“It has. How is your mate, brother?”
Envy smirked. It was strange to think of him with a bonded mate.
“Rachel is very well. Happier than me. More well-adjusted. Comfortable.”
I could feel his jealousy, but there was no malice in it. It felt, strangely, as though he was complimenting her.
“But,” he said. “Our brothers don’t mind that I found someone. None of them believe that I will be chosen to rule. I’m not strong enough, so they say. Not charming enough.”
“You insult yourself, brother.”
“No. I am a realist. I know what I am. I know what I need. But the truth is, now that you have found your mate, there will be trouble.”
There was a beat. The hall held its breath.
“The brothers will not be pleased.” Pride did not answer.
“The brothers,” Envy said, and his voice had the small pleased lift of a person setting a piece down on a board, “have spent a long age praying that the Rite would not, in fact, choose for you. An unchosen Pride, brother, we could ignore. An unchosen Pride could sit in his high citadel and rule his domain and presume to the Obsidian Throne all he liked, and the rest of us could go about our business and pretend not to notice. A chosen Pride. A bonded Pride. Confirmed. By the Veil. With the marks on her, no less, in your colors —“
His pale eyes flickered to my wrist again.
“That is another thing entirely.”
“I am aware, brother, of what it is.”
“Mm.” A small noise. Almost a hum. “I thought you might be.”
He turned, fully, and looked at me at last.
His face did not change. There was no leer. There was no menace. There was only the pale flat attention he had moved around the hall with, now resting, entirely, on me, and the small precise tilt of the head a person makes when they have understood the shape of a problem and have begun, already, to enjoy it.
“And this is she,” he said. “This,” Pride said, “is my mate.”
"Mmhmm." The small hum. "A precious thing."
The words had the flatness of a tag tied to the leg of a chair.
Again, the small hum. “Forgive me, brother. I had wanted to see her with my own eyes. The others will wish to as well. We could not, you understand, simply take your word for it.”
Envy moved.
He came around the long marble floor at an angle that was not quite a circle and not quite a straight line, his hands clasped lightly behind his back, his pale eyes tracking me as he went, and Pride did not move at all.
“She is small.”
The observation was addressed to no one, delivered with the air of an estate-sale appraiser murmuring a chair’s year before writing a number on a card.
“Smaller than I had imagined. I had thought—given the choice of you, brother, given the standard you would have insisted on—that the Veil would have brought a tall one. A queen-tall one. Something to fill out the throne beside you.”
“You are mistaken about my standard.”
“Mmhm. Evidently.”
He came closer.
He had drifted three paces nearer than he had begun, which I noticed because Pride noticed. Pride had not turned his head. The set of his shoulders had not changed. His gaze was still on Envy and only on Envy, and yet the air at my back had moved. Pride had shifted his weight a fraction, the half-pace I stood behind him had become a quarter-pace, and I understood, without looking, that he had stepped backward to meet me. He had closed the gap. He was, by inches, in front of me.
The bond on my wrist made the low warm tone that I was learning meant attend.
