Chapter 4 #3
“You landed every jump you took from the age of nine to the age of twenty-one. You earned every measure of regard that was ever offered to you, and you fell the first instant you stopped performing, and you have lived since then in a body that believes the only love available to you is the love you can land. I have watched you do it. I watched you do it across the Veil for years. I have watched you do it in my own hall since you arrived.”
He inhaled.
“I was given my magnificence,” he said. “I have told you this. I know exactly what it is worth. I would rather have, in my hall and in my bed and on the throne beside me if it ever comes to that, the woman who fell—and got up and walked into a strip-mall rink in Washington state and crouched in front of a four-year-old in rental skates every Saturday morning for nearly a decade, never once telling anyone how much it cost her—than a hundred who never risked the jump. Do you understand me.”
“I do not want to be magnificent alone anymore.”
The cracks came.
Not at the jaw, this time. Not at the temple.
At the back of his right hand—the gold of him splitting in a fine hairline between his fingers, and the raw white light of him bleeding through the split into the soft no-source light of the gallery.
He saw it happen. I felt him see it happen through the bond—the small reflexive flinch of his shame, the body’s old wanting to close the crack before anyone could see—
He let it stay open.
I took the cracked hand in both of my own.
I lifted it. I bent my head over it. I pressed my mouth to the seam of raw white light, and the gold there was hot—not the warm of the bond, hotter, the heat of a fire—and I kept my mouth there, and I felt his breath catch, as it had only twice before, both times last night, both at the moment I had touched him.
“Maria.”
His left hand came up.
He cradled my face without hurry, effort, or concession. His palm was vast against my jaw, the long fingers along the back of my skull, the heel of his hand under my chin, and he tilted my face up to his, and the rings in his irises stopped moving entirely.
He kissed me.
First the lower lip, then the upper. He tasted of cold water and clean stone and the faint sweet under-thing I had been smelling on the wind since I arrived, and the bond on my wrist made not the warm tone but a new tone, a high bright one I had not heard yet, and the new tone hummed against the kiss and made the kiss louder.
Then the kiss changed.
His mouth opened mine. His control fell away by degrees and the thing beneath it came up—the want he had been holding, the want I had felt last night through the bond, raw and ancient and unpracticed, the want of someone who had displayed every gift he was ever given and never asked for a single one—and his tongue found mine and the kiss became deep and the kiss became long and the kiss became the sort of kiss a body learns it has never had before, in the precise moment it is having it.
A rough note rose in his throat.
The bond carried the meaning of it up the inside of my wrist into my chest and the meaning of it was mine, the meaning of it was finally, the meaning of it was the long age is over, and the gold in him was bleeding from more cracks now—I felt them on his jaw, on his temple, on the back of the hand still cradling my face—and he hid none of them, and the light came up around us in the long bright gallery and lit the tributes on their plinths from a new direction, from him, from us, and the cracked hand under my mouth had gone hotter, and his other hand had slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, and his thumb was under the line of my jaw and his fingers were in my hair and the loose braid was coming down by inches without his having pulled it, finally ready to fall.
The kiss broke.
“I will not have you without the contract.”
“I will not take what I cannot keep. I will not touch you as I want to touch you, precious one, until your name is on the seal, and my name is on yours, and the bond is closed and no one—no brother, no Veil, no throne, no thing that walks—can reach across it again. Do you understand me.”
I lifted my marked wrist.
I laid it against the cracked hand at the back of my neck, and I held it there, and I said—
“I’ll sign.”
“Maria.”
“I’ll sign, my Lord, I’ll sign.”
“Baby.”
The word came out of him broken.
“Baby. Baby.”
The bond on my wrist flared.
It flared like fire when a door opens beside it.
The vibrant gold of the sigils threading up the inside of my forearm went, all at once, prismatic—the gold breaking into a long run of every color I had ever seen and three I had not—and the light of it lit the gallery from my arm outward, lit the tributes on their plinths, lit the milk-white bird from the Mirror, lit the cup from the Vault, lit the blade from the Scourge, lit every gift he had ever been given by every domain in this realm.
And in the middle of all of it, the only thing in the long bright gallery he had not been given.
The one thing in the room that had chosen him.
Me.