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’srobe 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 smallpause 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 amEnvy, 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.
