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 anyother entity’s color. It was just forus, 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.
