Hammer & Air Read online

  When I were done, I went outside for a minute—Hammer were asleep by then—and breathed deep and tried to gauge the season by the smell of frost and the color of the leaves.

  It couldn’t be done.

  The sky were the blue of early October, that deep, lazy azure you could fall into if you let yourself, but that weren’t possible. It had been mid November when Hammer had been wounded. It were, earliest, late in the month now.

  I ventured out from the house, with the intention of seeing where the enchanted world ended and the real world began—but I didn’t get far.

  My feet crunched through the dead leaves, and I snapped through maybe half a league of underbrush, before a terrible feeling of unease assailed me like a bucket of cold bathwater. For a moment, I thought I could hear the sea, and then… oh gods of magic, gods of motion… what in the hells of the holy were that?

  It were a hideously sickening motion, as though the ground beneath my feet had been ripped asunder and tossed like a child’s flying disk, me on top of it. My head spun and I fell backward the way I’d come, flailing as I fell and rolling as I landed, and I stayed there, gasping, trying hard not to vomit.

  I fancied myself a scientist; an investigator. But something clearly did not want me to progress beyond that boundary. I could, I thought resolutely. I probably could throw myself across that space with a lunge of pure momentum. And then I remembered Hammer.

  I stood up and brushed myself off and turned my back on that boundary without a single glance. Even then I knew that any course, any course at all that deviated from Hammer, were not a road I wanted to walk.

  When I think about it now, all that is good in my life has come from that squaring of my shoulders and tramping back to the little enchanted cottage that held my gruff, short-spoken companion. It seemed like the most natural course in the world then, and it seems that way now, but it were the beginning of my realization that the language of science does not have a word for the sacrifice of the paths of ambition to achieve a heart’s desire.

  It should. All languages should.

  I tramped back into the cottage, feeling an absurd notion to knock softly on the doorframe before I entered. Shaken by that terrible nauseating magical interlude, I did, the wood warm and giving under my knuckles. I were grateful, and, as Hammer had said, I were respectful. The cottage had wanted us. After feeling the protection it seemed to be giving us from the outside world, I would not offend it for naught under the sky.

  Hammer were awake when I walked in smelling of leaves and crisp grass, but he had not left the bed. I circled the bed with a glass of hot tea (I’d left the pot to boil over the trivet) flavored with rose hips and some honey I’d wished up in the cupboard. (It seemed to respond to the things I wished for Hammer. I’d longed for cream this morning, and there had been no sign of it. I’d wished for honey, since I knew Hammer liked it, and there it were.)

  He watched me coming with wary eyes. “I had a notion you’d try and leave,” he said softly, and I blinked.

  “Weren’t trying to leave,” I told him, tilting my head a little. Had never been no signs that Hammer were witchy. Maybe it were simply the house. “I tested the boundaries of the magic. It told me when I found them, that’s a certainty. But I didn’t want to leave you. Just wanted to know where we were.”

  Hammer’s lips turned up in a sleepy smile. “That’s you, Eirn. Always trying to put a name to something, explain it away. Even I know magic and your science don’t mix.”

  I set the tea down and put my hand to his head. I swallowed hard and blinked back tears. Sweaty, yes, but cool. The fever had broken. His body were sweating out the poison of infection, and that were why he lay so still.

  I swallowed again, and went to give him his tea but my hand shook so badly I couldn’t lift it from the end table. “I wouldn’t leave you,” I said, licking the spilt tea off my hand. Now my voice were shaking too. “I wouldn’t,” I repeated. I had to say something. Oh gods… gods of magic, gods of motion, I had been so afraid.

  Suddenly his hand came up and captured my wrist. I stared at the two hands—Hammer’s were broad and scarred and hard and capable, and mine were nimble and clever and long. Carefully—probably because he were weak and couldn’t move fast—he wove his fingers in with mine and squeezed.

  “Eirn?”

  Reluctantly I looked at him and used the heel of my other hand to clear my tear-scalded eyes. “You scared me ball-less, Hammer. Gods….” I took a deep breath, and then another, and then he gave my hand a tug, and I sank to my knees in front of the bed.

  “No worries,” he muttered. “You wouldn’t leave me, I don’t plan to leave you. Right?”

  I nodded and buried my face into the sheet next to his head and tried to wipe the tears off there. He let go of my hand and turned to his side so he could bury his hand in my hair and stroke my head until my shoulders stopped shaking, and I were still. Eventually, his voice, gruff and weak, penetrated my fog.

  “Come on up and lie next me,” he ordered, and I kicked off my boots and did that while he scooted over. We lay there, face-to-face for a few moments and he raised his thumb to wipe my cheeks.

  “Running were hard,” he murmured. “You were right. This place seems safe. Let’s be safe for a while, right?”

  I nodded. “Right,” I whispered, but my throat were swollen, and my head were clogged, and I couldn’t manage much else.

  “No. Close your eyes. When you wake up, it’ll be lunch time, and you can tell me a story.”

  “You like stories, Hammer?” He’d been apprenticed young, had spent a lot of time in the nearby tavern when I were sitting with the other boys by the fireplace at the orphanage.

  “I do.” He yawned then, the course of his healing taking over us both. “I always wished that book of yours were stories instead of seeds. Thought maybe you’d like me more if you could see me as a prince instead of a blacksmith.”

  I stared at him, the fog and fatigue of relief and emotion muddling me. Still, I managed to say something, this once, to give him something that he needed.

  “I couldn’t like you more if you were golden,” I murmured. “There is not a soul in all the kingdoms that I would rather have by my side than my Hammer. Not even a prince.”

  “I wish I could give you a prince,” Hammer murmured, both of us so drowsy in that snug, enchanted little cottage. “I wish I could give you a prince, so you could know the difference, so you could have a choice.”

  “Prince or parson, Hammer, I’d still choose you.”

  We fell asleep then, side by side, fanning each other’s cheek with every breath. We were young and fond and foolish, and we did not realize then, the risk you take when you speak of wishes and princes in the hearth of an enchanted home.

  Part V

  Gold Light on Sable

  It took Hammer some days to recover, but he let me nurse him, so I didn’t mind. I’d leave him inside sometimes, to go out and collect herbs, to collect edible roots, to make up our stores so we didn’t have to tax the house too greatly when winter finally arrived and the snows set in, but it didn’t matter. All Hammer had to do were mention a food or a taste, a smell or something we’d eaten in times long past, and I’d wish, and it would appear in the cabinet.

  I didn’t tell him about it, but he figured out soon enough when his favorite foods kept appearing at his bedside. And, of course, there were the book.

  We awoke from our nap that first evening, and as Hammer used the bathroom and sponged the sweat from his trembling limbs (a thing he begged me to let him do himself) I went to the kitchen for the rest of the bread and jam.

  I found—along with a baked chicken and a skin of goat’s milk—a hefty tome of fairy stories with a leather binding which was tinted a fantastic color of cobalt blue.

  I pulled out the book first and fondled the gilt-edged hide pages with reverent hands. There were finely plated illustrations, with what looked to be hand-colored details, and the beauty alone of such a book ma
de my eyes burn. But perhaps that were just the day for it, right?

  “Thank you. Oh… gods of motion, gods of magic, thank you. I could not have chosen better for Hammer myself.”

  He’d insisted on coming to eat at the table, and I’d insisted that I bring him a tray for the bed. We settled on him eating from a small table at the hearth, and as I watched him cozy into a big, stuffed leather chair with a throw over his lap, something inside me clicked rightly to place. The cottage might have been enchanted, but maybe part of that were Hammer.

  We sat and ate (silently, because that were how we were raised at the orphanage) and then, when I’d cleared the plates, I showed him the book. His eyes glowed and a child’s eagerness crossed his usually grim mouth.

  “Would you like me to read it?” I asked gently, just to watch him nod with that wonderful innocent happiness. The things I hadn’t known about him—the learning of them were as glorious as the fucking, if truth be told.

  The story I chose that night were about a lass named Snowdrop who fled into a forest and met up with seven little men who gave her safety.

  Hammer listened avidly, but when I were done, he snorted.

  “They must have been poofty as we are,” he said, and I grinned at him.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because otherwise, they would have buggered the poor lass senseless. I think she only pretended to be dead to get away from them!”

  I laughed then. “Well, not all of them were pooft; some of them must have been like you, liking both, otherwise, they wouldn’t have had to put her in the glass box when she didn’t look dead.”

  He laughed back and then rolled his eyes. “Aye, and I don’t think much of her prince. What? He sees her lying there like a statue and thinks that’s a woman he must have? For all he knows, she’s dumb as a potato and has a voice like a poker against a steel plate.”

  I laughed some more, but he grew thoughtful and cast me a glance from under lowered brows. “No,” he said with decision. “It’s a pretty story, but in real life you want someone you can know, good and bad, and who doesn’t make you long to jump on a sailing ship and never return.”

  I returned his thoughtful look with one of my own longing. “Yes,” I said gruffly. “That’s exactly who I want.”

  But he didn’t see my look. “Go ahead and read the next one, Eirn!” he begged, and my smile turned sad as I did what he asked. This one were about a pair of silly lovers, one of whom gets turned into a bird. It were a long story, and we had to mark it in the middle for the next night, because Hammer began to nod off in the middle. We made it to bed and stripped to our small clothes and crawled in. The softness of the mattress and the cleanness of the sheets were still blissful to both of us, and now that Hammer no longer threw off heat like a smith’s forge, I felt free to roll into his body as we had when we were camping in our bedrolls.

  He wrapped his strong arm around my chest and rubbed his cheek against my back and then made a sound of complaint.

  “You left your shirt on.”

  I grunted and stripped it off, throwing it to the end of the bed, and he sighed in contentment as his cheek rubbed skin this time.

  “Eirn?”

  “Yeah?” Hammer would have used the old word, “Aye,” but that weren’t my word.

  “You miss fucking?”

  “Yeah.”

  He yawned and pressed hard into my back, but he were too tired and we both knew it.

  “Tomorrow,” he promised.

  “When you’re better,” I told him, and I took the hand on my chest and kissed it before falling asleep myself.

  It were good we’d decided to settle in for the winter, because by the time Hammer were up and about and ready to venture outside, winter arrived. Unlike the winter in real time, in the forest that near to killed us, this one didn’t announce itself in built up frost and the occasional snow flurry—no. One day, Hammer and I tramped about and found the border of magic around the cottage (if we were careful, and sensitive to the changes in the air, it could be done without the horrible sense of dislocation I’d endured before) and the ground were dry grass, brown leaves and frosted branches.

  The next day, it were three feet of snow.

  Hammer and I cleared the snow out from around the cottage—mostly for something physical to do—and then spent the day inside. The cabinet gave us cocoa, cream, and honey (which neither of us had asked for) and I made us mugs of chocolate, which we drank standing up in the kitchen. Hammer said he could live on that drink if we had to, and when I looked at him to reply, I saw that he still had cream on his lip.

  I grinned then, and caught his hands to hold him still, and then playfully went to lick the cream off his mouth. He watched me move closer with his lips slightly parted and wide sober eyes, and as my tongue touched his skin, the moment went from playful to serious just that quick.

  Our lips met, slow and then savage, and we barely remembered to set our mugs down before we kissed our way to the bedroom, shedding our clothes as we went.

  We were naked, and I were lying on the bed, stretched out below Hammer as he pinned my hands above my head to keep me still so he could own my mouth completely, before it occurred to either of us that we were fucking in the daylight, on a bed.

  It were our first time on a bed.

  We both looked at each other and gasped, and he let go of my hands and pushed himself up on his elbows and lowered himself at the hips, and he were suddenly there, on top of me, looking at me quietly while our aching cocks throbbed against each other in time.

  There were something in his eyes then, something like the eagerness he’d had when I read him fairy tales, or that look I’d seen, way back in summer, when he’d thrust his hand down my pants and I’d said, “Not her, idiot! You!”

  It were happiness, not just to be in bed, but to be skin-to-skin with me.

  I looked at him with nothing less than my soul in my eyes, and he took it. His next kiss weren’t hard or savage. It were firm and tender, and his hands framed my face and soothed down my neck and my shoulders.

  He would have moved his mouth then, to follow those hard, scarred hands, but I didn’t want the kiss to end, and when I protested, he came back to kiss me some more. And some more. And some more.

  Our bodies were quaking with urgency, with the need to fuck and come, but our mouths, our souls, didn’t seem to want to break off contact for that other thing. Our hips ground savagely, and harder, and I kept flexing my arse, craving him inside of me, craving that sweet burn, the shudder of my body as he nailed that thing inside me that made me see stars, craving the fullness of him, crammed into me, making my chest swell with the force of his cock buried inside me to the root of him.

  He grunted and shoved two fingers into my mouth, and I sucked on them, hard. He pulled them out, covered in spit, and slipped them under me. The first one burned, the second one scorched, and then he spread them, and I gasped.

  As I breathed in air, he filled me with his cock, and that were as good. The pleasure… it were excruciating, and it were necessary, and I screamed with it, and shoved myself further on him, before he took over and fucked me hard into the softness at my back.

  And our eyes never left the other, and our lips met skin desperately, yearning for contact, begging for connection, howling for the closeness that didn’t come by fucking alone, but that we had no words for.

  His end were coming; he’d been sick, his arm still gave him some pain, and he couldn’t last long. He went up on his knees, slung my thighs up against his shoulders and supported my arse and my hips with his big, broad hands. “Yank on it,” he growled, and I didn’t even think about disobeying as I found my prick and began to pull.

  My head tilted back at my rough strokes, and my eyes started to close, until he snarled, “Look at me, dammit!” And I snapped to and did.

  He weren’t treating me like I would break. He were fucking me like an equal—damn me, if he weren’t—and it were hard, so hard to keep t
o his eyes as he drove us both to shivering, painful, swollen heights of wanting with every thrust into my arse.

  In the end, he were the one who closed his eyes, who threw his head back and grunted and howled. In the end, there were something so tender in him, so vulnerable, that he had to hide it, and as my own cock spurted and spat come onto my belly, he collapsed forward, not minding the mess, and buried his face into my neck and sobbed breath into the hollow of my ear.

  I wrapped my arms awkwardly around his shoulders and thought to soothe him, but he were trembling so hard that my embrace tightened, and I started to shake in return. We just held there, clenched together, still joined, quivering with the power of the fucking, and of all the things that we didn’t know to say.

  Eventually he muttered, “Stay there,” and rolled away, leaving my body open and weeping with his spend, and covered in my own. I heard sounds from the washroom. He came back with a cloth, and he cleaned me up with hands that shook, and set the cloth aside and climbed back into the bed with me, although it were still daylight. He pulled the fluffy white cover up around us while I looked at him with wide eyes, and then he lay back and patted his good shoulder. I put my head on it and wrapped my arms around his middle and clung, and he dropped kisses in my hair in the silence.

  That night, we heard a sound at the door.

  I were sitting, reading Hammer another fairy tale, (this one about a horrid little man who liked to kidnap children) and when Hammer looked at me shortly, I held up my hand. It didn’t sound threatening; and I didn’t like the thought of offering violence to a place that had brought us nothing but peace.