Chapter 6
When I woke the next day, I felt brand new. It was like my whole body was alive with the bond, with this place, with the person I was learning to be again.
Pride wasn’t with me when I woke, but through the bond I could tell that he was nearby. Very nearby.
He was at the window. He was dressed and he had his back to me. He was looking out at the strange colors of the terrace sky, his hands folded behind him.
I sat up.
The shift moved against me. The bond made the hum again—warmer, a little higher, something like fire.
He turned.
He had heard me. He had felt me.
“Good morning, precious one.”
The voice was low. The chamber ushered it.
“Good morning, my Lord.”
He came to the bed and stood at the edge of it, and he looked down at me, his golden irises turning in the concentric rings I was learning to read.
“I very much enjoyed our signing last night.”
I could feel his lust, the dark memory of the things he’d wanted to do to me in his chambers yesterday.
“Me too, Daddy,” I repled.
“Yes. I can feel it. Now, I didn’t want to waste any time. So, I have invoked a clause,” he said.
I waited.
“My very first.” He paused. “I have asked aloud, this morning, for one thing I want.”
My mouth went dry.
“What is it?” I said.
He turned. He crossed the chamber to a low chest along the far wall and he lifted something from it. Something I had not seen. Something he had set there before I woke.
He brought it to the bed.
He set it on the white silk beside my hip.
A small white box, wrapped in red ribbon. He bade me undo it and when I did, my eyes widened.
Inside, were my boots.
My actual competition boots. The ones I had left in a bag in the back of my closet in Spokane Valley after Tokyo and had never opened.
The leather was dark, oiled, softened by time into something richer than it had been when it was new.
The blades had been sharpened. I could see the fresh edge on them, the clean bright line of metal untouched since then and ready.
The laces were new—waxed, white, the kind of laces you put on boots you mean to use.
My breath stopped.
“How?” I asked.
“I have resources,” he said. Quietly. “The same resources that funded your rink. The same hand that reached across the Veil and found a bronze medalist from Salt Lake to teach your children.”
He let me look.
The boots sat on the white silk like question I would have to answer.
I could smell them. The leather. The wax.
The faint metallic undernote of the blades.
My body knew them. My body knew the weight of them, the feel of the tongue against the instep, the lock of the ankle when the laces were pulled tight.
My body knew, and my body was already, secretly, reaching for them.
“I want,” he said, “to skate with you.”
The words landed.
“On ice I have made. Not on a rink. A lake. A frozen lake, under my sky, with no boards and no judges and no crowd. Just you. Just me. The two of us, on ice that knows your name.”
I laughed.
I hadn’t meant to. It came out as the small apologetic laugh I had used since Tokyo—high, thin, no humor in it, a sound that was meant to route the feeling somewhere safe before it could land.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I don’t—I haven’t—not since—“
The deflections stacked.
“I’m not that person anymore, my Lord. You don’t want to see what’s left. I haven’t put these on since Tokyo. The muscle memory is gone. The edges are gone. I teach four-year-olds how to stand up. I don’t—I can’t—you really don’t want—I won’t.“
The bond seized.
It happened in both wrists at once. The braid of red and gold tightened—not the warm pulse of the contract room, not the singing hum of the morning—a band of heat, sudden and precise, racing up both arms from the pulse to the elbow, and the heat was not pain.
It was rejection. The contract refusing the smallness.
I gasped.
The heat climbed to my shoulders. It sat there, banked, waiting. The sigils on both forearms glowed—the red darker, the gold brighter, the two of them braided in a band that said, very clearly, you promised.
Pride watched.
Pride watched from the edge of the bed, hands at his sides, his gaze very still.
“You have broken it,” he said. “The contract. I know you didn’t mean to. But still, it is a serious breach, Little One.”
Low. Certain.
“You have gone small. You have lowered your head. You have stood less than your height. You have called yourself unworthy of a thing I have asked for, which is the same as calling me a fool for asking.” A pause.
“You agreed, on the parchment, in your own blood, that you would not do this. The contract is holding you to your word.”
The heat in my shoulders pulsed.
“I understand,” I said.
“Good.” He picked up the boots. He held them in one hand with the care due something precious. “There will be punishment for this, Maria. The contract requires it. I require it. Your worth is not a thing you are permitted to throw on the floor in my hall.”
I nodded. The heat pulsed again.
“First,” he said, “we skate.”
The door was not in the gallery. It was not in the colonnade. It was at the end of a passage I had not walked, behind an arch I had not seen, and when he opened it the air that came through was not the air of the citadel.
It was colder. Cleaner. It carried the scent of stone and water and something old but fresh. Possibility.
He led me through.
The passage gave onto a stair. The stair gave onto a terrace I had not stood on. The terrace gave onto a view I had no preparation for.
The High Citadel from the outside.
I had seen it from the inside for two days.
I had walked its halls, slept in its chambers, signed a contract in its most private room.
I had not seen what it looked like from the ground.
It rose above us—white marble and pale gold, the columns climbing into the deep wine-purple of the evening sky, the windows lit from within by a light that had no source I could name.
It was magnificent. It was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen, and it was his, and he had built it, or his father had built it, or the realm itself had built it around the shape of his pride, and standing at the foot of it with the boots in his hand and the shift against my legs and the bond humming at both wrists, I understood, for the first time, what it meant to be chosen by a being like this.
He took my hand.
We walked down from the terrace. The path was pale stone, gold-veined, the same marble as the halls, curving toward a stand of trees I had not noticed.
The trees were silver-barked, their leaves the color of old bronze, and they parted as we came near, as columns part in a hall when the lord walks through.
Beyond the trees was the lake.
I stopped.
It was vast—a sheet of ice so smooth it threw the deep wine-purple of the sky back at itself in a perfect mirror, and under the ice, running through it, the living gold.
The gold of the realm. The gold of his blood.
It lit the ice from beneath, a warm honey light that moved in the same long languid loops as the veins in the marble, and the ice above it was clear, perfectly clear, so clear I could see the gold moving under my feet before my feet had touched it.
The shore was pale stone. A natural bench, curved, the stone warmed by the same gold that lit the ice.
The air above the lake was warm—warm over cold, the infernal contradiction, the air holding the heat of his domain while the ice held the cold of something made for me.
There was no wind. No sound. No boards, no glass, no Zamboni rumble in the distance.
No crowd holding its breath. No judge with a clipboard.
No eyes in any of the seven realms but his.
He had made it.
He set the boots on the stone.
He knelt.
Fully. Both knees on the pale warmed stone of the shore, the Lord of the High Citadel at my feet.
The embodiment of pride, giving himself to me.
He took my right foot in his hands. He lifted it.
He set the boot on, and his fingers worked the laces with a coach’s certainty—each pull measured, the waxed white cord threading through the hooks with a precision that had nothing to do with haste and everything to do with care.
He tied the first bow.
He took my left foot. Did the same. His hands on my ankles. The bond humming where his fingers touched skin. The iron band cool against the inside of my heel. He tied the second bow. He looked up at me.
“Stand, sweetheart,” he said.
I stood.
The blades bit the stone. The familiar weight settled into my hips, into my ankles, into the small muscles at the outside of the calf that had been asleep since Tokyo and were now, very quietly, waking up.
My body knew. My body had always known. The shift hung around my ankles.
I hitched it, without thinking, the old practical tuck of competition costume, and the white silk gathered at my thighs and stayed.
He stood, removed his boots. His feet were bare—I had no doubt that he had no need of skates.
He took both my hands in his. His palms were warm. The cracks were closed. The gold of him was steady.
“I have you,” he said.
He stepped onto the ice.
Backward. One foot, then the other, his feet finding the gold-lit surface without a sound, and he drew me with him, my hands in his, and the first touch of steel on ice after all those years went through me like a current.
A noise escaped me.
It was not a word. It was the sound a body makes when it remembers something it thought it had forgotten.
The blade took. The edge held. The ice under me was not like any ice I had skated on—it was warmer, somehow, the gold beneath it lending a give to the surface that human ice did not have, and the give was forgiving, and the forgiveness was his.
He drew me out.