Chapter 7
Iwoke into gold.
Not the lavender of his sky, not the cold pale of the citadel’s daylight halls—gold, low and warm and constant, the living vein of the realm thrumming under the dark stone of his private chamber as though the floor itself had a pulse and the pulse had decided, in the night, to match mine.
His shirt was still on me. The wine-red blanket was still drawn up to my shoulder.
His arm was still under my head, the long bare line of his forearm warm against the back of my neck, the iron band cool against the place where my jaw met my throat.
“Good morning, precious one.”
“Good morning, my Lord.”
For a long count, he stayed where he was.
He let me have the gold-lit dim, the warm dark, the small mortal fact of my body fitted against his at the root of a realm I had not yet, in any honest accounting, agreed to keep.
Then he turned toward me, laid his palm at the side of my face as he had in the gallery, and his golden irises gave their long pulse.
“Today,” he said. “If you will have it. We close the bond.”
I inhaled.
“There are things you must understand before you answer, baby. I will say them in front of witnesses. I will ask aloud, as the contract binds me to ask aloud, once a day, for one thing I want. This is the thing I want today. Do you understand.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He rose.
He dressed me himself. Not in the silk shift, not in the white linen of his own shirt that had slept on me all night—in something new, something he lifted from the same low chest the shirts had come from.
A long unornamented robe of pale stone color, soft as water under the hand, the seam at the shoulder closed with a single small clasp of dark iron.
He drew it down over my arms. He fastened the clasp.
He combed my hair down with his fingers and let it fall loose along my back.
He dressed himself in white and gold. Full court. The deep-red sash. Then he opened the door.
The two who entered were not Pride’s household guard.
I knew, the moment they stepped through the arch, that these were older.
They were tall—taller than the fiends I had seen in the passages—with the long lambent skin of the lords’ kind, scaled faintly at the cheekbones and the inside of the wrists, eyes the cool bronze of an unstruck coin.
Greater demons. Archdemons, the bond whispered.
They moved without sound. They stopped three paces from where I stood at the side of the bed, and they did not look at me.
They looked at the floor in front of him.
He set them in place along the far wall with a small motion of his hand. They went where he set them.
He turned back to me.
He crossed the chamber to me, the floor seeming to brighten under each footfall, and he stopped a single pace off, and he sank.
He went to one knee.
My breath stopped.
It was the third clause of his side of the parchment.
I will kneel to you when you require it.
He was not waiting for me to require it.
He was kneeling without being asked, full court, in front of his own archdemons, the great horn-less head of him below the line of my own, his eyes lifted, steady, to find my face.
“Maria Price,” he said. “I am asking aloud. Today, at the long dusk, if you will have it, we will close the bond between us. The closing cannot be undone. Not by my hand. Not by my father’s, nor any of my brothers’.
Not by the throne, should it come to the throne.
Not by the Veil, should the Veil itself be torn again.
The closing is final. It is a thing that lasts as long as I last, and as long as I last is a very long time. ”
He inhaled.
“You will cease to be mortal. The body that crossed the Veil will not be the body that walks out of this chamber tonight. You will be of my kind, of my blood, of my making. You will be ageless, as my kind are. You will be braided to me at a level beneath thought. There will be no end of you, beloved, that is not also an end of me.”
The rings in his eyes did not move.
“I will give you the long age. I will give you the citadel and the gallery and the lake under my sky and every gift I have ever been given by every domain in this realm, and I will give you what I have never given any being, which is the name beneath the title. I will give you my cracks when they form and I will give you my pride when it has to be put down. I will give you the throne if it comes to me, and I will give you the lack of it if it does not, and I will give you, baby, a very great deal of myself I have not yet learned how to give.”
A pause. He had been formulating it somewhere very deep for an entire age.
“Will you have me?”
I stood at my full height. The contract demanded it.
“Yes, my Lord. I will.”
The archdemons at the far wall bowed their heads.
They did it in the same beat. Once, deep, without sound.
He rose.
He came to me. He lifted me into his arms—one beneath my knees, one behind my shoulders, the pale stone-color of the robe falling around us—and he turned, with me, toward the door.
Instead of rising, he descended.
I had assumed up. The parapet was up. The terrace was up. Everything in this citadel that mattered to him had been, until this moment, up.
He went down.
The gold in the marble brightened as we descended.
The living vein that had threaded the upper walls in long measured loops gathered, as we went down, into wider channels, into rivers, into a single broad flood of warm light running along the floor and the walls of the deepest stair.
The air thickened. The faint sweet under-thing I had been smelling on the wind since I arrived gathered into a fragrance I had no name for, the smell of warm metal and old water and something like honey burned at the edge of a flame.
The stair ended at a door. Plain dark stone, no veining, no ornament, like the arch in the gallery—only this one was at the very bottom of him, and through it the gold did not bleed dimmer. Through it the gold roared.
He set me on my feet.
He laid his palm on the dark stone. The door opened as all the doors of his realm opened for him, without sound, without hurry, without any acknowledgment that the opening was a thing.
The chamber beyond was carved from the living stone of the realm, deep and round and warm, the walls slick with the wet glow of living gold, and at the heart of it, sunk into the floor in a wide unornamented basin of pale stone, was a well of liquid light.
Not lit from above. Lit from below. Gold rising from the dark beneath the citadel like the deep steady breath of something that had been breathing for an age and would breathe for another.
The wellspring.
I recognized it immediately, as I had recognized the gallery and the chamber of the failing king.
This was the source. Of every gold vein in every wall of his citadel.
Of the gold under the ice he had made me.
Of the gold in his gaze, in his blood, in the marks at my wrist that braided his with mine.
The root of his power. The most hidden place in his domain.
He had brought me to be bound at the heart of him.
He turned me to face him at the edge of the basin.
The pale stone of the rim was warm under the soles of my bare feet. The light from the well rose past my hips in a steady column and lit the underside of his jaw, the long line of his throat.
He lifted his hands to the single clasp at my shoulder.
He undid it without looking. He drew the long pale robe down the line of my arm, inch by inch, echoing the removal of the cotton at the chair, and the robe fell along my back and pooled at my ankles on the warm stone, and I stood at the edge of the source of his realm in nothing at all.
He stepped back a single pace.
He looked.
He had brought something precious down into the deepest part of himself to bind it, and for one count he simply looked.
And the panic came up the back of my neck like a tide.
I had a body. That was all. No boots on it.
No shift on it. No long pale braid pulled tight to the temple, no smooth competition costume hiding the soft places, no rink uniform doing the small daily work of disappearing me.
There was no jump I could take here. No long opening glide.
No clean edge to set against the wrong one in Tokyo and earn, with a single landed lutz, the right to be looked at.
There was only the body. My height, with the rounding all those years of hunching had given it.
The dense small frame I had inherited from a mother who had never said the word beautiful about me in her life.
The faint old surgical scar at the right knee.
The right eyebrow, only half-there from the fall at twelve.
The crookedness of my nose. The pale skin, too pale, from a decade under rink fluorescents.
I had a body and there was nothing for it to do.
That was the whole terror. Without the performing, what was I? Without the landing, what was there to see. The old voice came up in me, steady and constant, you are the woman who fell, you are the woman who fell, you are the woman who fell, look at her, look at what she is.
My shoulders began to round.
He saw it. He saw it through the bond before he saw it in the line of my body. The braid at my wrist flared a quick precise warning, a band of heat from the pulse to the elbow, the contract saying no, the contract saying you promised. His voice joined it at the same moment.
“No, baby.”
Low. Even. Beautiful.
“No. Stay. Stand.”
I stood.