He didn’t move.

I’d thought, in all those months of imagining it, that if this moment ever came, he’d sweep me up. Carry me to bed in one arm the way I’d seen him carry iron bars across the forge yard. Instead he sat on my hearth with his fists on his thighs and stared at me like a man who’d been handed something he was terrified of dropping.

“Thrask,” I said.

“I’m trying,” he said hoarsely, “to remember how to breathe.”

I laughed, and that broke something. He reached out — slowly, so slowly — and laid one huge hand against my bare belly, just above the rune.

It covered nearly all of me. Hip to hip. His thumb rested at my navel and his little finger brushed the top of the glowing spiral, and the heat of his palm sank straight down through my skin to meet the warmth the working had left there.

He looked at his hand on me. At how small I was beneath it.

The sound he made went straight through me.

“Gods,” he breathed. “Look at you. Look at how small you are.”

The rune flared under his hand.

We both saw it. A brief, bright pulse of red-gold, like a coal breathed on. I felt it, too — a sudden deep clench of heat low in my belly, a softening, an opening. My breath caught.

Thrask’s eyes snapped to my face. “What was that?”

“The binding,” I said. My voice came out unsteady. “It’s tied to the body’s wanting. When I want, it… works harder.”

He was very still.

“So it glows,” he said slowly, “when you want me.”

My face flamed. “That’s— broadly— yes.”

He looked down at the rune, still pulsing softly under his palm. Then back up at me. Something dawned in his face, slow and astonished and fierce.

Then he picked me up.

One arm. Exactly the way I’d imagined. He rose from the hearth with me cradled against his chest like I weighed nothing, ducked under the beam without hitting it — the first time in ten years — and carried me through to my bedroom in three strides.

He laid me down on my bed. It creaked ominously as he knelt over me.

“If it breaks,” I said, “you’re building me a new one.”

“I’ll build you ten.”

He undressed me. His great hands were clumsy with the laces at the neck of my shift, so I helped. Then he drew it up over my head, and that was all there was. And then I was lying naked on my quilt in the lamplight with the rune glowing low on my belly, and the biggest man in three counties was kneeling over me, staring.

He touched me as though he’d been starving for five years. Because he had been.

His hands went everywhere. My breasts, which he cupped one in each palm, and which disappeared in them. My waist, which he spanned with both hands, fingertips meeting at my spine. My round belly and my wide soft hips and the plump insides of my thighs. He kept murmuring as he touched me — so small, so soft, look at you, Maren, look at you — in a low rough voice I’d never heard from him. And every word made the rune pulse brighter.

When he bent his head and kissed me, his tusks pressed gently against my cheeks, and he tasted of ale and woodsmoke and him.

Then he kissed his way down my body, and settled his broad shoulders between my thighs, and put his mouth on me.

I came the first time with my fists in his braids, crying out at the ceiling. He didn’t stop. He held my hips down with one hand — one hand, for both of them — and kept going, slow and patient and devastating, until I came again, and the rune blazed so bright it lit the whole room.

When he finally lifted his head, I was shaking. Soft and slick and open, and the deep, glowing heat in my belly had grown into an ache.

“Now,” I said. “Thrask. Please.”

He hesitated. Even then.

“The word,” he said. “Say it to me first. So I know you’ll use it.”

“Beam.”

“Again.”

“Beam. I’ll say it if I need to. I promise. Thrask, please.”

He unlaced his breeches.

I’d heard. Of course I’d heard. Three women at my back door, red-eyed and sore. I’d imagined. But imagining and seeing were not the same thing, and when he knelt up over me in the lamplight I understood, all at once, exactly why none of them had managed.

He was big. Big like the rest of him. Thick and long and dark green-grey, heavy between his thighs, and so far beyond anything a woman my size had any business taking that a small, sane part of me went quiet with dread.

The rest of me went molten.

The rune flared so bright that Thrask flinched.

“Maren—”

“I know.” I reached for him. “I know. Come here.”

He tried. Gods, he tried. He braced himself over me on one forearm and tried to settle between my thighs, and it was hopeless almost at once. He was too broad. I couldn’t get my knees wide enough to cradle his hips, and when he bent to reach me his whole body folded at an angle that made him grunt and me squeak. I wasn’t flexible enough. He wasn’t anything enough. Within a minute, my knee was in his ribs and his tusk was tangled in my hair.

“This,” Thrask said through gritted teeth, “is not going to work.”

I started to laugh. “We’re too—”

“Yes.” He was laughing too, breathless. Then he stopped, and his eyes went dark. “Turn over.”

He didn’t wait for me to do it. One hand on my hip, and he flipped me like I weighed nothing — onto my front, then up onto my knees, my cheek pressed to the quilt. His palm settled on the small of my back and pressed my spine into a deep curve. His other hand spanned my hip, lifted, and angled me exactly where he wanted me.

He was so much bigger than me that he could hold both my hips between one thumb and his spread fingers.

“Gods,” he breathed behind me. “Look at you. Look how small you are.”

The rune blazed beneath me, throwing red-gold light across the quilt.

Then he pressed against me. And pushed.

I gasped into the pillow.

It was a lot. Gods, it was a lot. The first press of him was blunt and broad and impossibly hot, and for one breathless heartbeat my body simply refused — a tight, startled resistance, the same wall every one of those poor women must have hit. Then the rune woke. I felt it flare low in my belly like a coal bursting into flame, and a slow, molten warmth poured down from it, through my womb, through every soft and secret place below. My body gave. Not torn. Not forced. Softened, the way honey softens in a warm hand, opening around the thick head of him and drawing him in. The stretch was enormous — a deep, burning, aching fullness that made my toes curl and my breath stutter out of me in little gasps. It burned bright and deep, like the first swallow of strong spirits. But it didn’t hurt.

Not even a little.

“Maren.” His voice was shredded. “Tell me. Talk to me.”

“It doesn’t hurt.” My eyes were wet. “Thrask, it doesn’t hurt. More. Please.”

He gave me more.

Slowly. So slowly. Inch by inch, his hand on my back, his breathing ragged above me. Every inch was a new, astonishing fullness. I felt him in places I’d never felt anything — pressing deep and deeper, filling me past where I thought I ended, until there wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t stretched around him. Every time he pushed further, the rune pulsed, and that molten warmth rushed down again, and my body softened and opened to take more. It felt like being unfolded from the inside. I moaned into the quilt without meaning to, long and low, and every time I did, he shuddered. He went further than I’d thought possible. Then further. Then further still, until he was so deep I could feel him nudging somewhere low and tender inside that made my whole body jolt and clench, and a high, helpless sound tore out of my throat.

He reached beneath me. Spread his great hand flat across my belly, over the glowing rune. His palm was hot and rough with forge-calluses, and it pressed me back against him, and I felt myself caught between them — his hand outside, him inside — so full and so held that my eyes stung. Then he went utterly still, and I knew he felt it too. The faint, unmistakable shape of himself, moving inside me, rising under his own palm.

The sound he made was barely human.

“I’m—” He couldn’t seem to finish. “Maren. I can feel— You’re—”

He pushed once more. And then his hips were flush against me. All of him. Every last inch.

For the first time in his life.

He folded down over my back and buried his face in my neck and shook. I reached back blindly and found his braids, and held on, and felt him trembling inside me while he made broken, helpless sounds against my throat.

“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I’ve got you. I’ve got all of you.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said. Like he couldn’t believe it. “You’re not hurting.”

“I’m not hurting.”

“You’re so small.” His hand pressed harder against my belly, over the rune, over the place where we could both feel him. “And you’ve got all of me.”

The rune blazed.

Then he began to move.

He was careful at first. Slow, deep, rolling strokes, his hand never leaving my belly, as if he couldn’t bear to stop feeling himself inside me. Every time he drew back, I felt the loss of him like a pull from my very core, an emptiness that made me whimper. Every time he pushed back in, the fullness returned in a slow, overwhelming rush that stole the breath from my lungs. The ridge of him dragged against something inside me with every stroke, and each drag sent sparks racing up my spine and down to my curling toes. But I’d waited five years for this, and so had he, and careful didn’t last. I pushed back against him and begged, and he gave in. He gripped my hips in both hands and took me hard and deep. Every stroke drove into me so completely that I felt it in my belly, in my breasts, in my teeth. Every stroke shoved me forward up the quilt until I was gasping into the pillow, my nipples dragging against the linen, my thighs shaking. The rune burned so bright I could see it through my closed eyelids, and the heat of it had spread now — out through my hips, down my thighs, up into my chest — until my whole body felt like it was glowing.

“Mine,” he was growling, over and over. “Mine. Gods, Maren, mine.”

“Hold on to something,” he said hoarsely.

I grabbed the bedhead with both hands.

He hooked one arm under my hips and lifted.

My knees left the quilt. Then my shins. Then I was hanging from the carved wooden bedhead by my hands, my whole lower body lifted off the bed entirely, held up against him by his arms alone. The wood bit into my palms. My arms trembled. And there was nothing beneath me now but him — nothing holding me but his hands and the thick, deep weight of him inside me. Gravity dragged me down onto him and he lifted me off again, and the angle changed everything. He was deeper than ever. Every time he drew me down, I sank all the way onto him and felt him fill me so completely that I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but hold on. My weight was nothing to him. He held me there and moved me — drawing me up and down the length of him, using me, filling me, my hips caught in his huge hands like I was something made just for him. I’d never felt so small. I’d never felt so wanted. The two things tangled together in my chest until I couldn’t tell them apart.

I screamed. I’m certain the whole village heard. The pleasure didn’t build so much as break over me all at once — a great, hot, crushing wave that started deep where he was buried in me and roared outward through every nerve I had. I clenched around him so hard I felt every inch of him. My vision went white. My fingers locked on the bedhead. My whole body shook and shook in his hands, wave after wave after wave, until I was sobbing his name and couldn’t stop. The rune flared so bright the whole room went red-gold.

He followed me over with a roar, dragging me down onto him one last time and holding me there, buried as deep as he could go. I felt him swell inside me. Then I felt him spill — long, hot pulses, flooding deep, so much of it that I felt the warmth spread through my belly beneath the rune. Every pulse wrung another shudder out of me. The rune flared with each of them, gold and red and gold, until the room was lit like a forge.

The bedhead came away in my hands.

We went down with a crack and a crash and a puff of feathers. For a long moment, we lay tangled in the wreckage of my quilt and my bedframe, him still buried inside me, both of us gasping.

Then Thrask started to laugh. Helpless, booming, shaking laughter. I laughed with him until I cried.

Afterwards, we lay in the ruins of my bed. He’d pulled the quilt over us both and wrapped himself around me so completely that I could barely see past his arm. His hand rested on my belly. On the rune, which still glowed softly in the dark.

He traced it slowly with one fingertip.

“It only glows when you want me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was glowing before I touched you. When I was just looking.”

I didn’t answer.

“Maren.” He tipped my chin up so I had to look at him. “How long have you wanted me?”

I thought about lying. I was a terrible liar.

“Five years,” I said. “Since the winter of the fever. You fell asleep holding my hand, and I sat there and looked at you and thought, oh, no.”

He was silent for a long, long moment.

Then he pressed his forehead to mine and closed his eyes.

“Five years,” he said. “We’re idiots.”

“We are.”

His thumb moved over the rune. “How long does it last? The working.”

I bit my lip.

“The water-ink would have faded by morning,” I said.

He went very still. “But this isn’t water-ink.”

“No.”

“Maren.”

“It’s tattoo-ink,” I admitted. “Witch’s ink. It sinks into the skin. It doesn’t fade.”

He lifted his head and stared at me.

“It’s permanent,” he said.

“It only works for someone I want. The binding’s tied to the wanting.” I made myself meet his eyes. “And I only want you. I have done for five years. So I thought… if it worked tonight, I’d keep it. And if it didn’t, I’d have a very pretty tattoo and a very good reason to stay away from you.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I should have told you,” I said. “Before. I’m sorry.”

Thrask looked at me for a long time. Then he looked down at the rune glowing on my belly. Then back at my face.

“It’s permanent,” he said again, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“And it only works for me.”

“Yes.”

He made a sound I’d never heard from him. Low and rough and wondering. Then he gathered me up into his arms and held me so tightly my ribs creaked.

“Good,” he said into my hair. “Good.”

I laughed into his chest.

“I’ll need a new bed,” I said.

“I’ll make you one.” His hand spread across my belly again, warm and huge and possessive. “Out of iron. With a beam across the top, so you’ll always have something to shout.”

I stopped laughing and looked up at him.

He was grinning. Wide and wicked, his tusks gleaming in the soft gold glow of the rune.

And then he rolled me beneath him in the wreckage of my bed, and gave me plenty of reasons to shout something else entirely.