Maren
This portal spits us out into noise.
A pressure behind my eyes, a wrongness in my stomach, and then somewhere else. My ears pop. My vision blurs and clears and blurs again, and the world reassembles itself around us: a stone courtyard, people pushing past on both sides, the noise of a city pressing in from every direction.
Korsmot.
Kovren's hand tightens on mine. His grip is too firm, the tendons standing out across the back of his hand, and when I look up his eyes are moving. The crowd, the exits, the rooftop lines. His shoulders have climbed toward his ears.
“Breathe,” I tell him.
He breathes. His grip loosens. Slightly.
The courtyard feeds into a broad avenue paved with flat river stones worn smooth by decades of cart traffic.
The smell hits before anything else. Cook fires, animal dung, spices I can't identify, the sour tang of too many bodies in too little space.
Korsmot has seen monsters before. People give Kovren space without being asked, bodies angling away, paths curving wider.
He notices. His fingers flex around mine.
The central market is enormous, open-air stalls sprawling in every direction. At the far end, a complex of stone buildings rises above everything else. Old stone, dark with weather and age.
The Bride Market.
I stop walking and look at it.
I'd imagined something squalid. Livestock pens. Instead, the complex is orderly, almost institutional. People flow in and out of the doors — men, women, things that are neither — and the traffic has the feel of routine.
A woman exits the main building with a creature beside her, tall and strange, too many joints in his fingers. She's holding his arm. Not being held. Holding. Her chin is up and her stride is certain.
We register. A bored clerk, a thick ledger, Kovren's pouch on the counter. The clerk's handwriting gets neater when he counts the gold.
Number forty-seven. Tomorrow afternoon, platform three. The binding stone ceremony, paid for and scheduled.
“Where is the stone?” I ask. “Can I see it today?”
The clerk blinks. “Gallery's open for the fourth bell ceremony. Around the side of the temple. Follow the signs.”
Outside, Kovren stays close behind me. “You want to see the stone.”
“I want to know what I'm standing in front of tomorrow.”
He doesn't argue.
The temple is the easternmost building of the complex, set apart by a narrow courtyard.
The architecture is different here. Older.
The stone is darker and smoother, worn by hands and weather until the surface has a sheen to it.
No columns, no ornamentation. Just a heavy door and walls so thick they must go three feet deep.
The gallery entrance is a narrow staircase on the side. We climb. Kovren has to turn sideways and duck, his shoulders scraping the walls regardless. At the top, a balcony overlooks the temple floor.
I look down.
The space below is circular, open, lit by high windows that angle the late afternoon sun across bare stone. At the center stands something that is not stone and not metal and not wood.
The binding stone.
It's taller than I expected. Eight feet, maybe nine, a rough column that tapers slightly toward the top. The surface is dark, almost black, but when the light catches it, I see colors moving underneath. Not on the surface. Inside. Deep, shifting, alive in a way that stone should not be.
Two people stand before it. A woman, young, dark-skinned, in a plain dress with her hair braided close to her head. Beside her, a creature I don't recognize. Broad, gray-skinned, with a heavy brow and hands that hang past his knees. He's looking at her. She's looking at the stone.
An officiant stands to the side, speaking words I can't quite hear from the gallery. The ceremony is quiet. No music, no pageantry. Just the two of them and the stone and the officiant's low voice.
The woman reaches out and places her palm against the stone.
Nothing visible happens. No flash, no sound, no dramatic shift. But I see her body change. A tension leaves her shoulders. Her weight settles differently, forward instead of back, and the hand she's not using to touch the stone reaches for the creature beside her and finds his arm.
He puts his hand on the stone beside hers.
I'm watching their faces. The woman's expression goes still, concentrated, and then her mouth softens. Not surprise. Not relief. The expression of someone finding a thing exactly where she expected it to be.
The creature's face is harder to read. His free hand comes up and covers hers on the stone, and they stand like that for a long time. The officiant has stopped speaking. No one in the gallery moves.
When they step back, the woman is smiling. Not a big smile. The small, private kind that isn't meant for an audience. The creature beside her is looking at her with an expression I've seen before. On a different face, in a different room, when he thought I wasn't paying attention.
They walk out together. Her hand stays on his arm.
Kovren hasn't moved. I glance up at him. He's gripping the gallery railing. His knuckles have gone white.
“That's tomorrow,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
He's quiet for a moment. “I'm afraid of what it will find.”
“In you?”
“In me.”
“I'm not,” I say.
He looks down at me.
“We should eat,” I say. “And sleep. Tomorrow is going to be long.”
We find an inn near the market. Small room, too-small bed, the usual problem. The innkeeper charges double when she sees Kovren, which I'm too tired to argue about. He pays without comment. The room has a window overlooking the courtyard, a washstand and a door that locks.
I wash my face and hands. The road dust and portal grime come off in gray streaks.
Behind me, Kovren strips off his travel shirt and shakes it out, and I watch him in the small mirror above the washstand without meaning to.
The scars I stitched in the ditch have healed to rough silver lines across his chest. The muscles underneath shift when he moves, his body doing its work, and I know the feel of that skin under my palms better than I know most things about myself.
He catches me watching. I don't look away.
He folds himself down to the floor by the wall, his back against the stone, knees drawn up. The same position he takes in every room, the one that makes him smallest. It never works. He still fills the space.
We eat bread and dried meat from the pack Mother Sanque sent with us. The bread is good. The meat is salty and tough and I chew it without tasting it because my mind is still in the temple.
The stone. The look on that woman's face when she touched it. The way she reached for the creature beside her, automatic, certain.
“Kovren.”
“Mm.”
“What does the bond feel like? Right now. From your side.”
He's quiet for a while. Chewing. Thinking.
“Your pulse,” he says. “Underneath mine. I've felt it since the ditch. A second rhythm, not quite in sync. When you're close, it's louder. When you touch me, it drowns everything else out.”
“Everything?”
“The rage. The noise. The constant...” He stops. Starts again. “The constant awareness that something is wrong with me. When you touch me, that goes quiet. Not gone. But manageable.”
I think about what Mother Sanque said. The bond is incomplete. Unstable. The quieting will weaken and eventually fail.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “The stone formalizes it. Makes it permanent.”
“If it reads us true.”
“It will.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am certain.”
“Time to sleep,” I tell him. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He almost smiles. I see it in the shift around his eyes, the softening that barely touches his mouth.
We arrange ourselves on the floor. The bed is too narrow and too fragile for him, and I've gotten used to sleeping against his side.
He stretches out with his back to the wall, and I curl into the space he makes for me, my spine against his chest, his arm settling around my waist. His hand rests against my stomach, heavy and warm.
My shirt has ridden up and his palm is on bare skin and the contact hums through both of us, low and constant.
His thumb moves against my stomach. Slow, half-asleep, tracing a line just above my hip bone. I don't think he knows he's doing it.
He could pull me closer. I could let him. But tomorrow the stone reads what we are to each other, and I want to walk into that temple with nothing unfinished between us. I want it to find something clean.
“Tomorrow,” I say, half to myself.
Tomorrow.
I close my eyes.