Chapter 4
My dreams were strange and I woke alone. There was a folded square of pale paper on the pillow beside my head.
The paper was the color of cream. The handwriting was beautiful—languid characters that knew exactly how much space they were allowed to take.
Precious one — I have business below that will not wait. I will return before the long dusk. The citadel is yours. Walk where you wish. The doors will open. When I return, we will discuss your choice, the contract I am preparing for you. Eat. — P.
The bond made the low warm tone under my sternum. Welcome, it meant, this time. Not warning.
I got up.
There was a robe at the foot of the bed and a pair of slippers in pale leather. I put both on, and looked at myself in the mirror.
She was still me. Not taller. Not, in any ordinary sense, changed.
My hair was the same long brown, the braid at my left shoulder, the loose strands at the temple.
My face was still my face, with the right eyebrow only half-there from the skating fall at twelve, and the faint crookedness of the nose I had inherited from my father, and the mouth that I had always thought was the one good thing about my face, though even at my prettiest I had never been what the other girls called pretty-pretty.
I was not beautiful, and I was not, in this light or any other, magnificent.
But something had changed. The gold on my wrist was not the only gold in me, now.
It was in my eyes, now. Not the lamplit gold of Pride’s hall, not the living current that moved the marks beneath my skin—but a cast to the whites, a faint metal glow at the corners of the iris, as if the bond had put a candle in behind my face and let it burn.
I had the sudden, private intuition that if Nova saw me, she would notice it at once.
She would say, Coach Maria, your eyes look like rings, and I would have to say, I know, love, I know.
I almost smiled, and then I did, and the smile was not the one I wore for children or parents or for anybody, really, but me.
I left the chamber.
The guard at the foot of the passage did not turn his head when I came past, which I took, correctly, as the small dignified version of being acknowledged.
He was tall, scaled at the cheekbones, in a long charcoal coat that reflected the light rather than swallowing it. He was Pride’s. The bond knew.
The citadel let me have it.
Door after door opened to me without my touching them—a courtyard of pale gold-veined stone where a fountain ran in measured loops; a library whose shelves climbed past my eye into a vault of dim lavender; a long colonnade open to the bronze-going-rose horizon, the wind moving cool through my hair and through the loose sleeves of the robe.
The chambers got grander.
A hall of pale water in which long silver fish moved with the measured weight of his handwriting.
A chamber whose floor was a single slab of polished obsidian and whose walls were hung, every one, with weapons.
A small high room with a single chair in it and a window onto a sky no one would believe me about later.
And then, at the end of a colonnade I had not seen before, the gallery.
I knew, the moment I stepped into it, that this was the room.
I do not know how. The rink-coach part of me, the part that had spent years walking into facilities and knowing, by the third step, which board they would not let me coach at—the same part knew this.
This was the room he had wanted me to find.
It was long. Longer than the hall I had stood in last night.
It was lit by no source I could locate. The light was just present, soft, the color of late afternoon in a sky I would never paint from memory and get right.
The walls were the same pale gold-veined marble.
The floor was inlaid, in a long unbroken pattern, with the symbol of each of the seven domains—somehow, I recognized all of them.
The bond told me. The bond was, I was beginning to understand, my whole literacy here.
The tributes ran down both walls.
Each one set on a plinth of pale stone. Each one lit. Each one labeled in the same hand.
A blade of black volcanic glass with a hilt of fused obsidian.
From the Scourge, the seven-hundredth year of the reign of Wrath, on the occasion of the brother’s first ascension to the parapet.
A great cup of gold the size of a child’s head, set with a single stone the color of dawn.
From the Vault. A small carved bird of a milk-white material I could not name, its wings folded, its eye a single inset bead of dark glass.
From the Mirror. A long curl of silk in a color that changed when I tilted my head.
From the Veil. A bowl of dark glass full of the dried husks of fruit that smelled, faintly, of honey and old paper.
From the Feast. A small folded square of something I could not call cloth and could not call paper. From the Still.
And the labels were not labels.
They were inventory.
A display of magnificence. Of importance. Of pride.
I stood at the third plinth and I understood it.
He hid nothing.
He had been given gifts by every domain in this realm for the entirety of a long age, and he had not put a single one of them in a vault.
He had not kept his trophies in a private cabinet to be brought out only for the inner circle.
He had put them in a gallery the length of a city block and he had lit them and he had labeled them and he had given his fated mate, on the second morning of her arrival, the run of the room.
This was him. This was every inch of him. Pride displayed without apology.
I walked the long floor.
I read every label. I stopped at the bird from the Mirror longer than I stopped at the others—the wings, the bead of an eye, the faint sense that the bird was not entirely still—and I went on.
I reached the end of the gallery.
It ended at a wall.
Or it should have. The plinths stopped. The labels stopped. The light dimmed by a fraction. The pale gold-veined marble of the floor ran on for six more paces and then met, set into the far wall, an archway.
The archway was not made of marble.
It was made of plain dark stone. No vein of gold ran through it. No light caught it. It was the only thing in the gallery, in the chamber, in the entire wing of the citadel I had walked through, that did not shine.
Inside the arch, the air was not still.
It rippled, a still pool disturbed by a hand from underneath. I had seen a ripple like that exactly once before in my life, with my palm on the rink glass at center ice in a strip mall in Spokane Valley, Washington, fourteen hours ago.
The bond went warm.
Not the welcome warm I had learned. The other warm. The high small warning tone of a fire that had banked and was now sitting up on its haunches.
This was the threshold the citadel had been quietly keeping me from since I arrived.
I didn’t even think—I stepped through.
It yielded exactly as the rink glass had.
Water-yielding. Cool against the heels of my palms where I had put them out, instinctively, in front of me.
My ears popped—the right first, the left a half-beat after, the same order as before—and the pressure of the gallery on the other side of the arch dropped away into something unknown to me and impossible to name from a chart.
I came out into a passage.
The passage went down.
Not steeply. A gentle grade, like a rink ramp descending to the locker rooms or the long curve of a parking lot leading to the underground level no one wants to walk to alone. The citadel above me had been a citadel that climbed. This was a citadel that fell.
The gold in the marble had gone wrong.
I went down five more steps before I let myself look at it directly.
The living gold I had been watching all morning thread through the pale stone—the gold that moved, that ran, that breathed—was here, in this passage, still moving.
But the gold had gone the color of ash. Of guttering candle wick.
It threaded through the stone of the walls in the same long languid loops, but the loops were dimmer, their motion reduced, and at three places along the wall the gold had stopped moving entirely and gone the dull grey of metal that had not been polished in a long age and would not be polished again.
The air got warmer.
Not warm like the air over a fire. Warm like the air in a room where someone had been ill for a long time and the windows had been closed because the wind made it worse.
There was a smell on it. Faint. Not unpleasant.
Medicinal: clean, sharp, with something underneath it that the cleaning was meant to cover and could not, entirely.
I kept going down.
The bond on my wrist had stopped warning. It had gone quiet. I do not know which was worse.
The passage opened.
It opened into a hall.
I had thought the hall above was big. The hall above had been built for someone who wanted to be looked at by a long room before the room reached him.
The hall above had columns the width of small cars and arches that went up and up and up.
This hall was bigger. It was bigger by orders of magnitude.
The columns went up into a dark I could not see the top of.
The arches did not finish; they vanished into the high gloom of the vault.
The floor ran out in front of me into a vast dim brown that took my eye a long count to even begin to organize, and when it did organize, what it organized was a throne.
The throne was empty.
It sat at the far end of the hall, raised on a dais of seven shallow steps, and even from this distance I could see that the throne was the source of the gold in this room—the gold bled from it through the marble of the floor and the columns and the walls.
The flow was steady. Unceasing. It was the gold that was failing.
The throne was the heart of it, and the heart was weak.