Chapter 2 #3
“I should go back. Thank you. Truly. Thank you for—for whatever this is—for the rink, for whatever you did for the rink, I don’t understand any of it and I don’t need to, I’m grateful, I really am.
But I’m not—I’m not your fated mate. I’m sorry.
I think you’ve—I think the Veil made a mistake.
I’m not the woman you saw skate. I’m not her anymore.
I haven’t been her in nine years. You’re looking at a ghost, my Lord, you really are. I should go.”
The gold in his eyes did not move.
“There is one way,” he said, “to test your theory.”
The voice came low, patient, unhurried, the same as before, but the gold in his eyes had done a thing—the rings had stopped moving for half a beat, and then had started again at a slower speed, like a clock recalibrating.
“If you are not my fated mate,” he said, “then the bond between us will not answer. If the Veil has made an error, the error will reveal itself, immediately, and I will open the door for you and you will go home to Spokane Valley, and you will never see me again, and I will remember your face in private.”
He raised his right hand.
It was steady. The fingers were long. The palm was open and turned toward me, how a person offers a palm to a horse they want to come near.
“There is a bond,” he said. “Between us. The Rite has set it, the Veil has confirmed it, and I believe—I am not asking you to believe, I am telling you that I believe—that it will activate the moment we touch. Hand to hand. Skin to skin. If it does not, you are right, and I am wrong, and I will release you with my whole apology. If it does, you will know. You will know in your body before your mind has caught up. You will not have to take my word for it.”
He waited.
He let the hand stay there.
The cold under my sternum and the heat over it met in the middle and made something I did not have a word for.
What if he was right?
What if I touched him and it answered? What if there was a bond? What if I was, in fact, the woman the Veil had opened for, and the nine years I had spent making myself the size of a coat hook in a rink lobby had been—
I could not finish the thought.
I could not let myself finish it.
“Maria.”
My name. He said it for the first time.
“Do you want to find out?”
His eyes held mine.
“Do you still have enough pride left,” he said, “to find out who you really are?”
I tried to summon her.
I tried to find the girl. The girl who had lifted her chin a quarter-inch on the long opening glide in Tokyo.
I could not find her.
She was there. I could feel the heat of her, the shape of where she had been. But the door was closed and the door had been closed for nine years and my hand on the handle was somebody else’s hand, and I could not, could not, could not open it.
I shook my head.
“I can’t.”
The words came out cracked.
“I’m sorry, my Lord. I can’t. I can’t do it. I have to go.”
I turned.
I turned on the marble in my doubled white trainers, away from him, away from the offered hand, back the way I had come, toward the place in the colonnade where there had to be a way out, where the Veil had to still be, where Spokane Valley was on the other side, where the rink was, where Saturday morning would come around again in six days and Theo would put the wrong boot on the wrong foot and I would crouch down and fix it and that was the woman I was, that was who I was, that was—
My right blade went on the wrong edge.
That is the only way I can describe it.
There was no blade. I was in trainers. There was no ice.
I was on cold gold-veined marble. But my body did the thing it had done in Tokyo.
The right foot went out from under me on an edge that was not there.
The shoulder opened a quarter-turn too early.
The crowd held its breath. There were no spectators in the hall and the hall held its breath anyway.
I felt the air over the top of the jump that I was not doing. I felt the cold. I felt the wrong edge.
I felt the right knee go in instead of out.
I went down.
I went down hard. The marble met my right hip and the right knee folded under me at the angle it had folded at when I was twenty-one in a black dress with silver beading at the right shoulder, and the small popcorn click that had been the soundtrack of nine years of standing up came back as something much louder, and the pain came up the side of my leg into my hip and into my back, and I made a sound out of my mouth that I had not made in nine years.
I curled forward over the bad leg.
The cougar on my fleece bent in the middle.
My hair came loose at the temple where the wind had moved it earlier, and a piece of it fell across my eye, and there was wet on my face, and I had not known I was crying until the wet got to my mouth.
He was there.
I had not heard him move.
He had crossed the three paces in absolute silence and he was, when I lifted my head, kneeling.
On one knee. On the cold gold-veined marble in his white and his gold and his deep wine red, with the fabric pooling around him, and his right hand was extended, palm up, open, level with my face.
The dark iron ring on it caught no light at all.
He did not say anything.
He just held the hand there.
I looked at the hand.
I looked at his face.
The gold in his eyes was not measuring me. The gold in his eyes was waiting. There was no pity in it. There was no triumph in it. There was a thing I did not have a word for, the same thing he had held when he had said I have been waiting for you, only quieter, deeper, more patient.
I put my hand in his.
The hall held its breath.
The bond answered.
It answered like fire answering a struck match.
It came up my arm. It came up the inside of my wrist where the pulse lives, and it came up the inside of my elbow, and it came across my shoulder and into my chest, and where the cold tenant had been living under my sternum for nine years it lit the room, it lit the whole room, it lit every dark corner of every hallway in the house that I had been the size of a coat hook in, and the heat of it was not the heat of damage.
The heat of it was the heat of something that had been banked for nine years finally getting air.
I saw her.
I saw her with my eyes open, in the gold of his eyes, in the marble of the hall, behind the wet on my face.
The black dress with the silver beading at the right shoulder.
The hair down. The chin a quarter-inch up.
The long clean opening glide. The bright forward-tilt of the body in the moment before the take-off.
The take-off itself. The clean landing. The clean one.
The one that had never happened. The one that was, suddenly, very clearly, going to.
I saw who I could be.
The fire faded.
It did not go. It banked. It settled. It found the place under the sternum where the cold tenant had been and it sat down in the chair and it crossed its legs and it stayed.
I looked down at my arm.
The skin on the inside of my wrist was marked.
Fine lines. Gold. Moving. The same slow living gold that ran through the veins of the marble all around us, threading down the inside of my forearm in long languid loops. They went up under the sleeve of my hoodie. I did not have to lift the sleeve to know they kept going.
Sigils.
I had no idea what they said. I knew that they were a language, and that the language was old, and that it was naming me.
I lifted my eyes to his.
He was still on one knee. He had not moved.
The face I had been looking at—the magnificent, the perfect, the courtly, the unflinching—had changed.
It had cracked.
Love. I do not know what else to call it. Love, raw, unpracticed, ancient and new at once, on the face of a being who had not been taught how to wear it and did not, in that moment, care.
His fingers tightened around mine.
“Welcome home,” he said.