Chapter 2
The floor under my feet was not rubber matting anymore.
I looked down.
At first I thought I had stepped onto the ice. A smooth, colorless surface, slightly slippery.
White marble. Polished to a depth I could see into.
Veined with gold, except the gold was not the dead gold of stone—it was moving, slow, as rivers move in aerial footage, threading through the marble in long languid loops that did not behave the way veins of metal behave in any rock I had ever seen.
I was transfixed by it, eyes following the veins. Without thinking, I leaned down, placed a palm to the surface. The marble was cold. Mountain cold.
I lifted my head.
The hall, if hall was the word, opened.
It opened upward into a vault of shimmering gold so high that my eye refused, at first, to climb it.
Columns. White columns veined with the same living gold, each one as wide around as a small car, soaring up and up and up and meeting overhead in arches that knew what they were doing.
The light came from everywhere. There was no source.
The light was just present, like light from a dream.
There were no walls.
That was the second thing I knew, and it took longer than the first. Where walls should have been there were only colonnades, and beyond the colonnades there was sky—a sky going from a low bronze at the horizon up through a long slow lavender and into something deeper at the top of the vault, a color I want to call indigo but the word is wrong, a color I had never experienced before.
Not like this, not with this much vibrance.
Beyond the colonnades, beyond the sky, beyond the columns, was a drop.
I did not have to walk to the edge to know it was a drop.
The wind told me. The wind moved through the hall in long clean unhurried passes, and it smelled of cold water and clean stone and something faintly sweet underneath that I want to say was honey or old paper but was neither.
I knew that smell. I had smelled it half a minute ago, with my hand on the rink glass.
My right ear popped. My left ear popped a beat after.
The wind moved my hair, what wasn’t in the braid, the small flyaways at my temple. It moved the loose paw of the cougar on my fleece.
My shoulders came forward without me asking them to.
I had spent nine years rounding my shoulders in rooms I felt too big for, in rinks and grocery stores and the lobby of my own apartment building, and the muscle memory was so absolute that the magnificent hall around me hit it like a hammer hits a bell.
My weight shifted back. My right hand went into the kangaroo pocket of the hoodie and my left hand came up and crossed my chest and held my right elbow, the small inward-folding posture I had developed in the year after Tokyo.
I bit the inside of my left cheek.
It felt like I was back there. Back on the rink. Exposed.
The room, the columns, the gold, the bronze-going-lavender sky, the drop, the wind. It was too beautiful for me. Too wondrous. Like skating, I didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry, I almost said. To the hall. To the columns. To the marble.
I caught the apology in my mouth and bit down on it.
The back of my neck went cool. The cool of it ran down the back of my hoodie, found the place between my shoulder blades where the knot lived, and sat there.
I was not alone.
I had not yet looked up to see who was watching. I had not had the courage to. But the held silence of the hall held someone within it.
The wind moved through.
I made myself look.
At the far end of the hall, very far, on a throne of pale unornamented marble raised on a shallow three-step dais, a man was sitting.
I want to call him a man. The word is wrong. He was more—so much more.
He did not rise.
In fact, he did not move at all. He sat on the pale marble throne with both hands resting on the arms of it. I felt for a moment as though the room itself, the wind, the sky, they had all risen for him. He would not rise for anything.
He was the most perfect, beautiful, wonderful being I had ever seen.
I had seen beautiful men. I had skated with two of them in pairs in juniors, before I’d gone single, and one of them was on a Wheaties box now.
I had seen the Russian men’s singles podium in Sochi in person.
I had seen, once, across a hotel lobby in Vancouver, a film actor whose face had stopped a roomful of figure skaters mid-sentence.
I had a baseline for our species. But this was not our species.
He was tall even seated—long-thighed, broad through the shoulder, the long-limbed sculptural proportions of something a Renaissance master would have spent two years carving and then signed his name to with a shaking hand.
His skin was the color of warm cream marble, shot through with gold.
I do not mean it looked gold like tanned skin looks gold.
His skin was lambent—the cheekbones, the bridge of the nose, the inside of the wrists where his hands rested on the throne—it glowed slightly, as though there were a low patient light somewhere just under it.
His hair was a deep gold, the color of honey held to a candle, falling neatly just past the jaw.
He wore white and gold and the deep red of old wine, fabric cut to perfection, every seam exactly where the seam was supposed to be.
There was a single ring of dark iron on his right hand.
The ring was the only thing on his body that was not luminous, and the contrast was so precise that I had the absurd thought, looking at it, that it was on purpose—that he had put a piece of darkness on himself the way a woman puts a single dark stone in a necklace of pearls, to give the eye somewhere to rest.
His eyes found me across the long floor. They were gold.
Not yellow. Not amber. Gold—the actual color of the metal, with the faint warm patina that real gold takes on when it has been handled, and the irises shifted in fine concentric rings like a coin shifting when you turn it slowly under a lamp.
The pupils were vertical. I noticed it and then I noticed I had not flinched from noticing it, which was its own small surprise, because everything else about me was already flinching.
They found me, and they did not let go.
I had been looked at before.
I had been looked at by judges, by spectators, by other skaters.
I had been looked at by network camera operators with telephoto lenses six feet from my face.
I had been looked at, on the night of the Tokyo free skate, by approximately two million human beings on six continents, and then, in the long quiet aftermath, by approximately a twenty million more, frame by frame.
None of it had prepared me for this.
He was not looking at me to appraise me. He was not measuring me. He was not weighing me. He was not, God help me, comparing me to anyone.
It was a look of recognition.
This was the look of a person who had, somewhere very far away and very long ago, set a place at the table, and now the guest had finally arrived.
My right shoulder twitched.
The wind moved between us, clean and enormous. It had a scent; lilac.
I let him look at me, because there was no other option available to me, and somewhere very far down under the sternum, the place I kept the thing I did not let myself want, that thing—small, ancient, ferocious—woke up and lifted its chin a quarter-inch.
He spoke.
“I have been waiting for you.”
The voice came from somewhere deep in his chest. Somewhere low and old and big. I heard it across forty feet of marble as clearly as if he had said it three inches from my ear. The hall did something with his voice. The hall ushered the voice to me. The hall was on his side.
He rose. Without hurry. Without effort. Without concession.
He was taller than I had estimated and I had not been low on the estimate.
The white-and-gold fabric of him fell into place around him as he stood.
His shoulders were back. His chin was level.
His weight was forward over the balls of his feet, not back into his heels.
He had skater’s posture. He had it perfectly. He had it without trying.
Pride—that’s what he had.
He came down the dais.
One step. Two. Three.
He crossed the marble floor and then stopped three paces away from me.
He was leaving the last distance to me.
I opened my mouth.
“I’m sorry — “
I paused, tried to compose myself, tried to understand what the hell was going on, who the hell he was, why on earth I was feeling like I was about to explode. My body hummed, my brain rattled in my skull.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—I don’t know how I got here, I’m sorry, I’m not—I’m not dressed for—I think there’s been a mistake, I’m so sorry, I’m just a—I’m nobody, really, I’m just a—“
He raised a hand.
One hand. The right hand. The one with the ring on it. He lifted it like a conductor lifting a hand at the beginning of a piece—not high, not hard, just enough—and my mouth, which had been on automatic for nine years, stopped.
It just stopped.
“No.”
He said it very quietly.
“Not sorry. Not from you.”
He let that sit.
The gold of his eyes did not leave my face.
“Never from you.”
Never.
He spoke again.
“You have been brought across the Veil.” He said it as though I should understand it, as though it was impossible to believe that anyone wouldn’t recognise the meaning behind the words.
“The Rite of Ascension has chosen you. You are my fated mate. I am Pride, the Lord of the High Citadel, the third of the seven sons of the Demon King, presumptive heir to the Obsidian Throne.”
I heard about half of it.
The mouth was making sentences and the sentences were going past me like water streaming past rock—they got around me, they touched me at the edges, and they did not, on the whole, get in. Fated mate. Veil. Rite. Ascension. Lord. High Citadel. Demon King. Obsidian Throne.
Pride. He was Pride? A demon lord?
Two of the other words got in, too.
Fated. Mate.