We walk down the mountain together. The morning is cold and clear, and somewhere ahead of us is a portal, and beyond it a city. In that city an ancient stone that will read our hearts and tell us if what we've built in five days is strong enough to hold.
The beast is quiet.
I reach for her hand.
MAREN
This portal spits us out into noise.
A pressure behind my eyes, a wrongness in my stomach, and then somewhere else. My ears pop. My vision blurs and clears and blurs again, and the world reassembles itself around us: a stone courtyard, people pushing past on both sides, the noise of a city pressing in from every direction.
Korsmot.
Kovren's hand tightens on mine. His grip is too firm, the tendons standing out across the back of his hand, and when I look up his eyes are moving. The crowd, the exits, the rooftop lines. His shoulders have climbed toward his ears.
“Breathe,” I tell him.
He breathes. His grip loosens. Slightly.
The courtyard feeds into a broad avenue paved with flat river stones worn smooth by decades of cart traffic. The smell hits before anything else. Cook fires, animal dung, spices I can't identify, the sour tang of too many bodies in too little space. Korsmot has seen monsters before. People give Kovren space without being asked, bodies angling away, paths curving wider. He notices. His fingers flex around mine.
The central market is enormous, open-air stalls sprawling in every direction. At the far end, a complex of stone buildings rises above everything else. Old stone, dark with weather and age.
The Bride Market.
I stop walking and look at it.
I'd imagined something squalid. Livestock pens. Instead, the complex is orderly, almost institutional. People flow in and out of the doors — men, women, things that are neither — and the traffic has the feel of routine.
A woman exits the main building with a creature beside her, tall and strange, too many joints in his fingers. She's holding his arm. Not being held. Holding. Her chin is up and her stride is certain.
We register. A bored clerk, a thick ledger, Kovren's pouch on the counter. The clerk's handwriting gets neater when he counts the gold.
Number forty-seven. Tomorrow afternoon, platform three. The binding stone ceremony, paid for and scheduled.
“Where is the stone?” I ask. “Can I see it today?”
The clerk blinks. “Gallery's open for the fourth bell ceremony. Around the side of the temple. Follow the signs.”
Outside, Kovren stays close behind me. “You want to see the stone.”
“I want to know what I'm standing in front of tomorrow.”
He doesn't argue.
The temple is the easternmost building of the complex, set apart by a narrow courtyard. The architecture is different here. Older. The stone is darker and smoother, worn by hands and weather until the surface has a sheen to it. No columns, no ornamentation. Just a heavy door and walls so thick they must go three feet deep.
The gallery entrance is a narrow staircase on the side. We climb. Kovren has to turn sideways and duck, his shouldersscraping the walls regardless. At the top, a balcony overlooks the temple floor.
I look down.
The space below is circular, open, lit by high windows that angle the late afternoon sun across bare stone. At the center stands something that is not stone and not metal and not wood.
The binding stone.
It's taller than I expected. Eight feet, maybe nine, a rough column that tapers slightly toward the top. The surface is dark, almost black, but when the light catches it, I see colors moving underneath. Not on the surface. Inside. Deep, shifting, alive in a way that stone should not be.
Two people stand before it. A woman, young, dark-skinned, in a plain dress with her hair braided close to her head. Beside her, a creature I don't recognize. Broad, gray-skinned, with a heavy brow and hands that hang past his knees. He's looking at her. She's looking at the stone.
