Chapter 3
White silk overhead, gathered to a point and falling open at the four corners of a bed I had no memory of falling asleep in.
White silk at the windows, moving in a wind that smelled of cold water and clean stone.
White linen against my skin, where my fleece and my leggings and my doubled white trainers had, at some point in the night, been replaced with a long pale shift that fell to my ankles and, I noticed with the small distant attention of a body still half asleep, had no seams I could find.
The gold on my wrist was warm.
The sigils had not faded. They traced long languid loops up the inside of my forearm and disappeared under the loose sleeve of the shift. Warm to the touch and warm from the inside both.
I sat up.
The chamber was the size of my entire apartment in Spokane Valley and then some. Pale marble floor. Pale stone walls hung with more of the white silk. A low table with a pitcher of water on it, beaded with cold. A long mirror, a screen of cut stone in a frame of pale gold.
I pressed my marked wrist to my chest. The bond gave a low warm tone under the sternum, then went still.
There was a door to my right, a tall arch of pale gold, with the white silk pulled back on either side and tied with a length of dark wine-red cord, and beyond it was light—bronze going to lavender at the edges, the same impossible morning sky I had seen through the colonnade last night, and the long unbroken line of a marble shelf jutting out over a drop I could not see the bottom of.
I got up.
The shift moved against me as I moved, cool, and comfortable. I had never worn anything quite like it.
I crossed the marble to the door. The terrace opened in front of me.
A colonnaded shelf of the same gold-veined white marble, the columns shorter here, more intimate, and beyond the columns, nothing — sky going from a deep warm bronze at the low horizon up through long bands of rose and lavender.
Far below, very far, the suggestion of land.
Other realms, I thought. The word came without my asking. Other domains. Other brothers.
In the middle of the terrace, a low table had been set for two.
White cloth. Pale gold plates. A shallow bowl piled with white peaches, the skins blushed at the cleft. A dark stoppered jar. A small loaf of bread, torn open at one end. A pitcher of something cold. Two cups. Two chairs.
Pride was in one of them.
He rose when I stepped onto the terrace. The same fluid effortless lifting of the body I had watched him do on the dais last night, the white-and-gold fabric falling perfectly around him as he came to his full height.
He stayed exactly where he was, behind his chair, one hand resting along the back of it, and he looked at me.
He looked at the shift, and the bare feet, and the marked wrist held against my chest, and the loose hair at my temple.
His eyes gleamed with the same recognition he had held on me last night across forty feet of marble.
The hall has set a place. The guest is here.
“Good morning, precious one.”
The voice was quiet. The terrace carried it to me, as the hall had.
“Good morning,” I said.
I said it small. I was not entirely sure my voice was going to come out. It did.
He gestured to the other chair.
“Will you sit?”
I crossed the marble to the chair and I sat. He waited until I had sat. Then he sat.
He poured my water without his fingers touching mine on the cup.
He turned the bowl of peaches so the best of them was nearest to me, and his hand did not graze my wrist. He tore the bread, set the larger half on my plate, and drew his own hand back across the white cloth and folded both of his hands in his lap.
“Eat,” he said.
I picked up the peach.
It was cold from the pitcher’s shadow, and it gave under my thumb like something living, and the perfume of it came up and I felt the bond on my wrist go warm again, low, in answer to a thing that had nothing to do with the peach. I bit. The juice ran. He watched me.
I was suddenly extremely aware of my mouth.
I set the peach down.
“You’re not touching me.”
I said it before I had decided to. I said it to the white cloth, not to him, because I was not going to be able to say it to his face. The heat had come into my face again and the heat in my face had nothing to do with the morning.
“No,” he said. Quiet. “I am not.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to choose. You have to feel worthy of my touch.”
It was so absurd I almost laughed. “What if I never feel worthy?”
“Then I will wait,” he replied, simply. “I have waited a very long age for you, Maria. I can wait longer. I will wait as long as it takes to complete the bond.”
I bit my lip. “What does it mean?” I asked. “To—complete it? The bond.”
A beat passed.
“It makes you mine.”
“Wholly. And forever. There is no undoing of it once it is done. Your soul to my soul. Your body to my body. Your life—for you will cease to be mortal, and that is a thing we will speak of later. There would be no end of you that was not also an end of me.”
I stared at him.
I would become immortal?
“I hope you will give yourself to me. I want for it with all my being. But if you do not give it, I will still wake every morning of the age remaining to me grateful that the Veil opened to you, and that I sat across a table from you on the Dawnless Terrace, and watched you eat a peach.”
The bond, on my wrist, went very warm.
I picked the peach back up.
I could not look at him. I ate.
Atone moved through the citadel.
It was a low sound, not loud, the sort of sound a struck bowl makes. It moved through the marble under my bare feet and through the columns at my left and through the chair I was sitting in, and it set the cold water in the pitcher rippling.
Pride went still.
I watched it happen. The courtly warmth that had been in his face—the small soft thing at the corners of his eyes when he had told me eat, precious one—vanished.
His eyes did not change. His mouth did not change.
The set of the shoulders changed by a fraction.
I felt something beat through him through the bond.
He rose.
“Maria.”
The voice was the formal one. The one from the dais.
“Will you walk with me into the hall.” He stepped back from his chair and waited for me to rise, and when I rose he turned, three-quarters, and gestured me toward the arched door.
I went.
We crossed the chamber. We crossed a passage I had not seen last night, marble going to deeper marble, the gold veins under our feet running quicker, all of them converging on the high hall. The tone moved through again. Quieter this time. A second strike on the same bowl.
He stopped at the high arched door of the hall.
“Stay close,” he said.
It was the first time he had spoken since the terrace.
“To my left. Half a pace behind. If he speaks to you, you do not have to answer. If you wish to answer, answer. If you wish to leave the chamber, you will say to me I am tired, and I will hear it, and you will be returned to your chamber within a quarter-turn of an hour. Do you understand me, precious one.”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.”
The two words struck my chest with the tone’s force. There was no time to do anything with them. He had already turned and was crossing into the hall.
The hall was not as I had left it last night.
Last night the colonnades had been open to the lavender sky and the wind had moved through them clean.
This morning the wind was gone. The light had dimmed by a fraction.
The columns stood in their soaring rows and the marble ran with gold and the throne sat empty on the dais at the far end, and in the middle of the long floor, alone, hands folded loosely in front of him, a man was waiting.
Not a man. A demon.
He was tall. Not as tall as Pride, but tall.
He was lean—the lean of a person who has decided, on principle, not to take up the room their body is allowed to take up.
Pale skin. Not the luminous cream-marble of Pride; matte, faintly cool, the pale of something kept out of the sun.
Dark hair, neat, cut close to the skull.
He wore a long unornamented coat of a charcoal so deep it ate the light around it, and underneath the coat a high-collared shirt of pale silver-grey, and at his throat a single small ornament of dark stone on a thin chain. No gold on him anywhere. No color.
His eyes lifted as we came in.
They were pale. Pale and flat and the precise color of nothing in particular — a grey-blue, or a green-grey, like shallow water refusing to commit to a hue. Before they reached us, they surveyed the hall with the cool appraisal of a man pricing furniture at an estate sale.
Beside me, Pride had become a different being.
Not warmer. Not colder. More himself. He had drawn his magnificence around him like a cloak. The fabric of him fell exactly. His chin was a quarter-inch up.
“Brother.”
Pride said it first. He let it carry across the floor with the easy unconcern of a host who has not summoned the visitor and is not, on the whole, pleased.
“Brother,” the other one said back. His voice was not what I had expected. Quiet. Almost gentle. The voice of a man who had spent a long time learning to make himself easy to be near.
“You felt the tone, then.”
“The citadel announced you,” Pride said.
“And so politely. Mine clatters.” The thin smile was thinner than the voice. “You always did have the better staff. I’d love to take some off your hands.”
“Why are you here, Envy?”
The hair on the back of my neck stood. Envy looked, mildly, around the hall. He looked, mildly, at the throne. He looked, mildly, last, at me.
The eyes settled. The back of my neck chilled.
He looked at the marks on my wrist where the sleeve had ridden up again.
He looked at the loose hair at my temple.
He looked at the white shift, and the bare feet, and the small inward fold of my shoulders that I had not been able to entirely undo since I had sat down at the table.
He was appraising me.