“Eat,” he said.
I picked up the peach.
It was cold from the pitcher’s shadow, and it gave under my thumb like something living, and the perfume of it came up and I felt the bond on my wrist go warm again, low, in answer to a thing that had nothing to do with the peach. I bit. The juice ran. He watched me.
I was suddenly extremely aware of my mouth.
I set the peach down.
“You’re not touching me.”
I said it before I had decided to. I said it to the white cloth, not to him, because I was not going to be able to say it to his face. The heat had come into my face again and the heat in my face had nothing to do with the morning.
“No,” he said. Quiet. “I am not.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to choose. You have to feel worthy of my touch.”
It was so absurd I almost laughed. “What if I never feel worthy?”
“Then I will wait,” he replied, simply. “I have waited a very long age for you, Maria. I can wait longer. I will wait as long as it takes to complete the bond.”
I bit my lip. “What does it mean?” I asked. “To—complete it? The bond.”
A beat passed.
“It makes you mine.”
“Wholly. And forever. There is no undoing of it once it is done. Your soul to my soul. Your body to my body. Your life—for you will cease to be mortal, and that is a thing we will speak of later. There would be no end of you that was not also an end of me.”
I stared at him.
I would become immortal?
“I hope you will give yourself to me. I want for it with all my being. But if you do not give it, I will still wake every morning of the age remaining to me grateful that the Veil opened to you, and that I sat across a table from you on the Dawnless Terrace, and watched you eat a peach.”
The bond, on my wrist, went very warm.
I picked the peach back up.
I could not look at him. I ate.
Atonemovedthroughthecitadel.
It was a low sound, not loud, the sort of sound a struck bowl makes. It moved through the marble under my bare feetand through the columns at my left and through the chair I was sitting in, and it set the cold water in the pitcher rippling.
Pride went still.
I watched it happen. The courtly warmth that had been in his face—the small soft thing at the corners of his eyes when he had told me eat, precious one—vanished. His eyes did not change. His mouth did not change. The set of the shoulders changed by a fraction. I felt something beat through him through the bond.
He rose.
“Maria.”
The voice was the formal one. The one from the dais.
“Will you walk with me into the hall.” He stepped back from his chair and waited for me to rise, and when I rose he turned, three-quarters, and gestured me toward the arched door.
