Chapter 4 #2
To the right of the throne, off the dais, set on the bare marble of the floor, was a bed.
A bed the size of a barge. That was the only word I had for it.
Not a bed for sleeping; a bed for lying in.
A platform of pale wood draped with linen that had once been white and was now the color of old cream, with a single low canopy of unornamented cloth over the head of it, and pillows that had been propped and re-propped a thousand times, and on the bed, under the linen—
The largest living being I had ever seen.
The Demon King.
The bond had stopped warning and started watching, the small attentive low warm tone of a thing that had not been here before and was here now and was paying attention to everything.
He was enormous.
Even lying down. Even with the linen drawn up over the long bulk of him.
The shoulders alone would not have fit in the doorway of my apartment in Spokane Valley.
The hands—one rested outside the linen, on the cream—were the size of a small dog.
He had the age of mountains. The horns, what I could see of them, were grey at the points and chipped at the bases, and the face—what I could see of the face—was the face of what had once been the most magnificent thing that had ever ruled any underworld, and was now fading.
The gold under his skin had gone grey.
It was the same gold. I could see it. The same living gold that ran through the marble of the column under my hand and through my own bonded wrist and through the throne at the head of the hall—the gold of this realm, the gold of his blood—and in him, in the high planes of the cheekbone above the linen, in the bare forearm of the hand that lay outside the cover, the gold had gone grey.
It still moved. Barely. It threaded through him like a late-summer river through marshland, finding paths around the stones it could no longer push.
I had not, until this moment, understood what the Rite of Ascension was for.
A father, ill. A father whose power was leaving him. Seven sons. One throne. The unbearable old domestic arithmetic of it.
And then I saw Pride.
He was beside the bed.
He was not on the dais. He was not on the throne.
He was not standing at any kind of high place.
He was sitting on a low seat—a stool, I realized, after a count, a plain pale wood stool with no back and no cushion—pulled in close to the side of the bed at the height of the failing king’s shoulder.
The white-and-gold tunic was unfastened at the throat.
The long sleeves of the under-shirt were pushed back to the elbow.
He was holding a cup.
It was a small cup. Pale. The kind of cup you give a child.
He was holding it with both hands, one steady at the base, one bracing the rim, and he was tilting it carefully against the mouth of his father, and his father was drinking—a small swallow, a pause, a small swallow more—and Pride was watching the throat of his father to see the swallow go down, and when the swallow went down, he was tilting the cup again.
I had seen him be a lord.
I had not seen him be a son.
He knew I was there.
I felt his awareness through the bond, through the strange connection we now had.
He tilted the cup a final time. He waited for the swallow.
The swallow went down. He drew the cup back and he set it, with the same precise care he set everything down, on a small low table on the far side of the stool, where the failing king would not knock it with his hand if his hand moved in the night.
He lifted his hand to his father’s brow.
He brushed the hair back.
Pride pressed his palm to the forehead for a count of three.
He drew the linen up.
He rose.
He rose without hurry, effort, or concession. The white-and-gold of him fell into place around him as he stood, and he turned, fully, and he looked at me across forty feet of dim brown marble.
The expression that found me was new.
The eyes were calm. The set of the shoulders was easy. The mouth—when he spoke, when he finally spoke, his voice came across the long floor with the same weight the citadel above used to deliver his words to me.
“It was naughty of you to come here, precious one.”
Quietly. Gently. There was no trace of the shame I had felt come off him on the parapet, or of the fury beneath it. The small bright forward-tilt I had been getting used to under my sternum went tilt, hard, and stayed tilted.
He crossed the floor.
He crossed it without breaking the line of his eyes off mine, and the marble that was failing under his feet caught a little of the gold off the soles of his boots as he came—a thread of warmer gold, a small living vein of it where his foot had passed, the citadel rousing the smallest amount under him as he moved. He stopped a pace away from me.
He looked at my feet.
“Bare,” he said.
I looked down. The slippers I had put on this morning—the pale leather, the soft sole, the loose easy fit—were on my feet. They were not, by any standard I would have used at the rink, bare. I opened my mouth to say so.
He raised his right hand. Just enough.
“Bare,” he said again. Quieter. “For this place. It is sacred. Flesh should touch stone. You should not have come down here in slippers, precious one. You should not have come down here at all.”
The heat came into my face.
He put his right hand at the small of my back.
Without asking, he laid it there—the heel of it just above the dip at the base of my spine, the fingers wide, the ring cool through the loose fabric of the robe—and the weight of his hand was so steady, so settled, that the small bracing tension I had been holding in my lower back since Tokyo went out of me in a single breath.
A small sound escaped me.
“This way,” he said.
He turned me and led me back along the long dim floor toward the passage I had come down.
“You will not come here again,” he said. Low. Even. “Not without me. If you wish to see this place, you will say so, and I will bring you, and you will be dressed for it. Simple robes. Barefoot. Do you understand me, precious one.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
At first, I could not tell what he was asking for.
Then I did.
“Yes, my Lord.”
The hand at the small of my back made a small approving press. It was the smallest movement. It moved everything inside me by a great deal more than its size.
“Good girl.”
I almost shivered.
He walked me up the passage.
The grade rose under us. The ashen gold in the marble of the walls strengthened by small degrees as we climbed—paler at the first turn, fairer at the second, the thread of it picking up speed and color the higher we got, until by the time we reached the dark archway at the top, the gold was the gold I had been walking with all morning, the gold of him.
He crossed the threshold first.
He kept the hand where it was. He walked me through, the heel of his palm steady at the small of my back, the fingers wide, and the gallery on the other side of the arch caught us both, and the soft no-source light of it found my face and his, and he turned me, gently, with the hand, until I was facing him in the long bright room of the things he had been given.
He held me like that for a long count.
“My father,” he said. “Was once so much more than he is now. Incandescent in his magnificence. Unassailable. Perfect.”
It struck me then. He prized magnificence above all else. He admired it in his father, in himself, in all the objects in this room.
I opened my mouth.
“I’m not magnificent.”
The words went out of me before I had decided that I was going to let them. They went out of me into the long quiet light of the gallery. The hand at the small of my back made no movement at all.
“My Lord, I have been trying to say this. I’m not.
I’m not magnificent. I was. For about three minutes when I was twenty-one.
I was the best in the world for three minutes and then I fell and what is left, what you have brought across the Veil into your hall, what the Rite has chosen—it is not the woman who was the best. It is the woman who fell.
The woman who was the best died on the ice in Tokyo.
I am the ghost. I am the one she left behind. ”
Silence.
The hand remained at my back.
“Since I arrived here, I have been waiting to disappoint you.
I do not know what a being like you is, and I do not know what a being like you needs, and I do not know what the bond will ask of me when it asks, but I know—I know—that what you are looking at in this gallery is going to disappoint you, and I—“
My voice cracked.
“—I cannot survive being your disappointment.”
My next breath was shallow.
For a long count, he remained still.
The hand at the small of my back stayed where it was. His right hand stayed at his side. His eyes held still on my face, a deep pool untouched by wind.
When he spoke, his voice was lower than I had heard it.
“Precious one. You do not have to land this one.”
At first, I failed to understand.
He saw it. He let me have a beat with it. Then he said, even lower: