Chapter 3 #3
He said it without theater, with the quiet of a sentence that had been, in his head, a sentence for a long time. The words went into the small warm room and the room took them.
“I’m sorry.”
He raised a pale, strong hand. “Please. There’s no need for sorrow.
His death is not a mortal death. It’s difficult to explain.
He will persist afterward. The way I want.
The way all living creatures want.” He sighed.
“His name does not signify in any tongue you speak,” he said.
“He has sat for an age you cannot count on the obsidian throne at the center of this realm, hell, we call it Infernum, and he is dying on it now, slowly, and the throne does not pass by primogeniture or by combat or by the old cruelties his fathers used. It passes by a Rite. The Rite of Ascension.” He paused.
He looked at the fire. “I have seven brothers. You have met no one yet who could prepare you for them. The Rite will go to the brother who can most closely do the one thing none of us has, until recently, ever been able to do.”
He looked at me then.
“Bond,” he said. “Soul to soul, with a willing human mate.”
I sat very still.
I had, at the soup, given up thinking. I had given up sorting.
I had let the room sit on me in the dark gold of its own logic, and the words he was now putting into it landed not where my analytical mind had been all evening but somewhere lower, behind the small old place where I had carried the manuscript in the drawer.
The bond. Soul to soul. The cold seam of sigils on the inside of my left wrist gave a single small pulse.
“Pride,” he said.
The shimmer along the line of his jaw flickered.
It went, for the half of a heartbeat, a deep slow crimson, the color of a king’s robe held under a low lamp, the color of a velvet curtain drawn at a long opening, a color that in any honest hall had been worn by men who expected to be looked at.
The crimson held the length of the vowel. It went. The oyster came back.
“Greed,” he said.
The gold I had seen in the panel in the gallery came along the cheekbone in a clean unhurried line. It was warmer than I had let myself notice in the panel. It was the color of the inside of a wedding band that had been on a hand for fifty years. It held, and went, and the oyster returned.
“Lust.”
A hot rose-pink at his temple, very brief, the blush of a mouth pressed somewhere it had been wanted, and I had to look away at the fire because the color put a small private heat in my own face and I did not want him to see it.
“Wrath,” he said. The word was the gentlest he had said. The shimmer along his collarbone, where the white of his shirt opened at the throat, ran through, in one thin red line, the color of fire down a fuse. I felt it on the back of my own neck.
“Gluttony.” A muddy purplish-bronze at the inside of his left wrist. “Sloth.” A slow weighted blue-grey at his sternum, the color of standing water in a deep well at noon.
Six.
He stopped.
He did not name the seventh. The shimmer, which had been moving across his body the way weather moves across a long horizon, settled once more, and he looked at me.
“I covet every one of them,” he said. “I have studied each of them, in my own halls, all the long years they have walked in theirs. I have learned each of them as a scholar learns a text. I know the cadence of my brother Pride’s laugh.
I know the precise weight my brother Wrath will give a single word before he uses it to break the spine of an argument.
I know the small pause my brother Lust takes between asking a thing and being given it.
I know the soft cough my brother Greed makes when an offer has been made to him that he will, in the end, accept.
I know my brother Sloth’s breath in his sleep.
I know my brother Gluttony’s appetite by the angle at which he holds his cup. ”
He paused.
“I have been each of them.”
The room held very still around the sentence.
I heard the words. I did not, for several seconds, understand what he had done with them.
I sorted through the verb. The verb was the load-bearing word, the way it had been all evening, and the verb sat in the air of the study with the small administrative wrench of a thing arriving exactly where I had felt, without knowing it, that something was going to arrive.
I have been each of them.
He looked at me steadily.
“I have worn my brothers,” he said. “I have worn them in their own bodies and in mine. I have, at one time or another, been sat in their chairs and spoken in their voices and held the cups they hold by the angle they hold them by. I have made love to women in their beds in their faces. I have taken counsel from my father in their colors. There is, in the long memory of myself, almost no hour in which I have been only myself.”
I tried to speak. My voice did not come up the first time. I found it.
“What are you?” I asked.
I had asked it on the plain. He had answered, then, with the name and the title and the long old roll of the seventh and the oldest, the last rival, the first watcher.
He did not answer now with any of those.
He looked at the fire. He looked at the strip of mirror behind his desk.
He looked, after a long held second, at me.
The shimmer along his cheekbone settled into the absence of color.
It was the pale uncertain inside of an oyster shell that had not, in any of its long years, decided what color it ought to be.
There was a faint hint of every color I had just seen run across him—a memory of crimson, a memory of gold, a memory of rose, a memory of fire—and there was, underneath all of that memory, no native pigment of his own.
“I do not know,” he said.
The two glove fingers of his ungloved hand tightened, very slightly, on the arm of the chair.
“I have not been only myself,” he said, “in a very long time. I cannot, sweetheart, tell you with any honesty what I am, when I am not being someone else. I have learned every other thing in the seven realms before I learned that.” He paused.
He looked at his bare hand on the leather.
“I have a voice. I have a cadence. I have a mouth that says certain words in a certain order when I am alone. I do not know if any of that is mine or whether I have, somewhere in the long centuries, taken it from a man whose name I no longer remember.”
The pilot light behind my ribs—which had been steady for the last hour, warming itself at his palm against my foot, at the soup, at the fire in the grate—did a small shamed lift.
“I have wanted,” he said, “to be anything—anyone—but myself for my whole life. I am Envy, dove.”
He moved his hand on the arm of the chair.
It was a small shift, the kind a body makes when it is preparing itself to say a thing it has not, until this hour, said aloud.
The pale shimmer along the inside of his bare wrist caught the firelight and gave it back muted, the way an oyster shell gives a candle back muted, and I watched it do that, because I did not, just at the moment, have anywhere else for my eyes to go.
“There is one thing more,” he said.
I waited.
“I have read your work, Rachel,” he said.
The fire moved in the grate. I did not, at first, hear the sentence the way I needed to hear it. My brain offered me three soft polite interpretations of it and I rejected all three and waited for the fourth. He gave the fourth.
“I have read every novel that has gone out into your world under the name of the woman in the cream coat,” he said, and there was no mistaking, in his mouth, that he meant her, although he had not said her name and would not, I understood, say it aloud here.
“I have read them in the observatory above this hall, on the night each of them was published, in a chair I do not allow other beings into. I have, in the last nine of your years, ordered each of them brought to me by the hand of a courier who does not know whose hands they go to. I have read, in that chair, a great many of the books your world has thought worthy of attention. There are very few sentences in any of them that I have, in the privacy of my own night, underlined with my thumb. There are, however, some.”
He looked at the fire.
“There was a sentence,” he said. “A line about grief being a country with no embassy. I underlined it with my thumb.” He looked back at me.
“I underlined it the night she—” the small almost-pause of a man not saying a name—“the night her book was published. I sat in the chair with my thumb on the line for a long time, and I thought, the woman who wrote this knows how to hold the load of a sentence, and I envied her.”
I could not, for a long second, breathe.
Margot had skipped that sentence. He had underlined it with his thumb.
He saw it. He did not, the way most men in any of the rooms I had ever sat in would have, look away.
“Three of your months ago,” he said, “the bond began to pull at me. I do not know how to give you the sensation in any language we share. It was not unlike the way I have, all my long life, felt the color of one of my brothers settle in me—an arrival, an absence I had not noticed, the small private wrench behind the eye of a thing being put into place at last. I went looking for the source of it. I expected to find a woman in a cream coat in a townhouse in your borough of Brooklyn. I did not find that woman. I found a woman in a fourth-floor studio on Suydam Street, in a grey hoodie with a frayed half-moon at the cuff, with a manuscript called Salt and Stay in the top right drawer of a desk by a window, and another woman’s name on the work the world had been admiring. ”
He said the title of the manuscript the way he had said his brothers’ names.
“I have not envied her,” he said, “in a single moment since that night. I have envied no one.”
He paused. He looked at me. The shimmer along his cheekbone settled, in this moment, into a color I had not yet seen on him—the pale gold of the inside of a slow long sentence finally given its load-bearing word—and held there, native, his.
“The bond,” he said, “does not complete without your consent, Rachel. Not your nod. Not your I suppose. Not your sorry, all right. Your uncoerced, deliberate, articulated consent. It is the law of the magic and it is, in this matter, also my law.” He waited a beat.
“I am telling you this because you have, by my reckoning, not had a single uncoerced choice put before you in nine years. I want this one to be the first.”
He stood.
I rose with him without meaning to. The chair gave me up.
The wine rug took my bare feet. He did not, this time, put his hand at my back.
He turned, instead, to the wall behind his desk—the long vertical strip of pearled silver—and he did with his fingers the same small inward turn he had done at the door of the study, and the silver went open like a held breath.
Behind it was a room.
It was circular. The walls were mirrored, panel after panel of soft pearled silver running all the way around.
There was no other door. In the center of the floor stood a low bed of dark wood with linens the color of cream that had been left out in the sun, turned back along their edge.
To the right of the bed, set into the floor, a circular tub of mercury-pale water, steaming faintly, the steam rising in slow soft columns into the windless air.
To the left of the bed, folded across a low bench, a robe of grey-green silk.
There were no candles. There was no fire. The light came from the mirrors.
He turned to me, brought his bare palm to the underside of my jaw, and his thumb, very gently, found the small almost-imperceptible ridge along the inside of my left cheek where I had been biting the same molar for a decade.
He found it through the skin. He pressed against it from the outside, very lightly, until the molar on the inside released.
He tilted my face up.
The mercury of his eyes met the hazel of mine.
“I will not come to you tonight, although I want to. I deeply desire it, I lust after it, I have envied the bonds of others my whole life, and I want our bond more than anything,” he said, and his voice in this hour was lower than it had been in any room since he had spoken my name across the held world.
“I want you to know, Rachel, when you decide—that you decided. I will not have you tomorrow, or in any year in any of the ages I am sovereign over, by any other instrument.”
He held my chin a half-second longer.
Then he let me go.
He stepped back across the threshold of the chamber. He inclined his head and the long vertical strip of silver closed behind him with the same held-breath softness with which it had opened.
The seam of the door went into the mirror.
I looked in the panel directly in front of me. The woman in the panel looked back. She did not, for the first time in any of the years I had been carrying her, look away.
The pilot light behind my ribs lifted, a slow blue, and steadied.
I want, the woman in the panel said, in a voice I knew at last to be mine.