Chapter 3 #2
“So,” he said. Softly. To Pride. “It is true.”
“It is.”
“The Rite has chosen.”
“It has. How is your mate, brother?”
Envy smirked. It was strange to think of him with a bonded mate.
“Rachel is very well. Happier than me. More well-adjusted. Comfortable.”
I could feel his jealousy, but there was no malice in it. It felt, strangely, as though he was complimenting her.
“But,” he said. “Our brothers don’t mind that I found someone. None of them believe that I will be chosen to rule. I’m not strong enough, so they say. Not charming enough.”
“You insult yourself, brother.”
“No. I am a realist. I know what I am. I know what I need. But the truth is, now that you have found your mate, there will be trouble.”
There was a beat. The hall held its breath.
“The brothers will not be pleased.” Pride did not answer.
“The brothers,” Envy said, and his voice had the small pleased lift of a person setting a piece down on a board, “have spent a long age praying that the Rite would not, in fact, choose for you.
An unchosen Pride, brother, we could ignore.
An unchosen Pride could sit in his high citadel and rule his domain and presume to the Obsidian Throne all he liked, and the rest of us could go about our business and pretend not to notice.
A chosen Pride. A bonded Pride. Confirmed.
By the Veil. With the marks on her, no less, in your colors —“
His pale eyes flickered to my wrist again.
“That is another thing entirely.”
“I am aware, brother, of what it is.”
“Mm.” A small noise. Almost a hum. “I thought you might be.”
He turned, fully, and looked at me at last.
His face did not change. There was no leer.
There was no menace. There was only the pale flat attention he had moved around the hall with, now resting, entirely, on me, and the small precise tilt of the head a person makes when they have understood the shape of a problem and have begun, already, to enjoy it.
“And this is she,” he said. “This,” Pride said, “is my mate.”
"Mmhmm." The small hum. "A precious thing."
The words had the flatness of a tag tied to the leg of a chair.
Again, the small hum. “Forgive me, brother. I had wanted to see her with my own eyes. The others will wish to as well. We could not, you understand, simply take your word for it.”
Envy moved.
He came around the long marble floor at an angle that was not quite a circle and not quite a straight line, his hands clasped lightly behind his back, his pale eyes tracking me as he went, and Pride did not move at all.
“She is small.”
The observation was addressed to no one, delivered with the air of an estate-sale appraiser murmuring a chair’s year before writing a number on a card.
“Smaller than I had imagined. I had thought—given the choice of you, brother, given the standard you would have insisted on—that the Veil would have brought a tall one. A queen-tall one. Something to fill out the throne beside you.”
“You are mistaken about my standard.”
“Mmhm. Evidently.”
He came closer.
He had drifted three paces nearer than he had begun, which I noticed because Pride noticed.
Pride had not turned his head. The set of his shoulders had not changed.
His gaze was still on Envy and only on Envy, and yet the air at my back had moved.
Pride had shifted his weight a fraction, the half-pace I stood behind him had become a quarter-pace, and I understood, without looking, that he had stepped backward to meet me.
He had closed the gap. He was, by inches, in front of me.
The bond on my wrist made the low warm tone that I was learning meant attend.
Envy’s eyes had not left my forearm. “The marks,” he said, mildly. “Forgive me, brother, but I am interested to see them. Wrath’s took, I am told, but I was not present for the ceremony. Greed’s, also. And of course, mine. May I.”
“No.”
“I will not touch her.”
“You will not approach her.”
“Brother.”
He had stopped two paces off. He tilted his head. The thin smile was on him again, the smile that was not a smile.
“I am simply curious.”
“You are not.”
“I am always simply curious. It is the only thing I am ever doing.” He lifted one hand, palm up, in the coaxing gesture used on a wary horse. “May I see them. From here.”
The sleeve had ridden up again. I tugged at it. Envy’s eyes followed the tug, with a small soft pleasure that did not belong to him.
“They are very fine,” he said. “Yours, brother. Unmistakably. The color, the loop of the curl, the small flourish at the wrist bone — that is your hand, I would know it anywhere.” He paused.
He looked, for a moment, at nothing — at the air a few inches above my wrist, where the marks were — and the small precise tilt came into his head, the tilt of a man who has understood the shape of a problem.
"Confirmed by the Veil," he said. "The marks on her. In your colors." A beat. "And not sealed."
Pride said nothing.
"Forgive me, brother. When I heard, I confess I assumed it would be done by now. The others closed theirs before the marks had cooled. Wrath inside the hour. Greed before the poor woman had stopped shaking. Even mine." The thin smile. Was hy lying? Something in his voice . . .
"And you, with the finest of them—the one the Veil went to such trouble over—have left yours hanging in the open air like a question half-asked." He hummed, low. "How unlike you. Or. How unlike what we were given to expect."
He turned, then, and looked at me. Fully. It was the first time, and it was worse than the pricing had been, because the pricing had at least kept its distance, and this did not.
"You should ask him to finish it," he said.
His voice was gentle, the voice that had learned to be easy to be near, addressed to me alone as though Pride had stepped out of the hall.
"An open bond is a thing the whole domain may argue over.
A claim half-made is a claim other hands can reach for.
A closed one, no one touches — not the brothers, not the throne, not anything that walks.
He will not tell you that. He is far too proud to ask you for a single thing.
" The tilt. "So I will ask it for him. Tell him to seal it.
Soon." A small pause, almost kind. "For your sake. Rather more than his."
"Which is strange counsel from me, I grant you.
" Lightly, almost to himself. "My brothers would by far prefer it stayed open.
They are praying it stays open." He let that rest where I could see it.
"You might ask yourself why the one of us they sent to look at you is the one standing in his hall telling you to close it. "
He left the question unanswered. He had no intention of answering it. He set it down in front of me with everything else, stepped back, and looked, mildly, pleased.
"Unless," he said—and here the voice softened further, which I was learning was the thing to be afraid of—"she will not have you."
He was not looking at me now. He was looking at Pride.
"That is the other reason a bond hangs this long, brother. Not patience. Not principle, whatever you tell yourself on the high parapet at night. A mate saying no without ever saying it out loud."
The light in the hall changed.
Pride was cracking.
There was a fissure at the line of his jaw, fine, hairline, no wider than a thread, and inside the fissure there was light.
Not gold. Not the warm honey-and-candle gold of him.
White. Raw white. The white of the inside of a star, of a thing that had not been seen and was not supposed to be seen, and the fissure at his jaw was joined by a fissure at the back of his right hand, and a fissure ran from his right temple down into the collar of his white-and-gold tunic, and the light from all of them began to bleed.
It bled into the air around him.
It crossed the marble. It lit the columns from underneath. It lit the gold veins running through the stone from within, and it lit me—I felt it on my face, I felt it on my forearms, I felt it on the back of my neck—and it lit Envy.
Envy stepped back a single pace. He did it without breaking the line of his shoulders, without lifting a hand, without changing the set of his mouth, but he stepped back.
The pale flat eyes had narrowed by a fraction.
The hands behind his back had unclasped.
He had, somewhere inside himself, made a quick adjustment.
“Brother,” he said.
His voice had thinned by a degree.
“You will not approach her.” Pride said it very quietly.
“You will not look at her again with the calculation you have been looking at her with. You will not put a question to me about her bond in her hearing. You will not, brother, come to my citadel uninvited. You have come once. I will permit it once. I will not permit it twice.”
He had not raised his voice. He had not moved. He stood in front of me with the white light bleeding from him, and the air around him burned.
Envy lifted his hands. A small gesture. Surrender, or its imitation.
“Brother.”
“You will leave my hall.”
“I will leave your hall,” Envy said. “I will leave it gladly.” He looked, one last time, around the columns, at the throne, at me.
The pale flat eyes settled on me again for half a beat.
"I will tell the brothers what I have seen.
They will draw their own conclusions — they always do.
" A pause. "I will tell you this much before I go, brother, as a kindness you will not believe is one.
You do not have the long age you imagine.
They have spent it waiting to learn whether your bond would ignite at all — hoping, on the whole, that it would not.
Now they know. They know you believe the Throne is yours. They mean to see that it never is."
He turned and walked the long marble floor toward the high arched door at the far end, and the matte dark of his coat ate the light of Pride’s cracks until he left the hall.
The door closed behind him.
Pride did not move.
The fissures of light at his jaw, at his hand, at his temple, sealed one by one.