House of Sand and Secrets (21 page)

I do not want to think about Isidro and the things I cannot do. And what it says about me.

Jannik’s face goes from light to shadow as the carriage rattles down the streets between the high buildings. Moonlight, then darkness. Then moonlight. I like it best when he’s in the light, so pale and other, so beautiful. Not Isidro’s perfection, but his own. Something must show in my expression, because Jannik rocks back.

“Why him?” I say. “I wouldn’t have minded others, but you had to go and feel something for someone else–”

“You’re an idiot, Felicita.” He lets go of my hand. “I do feel something for someone else. I’m just never allowed to say it.”

“Why not?”

“Because somehow it always gets thrown back in my face.” He bows his head. “Perhaps it’s easier to just say things without saying them.”

Like with the flower-language of the Hobs. “Perhaps.” I reach out again and brush my fingers very lightly against the top of his head, stroking the silk-smooth hair. “Perhaps it would be best to act, rather than speak.”

He smiles thinly. “Actions. Never my strong point. It seems that I need a whip before I can be goaded into anything real.”

I say nothing. I want to tell him,
act, act now
, but I’m too scared. Perhaps after all this I have read everything wrong, and how humiliating would that be? For hardly the first time in my life, I find myself wishing Jannik was a man who spoke his mind instead of believing we know what it is he’s thinking.

And yet, here I am expecting him to know my hidden thoughts. “Who did you buy the book for?”

“Book?”

“Traget.
The Melancholy Raven
.”

“Did you think I bought it to give to him?” Jannik sounds curious, tinged with the smallest amount of amusement. “You–” He shakes his head. “Sometimes I wonder if you are actually blind, or if it’s a very good act you think you should keep up for your own safety.”

“Who did you buy it for?” I say again, though I know. I know.

Instead of answering, Jannik slides carefully onto his knees and then, with one quick questioning glance to see if this is acceptable, he pushes my layers of skirts and petticoats up past my buttoned boots, until his fingers are on the ribbons at my knee band. His fingers are very cold.

It seems like it happens in a haze. Nightmarish and confused and yet it draws me in with all the promises of the things I have wanted. I don’t stop him or encourage him. Instead I lean back with my skirts bunched up around my thighs, and watch with a dreamer’s detachment. He takes this silence as consent, and presses his cheek against the inside of my knee. I want to move forward – not to stop him – to – I don’t know what. So I sit in my confusion, and do nothing. My breath is rasping, and I can feel how my whole skin is tingling and I don’t know if it’s me, or Jannik’s magic.

He nips the tender flesh of my knee through the silk of my drawers, not breaking the skin.

I yelp.

“Good,” he says. “I was starting to wonder if you were still awake.”

I swallow. “I’m awake. You can – carry – on.” The last is said with a gasp because now that he has my word, Jannik is nipping his way up my thigh. His fingers brush against the front of my underclothes, and obviously discovers what he would know if he’d ever bothered with women instead of Isidro.

“Convenient,” he says. It’s a bit muffled and I start to laugh breathlessly.

First his mouth, then his tongue. My thighs are jerking in a spasmodic dance over which I have no control. A pillar of ice, then fire, then ice runs through me. The silent laughter turns to a series of hiccups.

He flicks the skirts back up, and draws away to stare at me. “Laughing? Really?”

I lurch forward, knocking him backward and bashing his head against the back of the carriage seat. “Sorry,” I hiss into his hair, still gasping for breath, and half-laughing. I’ve straddled him, and this – this is how it should be. I kiss him, and taste salt and musk and me, and then his hands are tangled in my hair and we stay like this, the carriage floor rattling under us, trembling my thighs around him, until we draw to a halt outside the Pelim offices.

“This isn’t done,” I say as I draw away from him, and stand before the coachman can open the door.

He looks a little too flabbergasted to respond, but he nods, and manages to pull himself into some sort of order just as the door is flung open.

THE HOUSE IMAGINARY

We end up
on the storeroom couch, still fully clothed. We only kiss when the doors are closed. Perhaps, like me, he is still embarrassed by this sudden silent confession. Jannik presses me down onto the thick covers. His weight is comforting. He’s heavier than Dash was, a little taller, and he kisses differently. There’s something almost subversive about the way he kisses, something sly and sharp and fox-like that makes me feel like I am charged with static. I match my kisses to his, my breathing, then pause to gently take his lower lip between my teeth. This is me, saying
mine
.

I think he understands. Jannik pulls his head away and trails kisses down my throat, down to my chest. He frees my breasts from the low-cut bodice, flicking at my nipples with his tongue.

I shiver, arch my back. Something is off, leaving me feeling out of kilter. Taking a deep breath, I roll over to my side, pushing him with me. Still not right. “Sit up.”

He follows my command without arguing, and seems utterly unsurprised when I straddle him again. The feeling of rightness is back and we sit like this, tongues and fingers and lips touching. He opens his eyes when my one hand slides down to unbutton his trousers.

Still dressed, I lift myself over him.

His breathing is short, almost harsh. “Like this?”

I nod.

He slides in fast, both of us slick, his hips jerk once, and I want so much to just let myself go and be real and together. I have done this only with one other person before, but in my memories I squeezed it down to a meaningless dry nothing. With Dash, I was tying myself to him for safety. No matter what excuses I gave myself I knew that deep inside me I was using his bed sheets as ribbons to bind myself to the Whelk Street house. If I had him, I had a place to stay. I think I even convinced myself that I was in love.

I think I even convinced myself that he was in love.

Dry beach sand in my palms, pale and dead.

Jannik is fever-hot, pale as that sand but far more alive, filled with secrets. His hands are damp with heat, his fingers caging my cheeks, thumbs tracing under my eyes. His wool trousers are scratchy-rough against my thighs, a grounding counterpoint.

This is nothing like what came before, the way I want to remember it.

It’s different and maybe better, maybe sour-sweeter. I want to taste it slow, savour the plum-ripe moment. It’s the rightness of this finally happening and I want to cling that feeling, revel in it. I want to wrap it around me, fall into it, drown.

Instead, I make myself grip Jannik’s arms hard enough that I can feel the bones, and shake my head as I pull his hands down to his sides. He stops, his chest heaving, and I can feel his control as he shivers. Both of us still, our breathing the only thing that remains in time.

I mirror him, cupping his face in my hands and keeping his head in place. In the yellow fatcandle light his eyes are dark, the indigo almost black. I’ve never looked this closely into his eyes, at the tiny crystalline fractures, at the way they lighten toward the centre like ice around his dilated pupils. I kiss him once, very softly, and whisper. “I’m going to save Isidro,” I say. “There’s a way.”

He stays very still, waiting.

It takes all my hard cruelty to tell him how. “I’m going to use you as bait.”

Jannik blinks.

“Don’t say anything, let me explain.” My earlier conviction is gone. Like my desire, it’s faded. “I need to get into House Eline, and what better way than to give you to them?”

“What better way indeed.” He shifts away from me, and we are no longer joined.

“Jannik.” My hands are still on his face, and the magic is thrumming against my palms, stronger than it was before. It feels like I’ve trapped a mouse.

He twists his head and shakes free of my grip.

My heart speeds up, and the heat rises in my cheeks. “There’s a way for me to know where you are, at all times.”
Let me, let me, let me. Listen to me, to what I’m asking without asking.

“No.” The third eyelids snap closed, and I am left staring at the mucous-white skin, wet and raw.

“Please listen–” My courage spikes, driving me to admit my reasonings. This is just a cover, I want to tell him. I’m really asking this for me, not for Isidro. But I don’t get the chance to explain myself, perhaps because I never wanted to. I let it slip away, and my regret is shot through with relief. Let him think me cold and hard, it’s safer that way.

“There’s something wrong with you,” Jannik says, very calmly, and still not looking at me. “You trap us in this farce of a marriage so that you can escape Pelimburg, you tie me to your side, tell me my leash is as long I want, only it never is.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I stay at your side, and you kick me away,” he continues as if my interruption did not exist, “I stray, and you drag me back to heel. You pull me this way and that, and you use me, Felicita. But let’s get one thing settled between us now. I am not your fucking house dog.” The third eyelids peel back, and I am left looking into indigo so deep it hides everything.

“You’re not listening.”

“Neither are you.”

Whatever remaining desire that was in my system is replaced by anger. Anger that is reflected a thousandfold in Jannik’s hunched shoulders. We sit side by side, curled in on ourselves. I would have thought that this was exactly what he wanted. “Why are you turning this down now?”

“You have no idea what it is you’re suggesting. You’ve understood nothing I’ve ever said.”

“Everything you’ve told me has been evasive at best.” I cross my arms over my front, and try press away the strange ache behind my breastbone. “We – exchange – blood, and I know where you are, I can sense your physical condition. It will work in our favour, and we can use it to rescue Isidro. Isn’t that what you want?”

“It’s also fucking permanent.”

That, I hadn’t realized. Things Harun and Jannik said make more sense now, but I do not want to believe it. I cannot. “It’s – what – but, Dash?” I frown, hug myself tighter. Whatever bond was between them, it ended when he died, that much I know.

“We hadn’t.”

“Hadn’t what?”

“Hadn’t finished it.” He smiles emptily, and stares at the far wall. “The one thing I should really thank my mother for, I suppose. Making sure that I didn’t let myself get too attached to him. That I fed from others, and never completed the bond. I could feel a little of what he went through, you’re right, but he would not have felt the same.” The smile falters. “We would need more than that for you to be able to know where I am, to have any real clarity, don’t you see?”

“How much more?” Pain prickles my nerves. Jannik’s magic isn’t its usual feather-touch. It ant-marches across my skin, biting me. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he mutters, and takes a deep breath; he’s not looking at my face, instead he’s focusing on the crimson silk of my dress, pushed up around my knees. The stinging magic fades, leaving me itchy and on edge. “I don’t think you know what you’re asking,” he says, finally. “Come back here.”

I let myself be guided into place again, straddling him. But it feels stupidly awkward now, like we’re trying to capture something we’ve already lost. “So explain to me.”

He’s quiet. Then I feel his fingers and thumbs on my bare knees, stroking tiny circles against the skin. I don’t stop him, but I relax a little, although I’m not sure why. The fatcandle sputters out, and we are left in a protective wrapping of shadows.

When he starts talking, his voice is very low, so soft I strain to hear him properly. “A bond between bloodlines is more than a marriage contract. It’s a binding of lives. We will start off by knowing little things, like where the other is at any given moment, and slowly, that builds. We become aware of moods, of pains, and fears.” He stops, laughs bitterly, “Each other’s happiness.”

It doesn’t sound as terrible as he seems to think it is. A little invasive.

“And then you’ll realize you don’t know whose thoughts are whose. Only, by that time, you’re happy in your symbiosis; you can’t imagine a world, a life, without your partner. And then one day one of us will die.”

I swallow around the sand in my throat.

“Do you have any idea what happens when half of your mind dies?”

“You’re making this up,” I say when I find my voice. Even though I knew, or had guessed to just how bad it could get.

He shakes his head.

I lean forward and rest my forehead against his, and step off a cliff higher than Pelim’s Leap. “I don’t care,” I whisper, and it is a confession so long in coming that it pinches my chest, a spasm of pain and fear and terrible longing. The truth hurts, I realize with a dispassionate clarity. Especially a truth I’ve tried to tear out of my heart every time I was reminded it was there. A truth I could never face, could only ever view side-long, briefly.

It’s Jannik’s magic that answers, it mirrors his fingers, stroking against me, rippling under the layers of petticoats and silks, touching my skin with the soothing coolness of a breeze in the middle of the summer heat waves.

I pull myself closer against him, letting my breast rest against his. His heart is beating fast. Like mine, but the fear is gone. His arms come up and wrap around me, holding me tight. I relax, and drop my head against his shoulder.

“If you do this,” he says, after we have sat like this for many minutes. “I want you to tell me that you understand that there’s no going back from it.”

“Yes.”

“So say it,” he says, his breath huffing against my hair, tickling my ear.

“Pelim Jannik, I understand that if we do this, we will be permanently bound to each other emotionally and mentally, and that no amount of wishing will make it go away, no matter what I say. Is that good enough for you?”