Chapter 4 #3
It went around a long mirrored bend—the small narrow oval mirrors set into the bare stone at intervals, the wood-framed ovals, six of them along the curve, each giving me back a slice of a woman in dark trousers and a charcoal shirt walking with her left wrist held a fraction higher than her right—and gave, on the far side of the curve, onto a gallery I had not seen.
Mirrored on both walls.
It was the narrowest gallery I had been in.
The two walls of it stood not eight feet apart, panel after panel of pearled silver in narrow black frames running the length of it on either side, and the floor between them was the same black mirrored stone as the great hall above.
The corridor I was walking in had no door at the end.
It simply opened, after one more step, into the gallery, the way one room opens into another in a dream.
He was standing in the middle of it.
He had his back three-quarters turned, his shoulders square to the panel on the right-hand wall, and he was looking at his own reflection in the mirror.
He was not looking at himself with vanity.
He was not looking at himself with appraisal.
He was looking at his own face the way a man looks at a face he is learning.
The head tilted a fraction off true. The shoulders dropped, lower than I had seen him hold them, almost hesitant, as though the shoulders were not certain whether they were allowed to be at this height.
The chin was up. The mouth was relaxed. The eyes—those mercury eyes—were on the eyes in the panel.
The shimmer along his cheekbone was the pale uncertain color I had seen on him exactly once, last night, at the moment he had spoken of me.
His own.
He was studying it. I understood, watching him, that he was studying his own face the way a man studies a language he has decided, late in his life, to learn.
He saw me in the mirror.
He did not turn. He did not move his head a fraction off the angle he had set it at. The mercury of his eyes shifted in the panel by the smallest possible degree and met the hazel of mine across the silver, and the wire at my wrist went tight and steady and gold.
I stopped.
I had rehearsed, in the long count of dressing in the chamber and the longer count of walking down the stairs and through the corridor of his coveted things, a speech.
I had rehearsed it the way I had once rehearsed answers to questions journalists were going to ask the woman in the cream coat, with the small precise patience of a person who knew that the unrehearsed sentence was the sentence that always betrayed her.
I had it ready. I had it ordered. I had the load-bearing word of every line.
The speech did not come out the way I had it.
“You’re the demon of envy,” I said.
My voice in this gallery was not the voice I had practiced. It was thinner. It was also somehow surer, as though the thinness had taken some apparatus off it that I had not, until now, known the apparatus was on.
He did not move.
“You will always—you will always want what someone else has more than you want me.”
Still he did not move. The mercury of his eyes in the panel held mine. I felt him listen with his whole body.
“I have been second my whole life,” I said.
The sentence came out flatter than I had meant it.
Flat with a long unsaid weight under it.
“Second to her. I am very good at it. I am—I have been—sort of the best at it. Swallowing myself. Ignoring my one envy, my own need.” I paused, feeling my words.
“I have a—a method. I have a method for being second. I cannot—”
The shimmer along his cheekbone in the panel flickered. The pale uncertain color stayed.
“I cannot survive,” I said, “being second to you.”
My voice cracked on survive. It did not crack the way voices cracked in books.
It did not break. It opened a small clean private fissure on the v of the verb, the way a sheet of ice opens on a held weight, and the rest of the word came across the fissure carrying the load with it.
I did not apologize for the crack. I did not, for once in the whole long catalogue of nine years, route the load away.
He did not turn.
He spoke to my reflection. He did it with the care of a man who had understood, with the long old courtesy of his nature, that I had come to him through a mirror and was, for this minute, asking to be answered through one.
“Every want I have ever had,” he said, “was borrowed.”
The voice carried in the narrow gallery. The mirrors took it from one panel to the next along both walls in a long quiet conversation.
“I have worn my brothers’ appetites,” he said, “in my brothers’ bodies. I have lived, dove, in a long borrowing.”
He paused.
“You are the first thing,” he said, “I have ever wanted as myself.”
The pale gold along his cheekbone brightened by the smallest possible measure. It held.
“Last night,” he said, and the voice in the gallery dropped a fraction—not in volume, in a kind of register I had not heard him in until that moment—“what I felt from you also came from me. It was not a borrowing. It was not a copy. It was not any other entity’s color.
It was just for us, Rachel. It was the first private thing of my long memory.
I have never, in any of my long centuries, wanted anything as only myself until I wanted you. ”
The shimmer went the pale gold I had felt on my own wrist when I had come in the tub. It held a beat. It held two. It settled.
He turned from the mirror.
It was the first movement he had made since he had seen me in the panel.
He crossed the distance in three strides and then he was before me, right there, looking at me. He did not lift a hand.
I understood what he was waiting for.
He was waiting for the step. He was waiting for the small uncoerced articulated motion of a body moving toward him by its own decision.
I gave it to him, moved in closer, so close I could smell him. That warm, clean, metallic smell, spice underneath it, passion, forbidden lust, all mixed together.
His left hand came up.
He tilted my face up.
The mercury of his eyes. The pale gold along the cheekbone. The mouth I had not, until this moment, allowed myself to look at directly.
He kissed me.
It was not soft. It was the kiss of a man who had waited centuries for a mouth and had decided, on arriving at it, that the mouth would not be made small by the wait.
Hot. Precise. Without theater. With absolute attention to the load-bearing point—the lower lip, the place where the lower lip met the upper, the small soft inside corner where the breath came out—and he found the load on the first try, the way he had found the line in another woman’s book with his thumb, and he held it.
I opened on the second pull.
The mirrors took us.
The mirrors took us from every angle, and because I had walked into a gallery mirrored on both walls, there was no panel I could look at that did not show me a woman in a charcoal shirt being kissed by a man in a long black coat.
The panel directly beyond his right shoulder gave me the side of him and the front of me—the long line of his jaw under the pale gold, the small shocked open of my mouth on his.
The panel beyond my own right shoulder gave me the back of him and the front of me—the spread of his gloved hand at the base of my skull, the tendons of my own neck.
The polished black ceiling above us, which I had not, until now, registered as mirror, gave me the long line of the two of us from above, his gloved hand a black star at the back of my head, my own hands rising slowly into the front of his coat.
I did not look away.
The sigils along the inside of my left forearm, under the long charcoal cuff, flared gold.
I felt them go before I saw them. The cold seam went warm in one long unbroken pull, the way the wick of a lamp takes oil, and the gold ran the length of my forearm up under the cuff and into the back of my hand and into the fingers that were, at this moment, fisting in the front of his coat.
My knees gave.
They did not buckle. He felt it—I felt him feel it—and he did not hold me up.
He went down with me. He went down with the same unhurried discipline with which he had crossed the gallery, both of us lowering together along the long axis of his arm, the gloved hand still at the back of my skull, the right hand still at his side, and the floor of the gallery—black, mirrored, cool—came up and met our knees.
We were kneeling.
Both of us, in the middle of the narrow mirrored gallery, kneeling.
The mirrors took it from a hundred angles.
The man in every panel held the woman in every panel by the back of her head and kept his right hand at his side, and the woman in every panel had her hands fisted in the front of his coat, and the gold along her left forearm ran under her cuff, and her mouth was open on his.
I pulled him into me.
Both fists in the lapels.
The sound broke him.
He made a sound back—small, low, almost inaudible, the sound of a man losing a hand of his discipline—and pulled back.
An inch.
He did not let me go. He simply lifted his mouth one inch off mine and brought his forehead down to my forehead, and the bone of his brow met the bone of my brow, and the pulse at the base of my throat hammered against the underside of his jaw.
He breathed.
I breathed.
The mirrors held us there.
“Rachel.”
I felt his need, his want.
“I cannot have you like this,” he said. “Not yet.”
I made a small sound in the back of my throat.
“The bond does not complete without your consent in writing,” he said. The breath of the words moved on the bridge of my nose. “It is the law of the magic, dove. It is also my law. I told you this last night and I meant it last night.”
The gloved hand at the back of my skull tightened by a fraction that was not a fraction.
“I will not take a single thing from you in this gallery,” he said, “that I cannot keep.”
“I don’t want you careful,” I said.
The words came up out of me without the small old apparatus in front of them. No sort of. No I think. No qualifier.
“I want the bare hand,” I said. The sentence opened on its own. “I do not want you careful with me. I want—I want what you didn’t come to me with last night.”
I did not apologize for telling him. The not-apologizing took the shape, in my chest, of a small private opening, the kind a door does when it has at last been opened from the right side.
He closed his eyes against it.
The pale gold along his cheekbone deepened by a single shade. The shimmer held.
“Yes,” he said. “I know, dove. I know.”
He pulled me, then, against the front of him.
He did it with the gloved hand. The right stayed at his side.
He brought his hand from the back of my skull down along the line of my spine and curved his arm at the small of my back, and he pulled me against him, and I felt—through the dark soft cloth of his coat, against the bone of my hip, along the long held line of his thigh—exactly what the discipline was costing him.
He was hard.
He was hard the long full length of him, hard against my hip, hard with the slow heavy heat I had felt on the wire last night when the bare palm had closed around something that had not been my instep.
I felt it. He let me feel it. He did not move into me.
He did not, with the gloved hand at the small of my back, do the small old motion a man would have done in any room I had ever been in, the use of the press to take.
He held me there. He let me know, against the bone of my hip, that the not-taking was a thing he was choosing in real time, with the body that wanted to be doing the opposite of choosing.
It was, the way the not-reaching had been in the gallery, the most erotic thing in the room.
“Will you sign?” he asked.
His mouth was at my hair. The voice was low—impossibly low. The breath of the question moved at the part along the crown of my head.
“Tell me you will sign,” he said. “Tell me three times, Rachel. The bond will hold a yes said three times. I want the bond to have it.”
I lifted my face.
“Yes,” I said.
It cracked. It cracked the way survive had cracked. The fissure came across the s and the rest of the word carried the load over it.
The pale gold along his cheekbone took a deeper note.
“Yes,” I said.
The second one came out steadier. There was no fissure in it. The voice that gave it was the voice that had said the speech in the gallery, the thinner surer voice, the one with the apparatus off it.
He did not move. The gloved hand at the small of my back held.
I drew a breath.
I gave him the third one.
“Yes,” I said.
The sigils along the inside of my left forearm flared.
Not gold. Every color at once.