← The Gilded Shore

Chapter 19

Chapter 19: The Coach

Nico

The leather straps of the carriage creak with every rut, a heavy, grease-dry groan, continuous since we left the harbor. We have been traveling for three days, a slow grind inland from the coast toward the limestone plateau of Valderre. My road coat is dusty, the wool stiff with the grit of the highway. My tongue is dry. Valderre sits days from any water a keel can use; the only way up to it is the overland road. The Sans Souci is two days at sea by now, Théo with her. So only the two of us occupy the rocking wooden box, surrounded by the smell of old horsehair and leather.

Kahina sits opposite me, her head resting against the padded leather wall. Her saffron travel dress is wrinkled from the miles, but her carriage is even, her hands folded in her lap. She has spent the morning looking out the small glass window at the dry, terraced hills rising toward the inland plateau.

“Your father has a grand estate,” she says, her tone flat against the gray light through the window. “He is a Duke. You will have a palace in Valderre.”

“My father does not build palaces,” I say, looking down at the dust on my boots. “He builds operating instructions. The rooms are where he stores the paperwork.”

“And the betrothal?”

“Geneviève,” I say, and the name does not come out a joke the way it would have a month ago. “I have never met her. She is the Count's daughter, and my father means to spend her on the family accounts the way he spends everyone. There is a real woman at the end of that contract, and I am one of the things being done to her, and I have spent the whole summer refusing to think about it. I am not looking forward to standing in front of her face.”

“You had the letters on your desk,” she says, her gaze turning to me. “You had the keys to the Seravalle apartments. But you lived on a boat with no room for a wardrobe.”

“Two years,” I say. The number is out before I decide to give it to her. “The sailing was decent.”

“You kept the letters on the desk and never opened them,” she says, calm, tallying the contents of my chest. “That is not a man with somewhere to be. You stayed because you wanted to see if anyone would notice you were gone. You wanted to know if you had any weight when you were not performing the Duke’s heir.”

I laugh, a short, dry sound, bouncing off the wooden ceiling.

“You are a poor audience, Mademoiselle,” I say.

“I am not an audience at all,” she says.

The cut is clean and fast and does not hurt until the blood starts. She has stripped the grand titles and the careless smiles off me and is looking at what is left. It pulls at me lower than the champagne we drank in Saverno did. I look at her dark eyes and the proud line of her mouth.

There is a joke somewhere for this. There always is. I open my mouth for it and nothing comes, and the silence sits in my chest where the line should be. She has seen me, the whole plain shape of me, and I have nothing to throw over it. My hands are already moving toward her before I have decided anything.

The carriage hits a deep rut, throwing her forward. I catch her arms, and this time I do not wait to be invited. I pull her across the narrow space into my lap, and I am the one who moves first, and that is the whole of what is different. The iron is off. She has chosen me, and so I can reach for her first, and I do.

She lets me. She does not take the top of it. She lets me hike the heavy wool up her thighs and free myself and draw her down onto my lap. I set the pace against the sway of the road. The last line she always kept for herself, she gives me.

I guide myself to her and she sinks the rest of the way, the slick grip of her closing around me, the jolt of the road driving her down. She gasps, her head going back against the carriage wall.

“Nico,” she says, her voice muffled against the side of my neck.

The coachman sits three feet above us on the box, his boots tapping the roof. Every sound we make is a risk. I press my palm over her mouth, my fingers dry against her lips, muffling her breath as I thrust upward. She bites my palm, the sharp pinch of her teeth matching the clench of her around me.

My mouth catches hers, my tongue sliding between her teeth, swallowing her gasp as the wheels rattle over the loose stones. The carriage sways, a violent heave, driving me deeper. She grips my shoulders, her fingernails digging through my shirt, her hips rolling with the motion of the springs.

Through the loosened linen of her bodice I palm her breast, her nipple hard against my thumb. The next posting station is two miles down the road, the horses already slowing on the rise. We move fast, the wood creaking around us, the wheels covering the sound of our breath.

She tightens around me, her hips locking against mine, and she shakes, silent, her forehead pressed against my neck. I come inside her, my own groan lost in the rattle of the iron tires on the gravel.

We sit folded together for a minute, the carriage swaying as the horses reach the flat. My hand rests on her hip, rising and falling with her breath.

We right our clothes, my fingers clumsy with the laces of her bodice, my breeches buttoned as the coach slows. The iron wheels grind on the stone courtyard of the posting inn, the horses stamping to a stop.

I look at the woman opposite me. Her hair is messy, a few pins loose on the collar of her coat, but her face is composed, the travel-creased wool of her skirt smoothed over her knees.

Valderre is two hours away. The Duke is at the end of the road. I do not look at it. I pull her closer, my chin over her hair, the road noise filling everything else.

Kahina

My head rests against Nico’s shoulder, and the saffron wool of my dress is still unlaced at the collar. The heat of our bodies is thick in the closed space, and Nico's arm is heavy around my waist. We are half-dressed and sated, and the walls of the wooden box keep the world away for another hour.

He leans his head back against the padded leather wall with his eyes closed. His dark hair is messy and his road coat lies thrown on the floor between our boots.

“Tell me something real,” he says, his voice low under the rumble of the wheels.

“I am real,” I say.

“Something from before,” he says, his hand stopping on my hip. “A memory. Not a wound, Kahina. Only something you remember.”

I look at the dark leather padding of the door. Since the coast fell, I have given every man a weighed answer, and the names of my family were kept back behind my teeth. The warmth of his chest is solid under my cheek, and the carriage sways to rock me against him.

“My mother’s courtyard had white walls,” I say, and the words come slow. “The jasmine grew over the stone arches, and the scent was thick enough to taste at the back of the throat in the afternoon heat. In the summer, the light turned heavy and gold, and it burnished the red roof tiles and the fountain water to metal. It was a still place, and my sisters argued about the embroidery patterns on the gallery while their voices rose over the splash of the water.”

I do not tell him about the red sails clearing the harbor point, weeks ago now, when the coast fell. The smoke turned the light to ash, and the sound of my sisters screaming as the iron collars closed remains unspoken. I keep the garden white and bright, and it remains a clean place in my speech.

He does not ask who lives in the courtyard now, and he does not ask where the corsair captains carried my family. He simply holds me and his fingers tighten on my hip, and he takes the jasmine without reaching for anything behind it.

My shoulders drop against his chest and they stay down.

The carriage sways as the wheels hit the smooth gravel of the interior highway. The wild hills of the coast are gone, and neat stone grids stretch under a flat, gray sky toward the horizon.

I slide off his lap to the opposite bench, and the leather is cold under me. The gap between us is wider than the wooden box, but the road is widening too, and the posting inns are turning into stone villas with tall chimneys.

“We are entering the estate,” I say. The laces of my bodice fight my fingers, and the heavy travel wool is stiff. My hands are clumsy from the long hours on the road.

Nico buttons his shirt, and his jaw is set in a quiet line. He pulls his road coat over his shoulders, and the easy, social smile returns to his face. It is the same smile he wore in the Seravalle salons, but it does not sit on him the same way now.

“We are agreed on what we are doing here,” I say. We have turned the plan over the whole length of the road, and I already know the steps. Two plans wait behind these walls. Armand can be broken here by Nico's name and Felix's manifests, and my own testimony of the Tunis dock can turn the law against him. The Duke also waits with the contract he means to spend on Geneviève, and that is Nico's reckoning to make. Both run through this estate.

Under both plans, a deeper strain remains quiet where Nico cannot see it, and it is a thing this estate cannot touch. Armand's fall does not bring my sisters home. Malik is still on the water, and the only road back to them runs through him, and that road is longer than Valderre.

We slow, and the horses turn onto a wide avenue lined with poplars. The tall iron gates of the Valderre estate swing open, and the hinges groan into the silence. I smooth my skirt over my knees and my back is held straight against the seat, and the carriage rolls through.