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 anylanguage 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.
Chapter 4
