I went down.
I went down hard. The marble met my right hip and the right knee folded under me at the angle it had folded at when I was twenty-one in a black dress with silver beading at the right shoulder, and the small popcorn click that had been the soundtrack of nine years of standing up came back as something much louder, and the pain came up the side of my leg into my hip and into my back, and I made a sound out of my mouth that I had not made in nine years.
I curled forward over the bad leg.
The cougar on my fleece bent in the middle.
My hair came loose at the temple where the wind had moved it earlier, and a piece of it fell across my eye, and there was wet on my face, and I had not known I was crying until the wet got to my mouth.
He was there.
I had not heard him move.
He had crossed the three paces in absolute silence and he was, when I lifted my head, kneeling. On one knee. On the cold gold-veined marble in his white and his gold and his deep wine red, with the fabric pooling around him, and his right hand was extended, palm up, open, level with my face. The dark iron ring on it caught no light at all.
He did not say anything.
He just held the hand there.
I looked at the hand.
I looked at his face.
The gold in his eyes was not measuring me. The gold in his eyes was waiting. There was no pity in it. There was no triumph in it. There was a thing I did not have a word for, the same thing he had held when he had said I have been waiting for you, only quieter, deeper, more patient.
I put my hand in his.
The hall held its breath.
The bond answered.
It answered like fire answering a struck match.
It came up my arm. It came up the inside of my wrist where the pulse lives, and it came up the inside of my elbow, and it came across my shoulder and into my chest, and where the cold tenant had been living under my sternum for nine years it lit the room, it lit the whole room, it lit every dark corner of every hallway in the house that I had been the size of a coat hook in, and the heat of it was not the heat of damage. The heat of it was the heat of something that had been banked for nine years finally getting air.
I saw her.
I saw her with my eyes open, in the gold of his eyes, in the marble of the hall, behind the wet on my face. The black dress with the silver beading at the right shoulder. The hair down. The chin a quarter-inch up. The long clean opening glide. The bright forward-tilt of the body in the moment before the take-off. The take-off itself. The clean landing. The clean one. The one that had never happened. The one that was, suddenly, very clearly, going to.
I saw who I could be.
The fire faded.
It did not go. It banked. It settled. It found the place under the sternum where the cold tenant had been and it sat down in the chair and it crossed its legs and it stayed.
I looked down at my arm.
The skin on the inside of my wrist was marked.
Fine lines. Gold. Moving. The same slow living gold that ran through the veins of the marble all around us, threading down the inside of my forearm in long languid loops. They went up under the sleeve of my hoodie. I did not have to lift the sleeve to know they kept going.
Sigils.
I had no idea what they said. I knew that they were a language, and that the language was old, and that it was naming me.
I lifted my eyes to his.
He was still on one knee. He had not moved.
