Not gold. Every color at once.
Chapter 5
Theflareattheinside of my left wrist lit the gallery.
Every color at once, a spill of pale fire along the web of veins beneath the skin, lighting the mirrored corridor with a white so bright I saw it in every panel, every direction, caught and thrown back by the endless reflections: the woman on her knees, hands twisted in the lapels of a man who had never belonged to anyone until her; the man, his cheekbone catching the gold and then the gold again, brighter every time, a blaze at the temple, a rapture at the jaw. I watched it as if from underwater. The world ran electric through my body, up the column of my neck and into the soft palate of my mouth, down my spine and out to the ends of my toes, where they curled into the polished black stone as though that was the only anchor left.
The shimmer along his cheekbone caught the light and did not, for several seconds, let it go.
I understood, in the aftermath, that I had been holding my breath. I understood, after the flare, that the gallery had gone quiet. The hush after a spell, the hush after a verdict, the hushthat sits on a room when all of the air has been made holy by a single word.
I looked up.
He was looking at me. Not in the panel, not in the mirror, but at me. The mercury of his eyes held steady. The hand at the small of my back—still gloved, I realized; he had not risked the bare skin—stayed there, holding my body in place, taking up every tremor the flare had left behind. He did not ask if I was all right. He did not, in any of the ways that men I had known before would have, try to soften the moment with a joke or a smile or a retreat. He let the magic be what it was, and in the letting, made it possible to survive it.
His hand came up to my cheek.
The gloved knuckles ran slow along the arch of my cheekbone, from the hollow at the base up to the rim of my orbit, and the pressure of it, feather-soft and then not, was the first real thing I felt since the bond had ignited. I closed my eyes to it, and the hand followed, thumb brushing the edge of my cheek with the slow patience of a person lifting something delicate out of a kiln.
I made a sound. I could not help it.
His hand at my back steadied. He shifted his weight down and forward, pressing his knee to the stone, so we were matched in height again, and he brought our foreheads together. The angle of it meant his mouth was at my ear. The heat of him there, the exact heat I had felt along the inside of my thigh in the gallery, ran into me like a story told for my ear alone.
“Come back,” he said, very quietly. “Come back, dove.”
The voice was not the gallery voice. It was not the courtly, old, careful register. It was the voice you would use if you had been sitting at a bedside for a week and the body in the bed finally drew a breath.
He did not move to stand until I made a sound of assent.
He helped me up, and the black-gloved hand did not leave the small of my back until my legs had agreed to be legs again. He held my weight as if I weighed nothing at all. He pulled me upright with the ease of a man lifting a girl out of a swimming pool.
I tried to pull myself together.
The world had not, in the time I had been gone, done me the favor of becoming less strange. The gallery was still the gallery, the black mirrored stone under my feet and the silver panels at either hand, each giving me back a thousand angles of the woman in the charcoal shirt and the man in the coat. But the me in the panel was different now, and I had to look, if only for a second, to confirm that she had survived it.
She had. She looked alive, even more alive than the last time I had seen her.
He took my left hand.
He turned it, slowly, between his hands, the way a person might turn a piece of wet glassware in the sun to see whether the surface had come out the way the artist had wanted.
“Beautiful,” he said, and I did not flinch at the word.
He led me.
Not back up the gallery, not through the public route, but a side door I had not seen before, a seam so fine in the mirror it looked like a trick of the light. The door opened without a sound, as if the palace itself was trying not to disturb what had just been made in the corridor. Beyond it, a spiral stair: black stone, shallow steps, no rail. The kind of stair you would design if you were immortal and had never once tripped in your life.
I followed.
I could feel the new pulse of the bond in every part of my body; the sigils under the skin, the hollow of my lower back, the slow blue pilot light behind my ribs that had, in the instant of the flare, changed to something else.
At the top of the stairs: a door. Not a mirror, not silver, but old wood, dark and bare and matte.
He paused at it.
He turned back to look at me, and the shimmer along his cheekbone was a steady gold.
“This will be overwhelming,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”
