.”

I stood in the cell with her in my arms and looked over her shoulder at the two of them on the floor, at Kit already looking back at me like he wanted another go, and Jory with his eyes half shut, finally done waiting for opening night. I thought of Jory behind the bar, the night I spent here alone, telling me what they wanted. Fourteen rooms and something happening in all of them, he had said, and a girl in a chain down in the cells, making noise, with somebody making her make it.

I had bought that. I had read the deed, and signed it, and said yes to every line of it.

Fenwick came out the next day at midday with a letter.

He drove up to the rehung gate in his little wagon with his tall hat on and his folio beside him on the bench, and Jory opened the gate for him and bowed, with his shadow lying across the snow, and Fenwick looked at Jory from the wagon bench without changing his expression in the slightest. I’d been looking forward to that face moving, and it didn’t.

“Innkeeper,” he said to Jory. “You are looking well.”

“Thank you, Mr. Undergable.”

Fenwick drove into the yard and climbed down, and looked round at the pink stains on the snow and the new gatepost and the scuff marks running from the gate down to the landing, and made a small note in his folio. I’d have paid good silver to read it.

“I gather,” he said to me, “the property has hosted an event.”

“A few people came out from the city.”

“So I am told. The Guild sends its regards and has asked me not to describe the property to anyone for some weeks.” He closed the folio. “The Exchange, for its part, considers the occupants’ improved condition a matter for the owner and declines to revalue.” He reached into his coat and took out a folded letter with a blob of blue wax on it, pressed with a flower. “And Mistress Winterbrook asked me to deliver this, by hand, and to watch you read it.”

I broke the wax with my thumb, one-handed, and Fenwick watched me read it.

It was Lily’s writing, small and neat, the same hand that had written the smallclothes clause in the margin of my deed.

I hear you’ve had visitors. I hear a great many things, sweetheart, and some of them are about dead men who are no longer as dead as they were. I’m coming out on Thursday to see my yard. Tell your ghosts I’m bringing the salt.

I read it twice, and my ears went hot at sweetheart both times. Kit was reading it over my shoulder, solid, warm against my back, with his chin on my shoulder.

“Is the salt still a rule?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now,” I said, and looked at the four red ribbons hanging still at the corners of the snow by the stables, and wondered what I was going to tell her.