Chapter 5
He drew back from me by inches.
The prismatic light at my wrist settled down to its living gold again. He kept the cracked hand at the back of my neck. He kept the other at my jaw. He looked at me for a long count, his gaze very still, and then he said—
“Come.”
That was all.
He took my hand. He led me out of the long gallery, down the colonnade. Up a stair I had not seen before. Up another stair. Finally, we stopped at a door.
It was set into the pale gold-veined marble of an upper passage, a single arch no taller than he was, a dark wooden door with no handle, no carving, no ornament of any kind. He laid his palm flat against the wood, and the door opened inward onto a room.
It was small.
Pale stone walls hung with nothing. A single window, narrow, opening onto a sky that had gone past lavender into something deeper, the deep wine-purple of his evening colors.
A low table of white marble in the middle of the floor, inlaid with the same living gold as everything else in the citadel, but quieter here, banked, the gold running in straight lines instead of loops.
On the table, two things.
A sheet of dark parchment that drank the light.
It was the color of a deep well. The light from the window did not catch on it.
The lamps from the passage outside did not reflect on it.
It was a piece of paper that ate. Beside it, set on a small rest of pale wood, a stylus of gold-veined bone. The veins in the bone moved.
He closed the door behind us.
The room got smaller.
“This is my study,” he said. His low voice reached me at half the volume the hall had needed. “I do not bring beings here. I have not, in the long age of my reign, brought any being here. You are the first.”
I had no idea what to do with that. I looked at the table. I looked at the parchment. My eyes stayed off him.
It struck me that there was nothing on display here, no record of magnificence of any kind.
“The contract,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“It cannot be written clothed.”
I looked up.
He was already moving. He had crossed to the table. He stood beside it with his right hand resting on the marble edge, the iron ring catching no light, and his gaze found my face and held it.
“The binding takes only what is brought to it bare,” he said.
“Anything concealed from the parchment is void. A thing half-hidden is a thing the brothers can argue. It is the rule I have lived by in the gallery and the rule I live by in this room. I hide nothing I have been given. I will hide nothing I give you.”
He paused.
“I will disrobe first.”
He began before I could nod.
He lifted his hands to the fastenings at the throat of the white-and-gold tunic.
He did it without ceremony, as a sovereign does a necessary thing—the long fingers working the small clasps, the fabric falling open at the line of his collarbone, and then the tunic itself coming off across the shoulders in one measured movement that made the room smaller by a measurable amount.
The under-shirt followed.
He folded both. He set them on a low chest along the wall I had not noticed. Then the dark trousers, the soft leather of the boots, every piece set down with his usual precise care, until there was nothing on him at all.
I had no preparation.
His body was not the body of a human, and the body of a being like him in the low deep wine-purple light of his own private room, standing without ceremony three paces from me, was a thing I had not been given any vocabulary for.
He was sculpted. The chest was broad and the long lines of his stomach ran clean down into the cut of his hips, the lambent skin catching the low light at every plane, the cracks at the back of his right hand bleeding a faint hairline of raw white into the dim.
The legs were long. The thighs were thick from standing without rest for a long age. And —
And.
His cock.
He was hard.
He was hard and he was thick and he was heavy and the size of him was, frankly, not a size I could fit in the small careful arithmetic my body had been doing since Tokyo.
The width of him at the base. The length of him standing up against the line of his stomach.
I had a wild moment, very small, very honest, of thinking—he means to put that in me. He means to have me with that. How?
I felt the heat climb my face. I felt the heat climb everything else, too, lower, in a way I had not felt in years, in a way I had perhaps never felt with quite this completeness, and the bond on my wrist made the new high bright tone again, and the wetness between my legs was immediate and embarrassing.
He let me look.
He let me look for a long count. He remained motionless, neither shifting his weight nor holding himself for me as a man at his most magnificent might have done. He simply stood, bare, with the same easy sovereign settledness, and let me see.
“Now you, baby.”
The voice was very low.
My hands went to the belt of the robe. They were not steady.
I undid the belt. The robe parted. The shift was underneath, the long pale unseamed shift I had woken in, and I lifted it over my head in a single movement, as I had lifted competition costumes throughout my career, with the small efficient practicality of a body that knew the geometry of getting out of fabric quickly.
I stood bare in front of him.
He shook his head. Once.
That was all.
The bond carried the rest. It carried what he wanted to do to me, raw and unedited, as it had carried his shame on the parapet—the want to put his mouth at the hollow of my throat, the want to put his hands at my hips and lift me onto the marble table, the want to part my legs with his and find with his fingers and his mouth and his cock the wet that he could see, that he could smell, that he was holding himself, by the small thin line of an unbroken rule, from taking.
Neither of us pretended.
I felt my own want answer his through the gold at my wrist. I let him feel it. No editing. No deflection. For once since Tokyo, I refused to route the feeling into a joke or a denial or the small apologetic laugh that had no humour in it. I let him have it.
His mouth did the thing at the corner that was almost a smile and was not.
“Shall we begin?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He crossed to me.
He put his hands at my waist—the long fingers wide, the heels of his palms warm at the curve of my hips—and he lifted me, without effort, then set me on the edge of the marble table. It was cold under me.
I felt it everywhere, sharp and clean, the cold of the deep stone meeting the heat of me, and I made a small sound that was not entirely embarrassment. He let his hands stay at my hips for a count of two. Then he drew them back.
He sat beside me on the same edge.
The marble took his weight without a sound. His thigh was at my thigh. His shoulder was at my shoulder. His bare hip was an inch from my bare hip.
He took up the stylus, looked at the empty page for a count, then looked at me, his eyes turning as he thought.
“I write mine first,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“The sovereign binds himself before the kept. It is the order of things, for me at least.”
He set the stylus to the parchment.
“My kept. I swear I will not perform magnificence in your presence.”
He said the words as he wrote them. The stylus moved in long measured characters, the same hand from the folded square of paper on my pillow this morning. The dark parchment drank the strokes, then the stylus lifted.
The clause sealed.
A line of white-gold light travelled along the new characters from left to right. When it reached the end, it banked into the parchment and stayed, faint.
I felt it on my wrist.
The bond sounded and the gold at my forearm warmed by a measurable degree, and I felt, through it, the cost of what he had written—the cost of performing magnificence for a long age, then agreeing not to perform it in front of the only person he most wanted to be magnificent for.
The cost was high. The bond did not soften it.
He drew the stylus back to the parchment.
“I will show you my cracks when they form.”
He wrote it.
The light ran. The light banked. And on the back of his right hand, two inches from where the stylus held, a fissure opened. This time, he never paused. He kept writing. He let the crack stay. He let me see it without lifting his eyes from the page.
“I will ask you, aloud, for one thing I want, every day.”
He wrote.
The light ran. A second fissure opened at the line of his jaw, the smallest of seams. The bond carried the cost. He had not asked aloud for a thing in a long age.
The small old terror under the bone of it, the terror of a child who had learned, very early, that to ask was to admit a need, and to admit a need was to admit a lack, and anything with a lack was not what he had been built to be.
He wrote on.
I watched him write.
I watched the long line of his back as he bent over the parchment, the cut of his shoulder, the easy working of the muscles down his right arm as he formed the characters, the bare line of his hip against the marble.
The light from the deep wine-purple sky outside the narrow window caught the lambent skin at his cheekbone and at the inside of his wrist and at the long flat plane of his stomach, and the cracks on him caught their own light from inside.
He was so beautiful. Achingly, perfectly beautiful.
He was also lonely. Deeply lonely.
The cost of every clause came up the gold at my wrist and sat under my sternum next to the small old tenant who had lived there since Tokyo—the memory of my pride—and the two of them met, and they embraced.
“I will kneel to you when you require it.”
He wrote.
The light ran. The seal took. The bond gave a low warm pulse that I felt in the soft place behind my breastbone, and the cracks on him widened by the smallest measure.
He set the stylus down.
His eyes stayed on the parchment and his head remained bowed. He held very still on the marble beside me, his bare shoulder against my bare shoulder, his gaze lowered.