But Perceval is Exalt, Rien almost said, and bit her tongue just in time. She could already imagine the dexterity with which Mallory's arched dark eyebrows would rise, and the answer that didn't need saying.
The funny thing was, the trees rustled when Mallory hesitated, though there was no breeze. Odd; the holde seemed large enough for convection currents, and the temperature drop should provoke circulation. But then, it was a strange wood, carefully managed, quiet and open and full of light. Rien dusted a fallen peach-petal off her cheek. Many of the trees, she thought, were ancient, their age-weakened branches supported by posts and strapping. 'This is one of the old Heavens.'
'The first,' Mallory agreed, unless it was a correction. Needles and tubes and whatever they had been connected to vanished into the ubiquitous pack, which rested beside the guitar for the time being. 'Do you like the trees?'
'They're beautiful. You care for them?'
'There's only me,' Mallory answered. Which made Rien wonder about Gavin. But perhaps as a colony construct, he didn't count as company by Mallory's standards. 'They're a library.'
'A library?' Rien tilted her chin up again, gazing at the whispering branches. 'An archive, you mean? A library of trees?'
'A library of trees.' Mallory looked up as well. 'But we've lost the index. Here—'
The necromancer stood and stepped away, feet indenting the loam. It was a tiptoe reach to bring down an apricot, soft and fuzzy and not much bigger than Mallory's thumb. When Rien put out her hand and Mallory laid it there, the brush of fingertips against the hollow of her palm made her stomach drop.
Eyes on Mallory's, Rien put the still-warm, velour-skinned fruit in her mouth and sucked the flesh from the stone. It was sweet, sharp with overripeness, yet bland and a little gritty, not as juicy as she had thought it might be. She spat the stone into her palm, chewed the pulp, and swallowed.
A whirl of music, a human voice, a shivering crescendo of drums and electric guitar. Rien sat transfixed by the music, old and alien and like nothing she'd heard before. She felt her symbiont accepting the new information, integrating it. Making it part of her flesh and her bone. It immersed and surrounded her, but even as she heard it performed, she sensed it as a gestalt, knew the notes and the chords. She could have played it, if her hands were sufficiently trained to the task. She could have sung it, if her voice were adequate. She could have rearranged it, resurrected it, reinvented it, if she had been a composer.
A song, and she'd swallowed it.
She found her way back, eventually. Her eyes stung with the beauty. A warm hand rested on Rien's nape. It was comforting, and it sent a shiver down between her shoulders. She swallowed and licked salt from her lip and tried to think what to say.
'Do you live here alone?'
'All alone,' Mallory said, and kissed Rien on the mouth, lightly, full of questions.
'I don't like men,' Rien said, though she could not look away for a second from Mallory's eyes—blacker in the half-light than Rien remembered them from sun—-under the witchy mahogany frizz of bangs.
'How fortunate for me that I'm not one,' Mallory answered, and kissed Rien again.
Rien fancied herself not uneducated in passion. She was sixteen; she had done her share of groping and kissing and more than kissing, in coffins and behind tapestries and even in beds. She thought she knew how it was done.
She was not prepared for Mallory to pull away before Rien thought the kiss was half finished, quickly nipping Rien's lower lip and then pressing a finger against it. And then it was dark eyes, brown and transparent as coffee, with green and amber flecks swimming under the surface—and Mallory's breath across her mouth.
'Wait,' the necromancer said, and kissed her around that silencing finger. 'Gently, Rien. It's not about getting it over with as fast as possible, my sweet.'
Rien nodded, to show she understood, then kissed Mallory's fingertip before she drew back. 'Before we ... um. Is there someplace I could pee? I was asleep a long time, and ...' she gestured to the IV site in her arm, nothing but a red pinprick now.
'Pick a bush,' Mallory said, and dug through the pack to find a hand spade and toilet paper.
Rien thought she could figure out what she was in-tended to do with both, and absented herself briefly to heed nature's call. When she returned, she found Mallory shaking out the pallet and folding the blankets into a neat rectangular pad. After divesting herself, Rien knelt and reached for Mallory's hand. They kissed again, and this time, she was softer, and tried to match Mallory's pace.
As if in slow motion, Mallory lay back on the pallet, and drew Rien over. Rien pressed close, parting Mallory's thighs with her knee, turning her head and leaning a little aside so their breasts could nest together. Mallory made a noise into her mouth, and their tongues were warm and sweet together until, panting, they broke apart.
'You're
'You're fierce,' Mallory replied, and fingers in Rien's hair pulled her down again.
And Mallory was right. Rien would have hurried it, left to her own devices, raced through, eager to know everything all at once. Instead, they kissed in the shadows, and Mallory's fingers found Rien's collarbone, and Rien's mouth found Mallory's throat, the little softness beneath the chin and the ringed hardness of the larynx. And then Mallory slid influential hands across Rien's shoulders, and the next Rien knew, she was on her back, the dirty tank top nuzzled upward and her dirty belly caressed. She stroked Mallory's hair, as she'd wanted to, felt it fuzzy here and ringlets there, full of tangles. She pressed down her hands; the bones of Mallory's skull were under it.
And Mallory's hands were on her breasts, and she had to let go her grip and lift her arms as the necromancer pulled her tank off, and then kissed what there was to kiss. Mallory's erection indented Rien's thigh, and Rien expected to find it distasteful. But Mallory smelled right, and tasted right, and the skin was silk and satin under Rien's hands as she traced the lines of Mallory's spine and shoulder blades and the wiry muscles that defined them.
Mallory's hands skimmed her hip bones, found the edge of her trousers—they were a mess now, ripped in two places, the hem torn ragged at the back—and slipped beneath. Rien stroked the necromancer's hair again. 'You, too,' she said.
And then she met Mallory's eyes over the undulations of her own breasts and belly, and read the question in the necromancer's expression. 'Well,' she said. 'You said you weren't a man. I believe you. Let's see it.'
'All this,' Mallory answered, with a head shake and a crooked smile, 'and she also plays guitar.'
As Mallory knelt, Rien stripped off her own bottoms and kicked them aside. Mallory's trousers involved a belt and snaps; it took a little longer. And when they went down—Rien wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but a perfectly average erect penis wasn't it, not exactly. She'd been with boys—Head always said you couldn't say you didn't like something until you'd tried it—and this wasn't anything she hadn't seen before. Except where a boy would have a scrotum and testicles, Mallory had what looked just like girl parts behind.
'Did you do it that way on purpose?' Rien asked, holding out her hand.
'Of course,' Mallory said. 'If you hate it I can change.'
'Don't be silly,' Rien said, and wrapped her fingers around Mallory's warm bony wrist. 'I don't love you. You shouldn't change yourself for me.'
Mallory bent down and kissed her again, and this time there was no hesitating for clothes or negotiation, except the little sounds of question and permission they made that weren't—quite—words. Awkward, sometimes, and sticky, and Rien kept wishing she'd had a shower. But Mallory didn't seem to care, and by the time Rien pulled Mallory down and covered everything that she could reach with kisses, she was done with caring also.
11 her own salt
