The face I had been looking at—the magnificent, the perfect, the courtly, the unflinching—had changed.
It had cracked.
Love. I do not know what else to call it. Love, raw, unpracticed, ancient and new at once, on the face of a being who had not been taught how to wear it and did not, in that moment, care.
His fingers tightened around mine.
“Welcome home,” he said.
Chapter 3
Whitesilkoverhead,gatheredto a point and falling open at the four corners of a bed I had no memory of falling asleep in. White silk at the windows, moving in a wind that smelled of cold water and clean stone. White linen against my skin, where my fleece and my leggings and my doubled white trainers had, at some point in the night, been replaced with a long pale shift that fell to my ankles and, I noticed with the small distant attention of a body still half asleep, had no seams I could find.
The gold on my wrist was warm.
The sigils had not faded. They traced long languid loops up the inside of my forearm and disappeared under the loose sleeve of the shift. Warm to the touch and warm from the inside both.
I sat up.
The chamber was the size of my entire apartment in Spokane Valley and then some. Pale marble floor. Pale stone walls hung with more of the white silk. A low table with a pitcher of water on it, beaded with cold. A long mirror, a screen of cut stone in a frame of pale gold.
I pressed my marked wrist to my chest. The bond gave a low warm tone under the sternum, then went still.
There was a door to my right, a tall arch of pale gold, with the white silk pulled back on either side and tied with a length of dark wine-red cord, and beyond it was light—bronze going to lavender at the edges, the same impossible morning sky I had seen through the colonnade last night, and the long unbroken line of a marble shelf jutting out over a drop I could not see the bottom of.
I got up.
The shift moved against me as I moved, cool, and comfortable. I had never worn anything quite like it.
I crossed the marble to the door. The terrace opened in front of me.
A colonnaded shelf of the same gold-veined white marble, the columns shorter here, more intimate, and beyond the columns, nothing — sky going from a deep warm bronze at the low horizon up through long bands of rose and lavender. Far below, very far, the suggestion of land. Other realms, I thought. The word came without my asking. Other domains. Other brothers.
In the middle of the terrace, a low table had been set for two.
White cloth. Pale gold plates. A shallow bowl piled with white peaches, the skins blushed at the cleft. A dark stoppered jar. A small loaf of bread, torn open at one end. A pitcher of something cold. Two cups. Two chairs.
Pride was in one of them.
He rose when I stepped onto the terrace. The same fluid effortless lifting of the body I had watched him do on the dais last night, the white-and-gold fabric falling perfectly around him as he came to his full height.
He stayed exactly where he was, behind his chair, one hand resting along the back of it, and he looked at me. He looked at the shift, and the bare feet, and the marked wrist held against mychest, and the loose hair at my temple. His eyes gleamed with the same recognition he had held on me last night across forty feet of marble. The hall has set a place. The guest is here.
“Good morning, precious one.”
The voice was quiet. The terrace carried it to me, as the hall had.
“Good morning,” I said.
I said it small. I was not entirely sure my voice was going to come out. It did.
He gestured to the other chair.
“Will you sit?”
I crossed the marble to the chair and I sat. He waited until I had sat. Then he sat.
He poured my water without his fingers touching mine on the cup. He turned the bowl of peaches so the best of them was nearest to me, and his hand did not graze my wrist. He tore the bread, set the larger half on my plate, and drew his own hand back across the white cloth and folded both of his hands in his lap.
