Chapter 3 #3
It was effortful. The closing took him. He stood, still, in the middle of the long marble floor, with his back to me, and he did the work of putting himself back together, and the work made the air in the hall thin.
He turned.
When he turned, his face was immaculate.
The fissure at the jaw was gone. The fissure at the back of the hand was gone. The fissure at the temple was gone. He was perfect, once again.
“Maria. Will you permit me to return you to your chamber.”
I nodded.
He bowed. A small precise bow. He had not bowed to me before.
He gestured me toward the door.
The walk back to the chamber was long. He went ahead of me by half a pace and to my right, and his hands stayed at his sides, and his gaze stayed ahead. He was too proud?
We reached the arched door of the silk chamber.
He stopped two paces short.
“You will rest,” he said. “You will be brought whatever you wish. There will be a guard at the foot of this passage. He is mine. He will allow no one near this door. I will return when I have — “
There was a small pause.
“ — settled certain matters. You will not be disturbed.”
Without touching the latch, he stepped back another pace, made the small precise bow again, and turned.
He walked away.
I stood at the door and I watched him go down the long marble passage, the white-and-gold of him moving cleanly into the deeper marble at the far end, and he continued without looking back, and the bond on my wrist dwindled to a banked ember.
I closed the door behind me.
The chamber was as I had left it. The bed, with the white silk turned back.
The pitcher of cold water. The mirror, with the tea towel still draped over it from above.
The arched door to the Dawnless Terrace was closed, now, the wine-red cord untied and the silk fallen across the opening, and the morning was somewhere outside it doing its bronze-into-lavender thing without me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and what happened next was not what I had been expecting.
The bond opened.
The low warm tone under my sternum, the one I had been getting used to, the one that hummed and stilled and hummed again as if it had a small life of its own, did not hum.
It opened. A door inside me swung wide, mirroring the chamber wall that had opened to the terrace that morning, and through it came —
Him.
Not him in body. Him in everything else. It came as sensation, not as words. It came up the inside of my wrist where the marks were, and it came up the inside of my forearm, and it came across my shoulder, and into my chest.
I felt him. His feelings.
The first was shame.
Not my shame. Bigger than my shame. Older than my shame. Grander. The shame of having been seen breaking. The breaking stung, but not as much as being seen by me and his brother.
The shame was on top. Under the shame: terror. An ancient cornered terror.
And deeper still, under the terror: fury.
Fury at himself. Fury at the cracks themselves, at the muscles of his face that had not held, at the body that had betrayed him. Fury, white and hot, the white of the light that had bled out of him. Fury that had been on the verge of becoming something else, something he had been holding back —
Under the fury, the heat.
The fissures were still open. He was not in front of me, he had walked away down the passage, but I felt them.
I felt them on the inside of my own jaw, on the back of my own right hand, down the line of my own right temple.
Hot. The heat of air over a fire; the heat of a flush when the body has been told something the mind has not caught up to yet.
Under the heat —
Under everything —
The want.
The want to know that his pride was not unfounded.
It was so raw it frightened me.
It was so raw that a small sound escaped me, in the empty chamber, into the white silk, and did not entirely belong to me either.
And under the want, last, smallest, the worst of it all—he was gripping cold marble.
He was somewhere very high in the citadel, somewhere far above me, and his hand was on something cold, on a parapet or a sill or the arm of a chair I could not see, and his hand was holding the cold marble so hard it hurt him, and he was alone.
The isolation of pride.
I pressed my marked wrist to my chest. I could not bear it. I could not bear that he was alone with it.
I stood up. I put my hand on the latch and opened the door. I had to find him.
I do not entirely know how I knew where to go. The bond knew. Out of the silk chamber. Down the long marble passage. Up a stair I had not seen before. Up another stair. Across a colonnade open to the lavender-going-deeper sky, the wind moving cool against the shift and against my bare arms.
Up another stair.
I came out onto a high place.
It was the highest place. I understood that the moment I saw it.
A narrow parapet of pale marble, gold-veined, jutting out from the body of the citadel into the open air, the columns shorter here, the sky bigger, the drop on three sides absolute.
The light was the cool deep lavender of late afternoon in a sky that did not have an afternoon.
He was at the far rail.
His back was to me.
His hands were on the cold pale marble of the parapet.
Both of them. The fissures were closed, or mostly closed—I saw the faint white line at the back of his right hand from across the parapet, a hairline, a thread, still bleeding the smallest amount of raw white light—and he was utterly still, a thing built to bear.
His back remained to me.
I knew, somewhere, that he had felt me come up the stair. I knew because the bond spoke to me, and I knew it spoke to him, too. He had felt me at the second door. He had felt me at the mirror. He had felt me on every step.
I crossed the parapet. The marble under my bare feet was cold. The wind moved the hem of the shift around my ankles. I came up behind him, and then beside him, and I put my left hand on the cold marble of the rail next to his right hand.
His breath caught.
I lifted my right hand.
I lifted it and I laid the marked inside of my wrist against the back of his right hand, gold to gold, the living sigils to the faint hairline of raw white light, and I held it there.
He went very still, then let out the breath.
“You should not be here, precious one.”
The voice was hoarse.
“I know.”
“You need time. I must not pressure you.”
“I understand.” He turned and I moved my hand, pushing it flat against his chest.
I felt the place where the cracks had been, the low broken light still warm under the white-and-gold fabric, the even beat of him underneath that.
I lifted my other hand. I put it at the side of his face.
I drew his forehead down to mine.
He let me, with the same surrender he had given last night when he had come down off the dais and stopped three paces off—the quiet yielding of someone long resolved, on principle, not to move this woman unless she chose it.
“Listen to me,” I said.
I spoke quietly, with the small clean weight of something that did not need saying twice.
"I will not be moved across anyone's board. Not your brother's. Not your father's. Not, my Lord, even yours."
I felt him go still under my hands.
"He stood in your hall," I said, "and he told me to make you finish this.
Quickly. Before anyone could argue it. He made your waiting sound like a danger to me.
He made your patience sound like a thing you ought to be ashamed of.
And I think he wanted me to carry it up here, and set it down in front of you, and watch it land. "
The hairline of white at the back of his hand pulsed, once, under my wrist.
"I am not going to do that."
I pressed my forehead harder against his.
"If I give you the bond—if—it will not be because a man in a coat the color of dark water frightened me into it.
It will not be because the Veil opened, or the Rite chose, or you are owed it, or it is simply the next thing that happens.
It will be because I looked at you on a parapet with the light still coming out of you, and I decided.
And a thing I decide, no one unmakes." A breath.
"Not one of your brothers. Not all of them in a row.
Not the throne they are so frightened you will sit in. No one."
A small sound left him: the sound of someone who had not been held, seen, or spoken to without first being measured in a very long age.
I felt the gold on my wrist warm against his chest, and the small last hairline of white close at the back of his hand, and his next breath tremble faintly.
“Welcome home,” he said.