Envy’s eyes had not left my forearm. “The marks,” he said, mildly. “Forgive me, brother, but I am interested to see them. Wrath’s took, I am told, but I was not present for the ceremony. Greed’s, also. And of course, mine. May I.”
“No.”
“I will not touch her.”
“You will not approach her.”
“Brother.”
He had stopped two paces off. He tilted his head. The thin smile was on him again, the smile that was not a smile.
“I am simply curious.”
“You are not.”
“I am always simply curious. It is the only thing I am ever doing.” He lifted one hand, palm up, in the coaxing gesture used on a wary horse. “May I see them. From here.”
The sleeve had ridden up again. I tugged at it. Envy’s eyes followed the tug, with a small soft pleasure that did not belong to him.
“They are very fine,” he said. “Yours, brother. Unmistakably. The color, the loop of the curl, the small flourish at the wrist bone — that is your hand, I would know it anywhere.” He paused. He looked, for a moment, at nothing — at the air a few inches above my wrist, where the marks were — and the small precise tilt came into his head, the tilt of a man who has understood the shape of a problem.
"Confirmed by the Veil," he said. "The marks on her. In your colors." A beat. "And not sealed."
Pride said nothing.
"Forgive me, brother. When I heard, I confess I assumed it would be done by now. The others closed theirs before the marks had cooled. Wrath inside the hour. Greed before the poor woman had stopped shaking. Even mine." The thin smile. Was hy lying? Something in his voice . . .
"And you, with the finest of them—the one the Veil went to such trouble over—have left yours hanging in the open air like a question half-asked." He hummed, low. "How unlike you. Or. How unlike what we were given to expect."
He turned, then, and looked at me. Fully. It was the first time, and it was worse than the pricing had been, because the pricing had at least kept its distance, and this did not.
"You should ask him to finish it," he said.
His voice was gentle, the voice that had learned to be easy to be near, addressed to me alone as though Pride had stepped out of the hall.
"An open bond is a thing the whole domain may argue over. A claim half-made is a claim other hands can reach for. A closed one, no one touches — not the brothers, not the throne, not anything that walks. He will not tell you that. He is far too proud to ask you for a single thing." The tilt. "So I will ask it for him. Tell him to seal it. Soon." A small pause, almost kind. "For your sake. Rather more than his."
"Which is strange counsel from me, I grant you." Lightly, almost to himself. "My brothers would by far prefer it stayed open. They are praying it stays open." He let that rest where I could see it. "You might ask yourself why the one of us they sent to look at you is the one standing in his hall telling you to close it."
He left the question unanswered. He had no intention of answering it. He set it down in front of me with everything else, stepped back, and looked, mildly, pleased.
"Unless," he said—and here the voice softened further, which I was learning was the thing to be afraid of—"she will not have you."
He was not looking at me now. He was looking at Pride.
"That is the other reason a bond hangs this long, brother. Not patience. Not principle, whatever you tell yourself on the high parapet at night. A mate saying no without ever saying it out loud."
The light in the hall changed.
Pride was cracking.
There was a fissure at the line of his jaw, fine, hairline, no wider than a thread, and inside the fissure there was light. Not gold. Not the warm honey-and-candle gold of him. White. Raw white. The white of the inside of a star, of a thing that had notbeen seen and was not supposed to be seen, and the fissure at his jaw was joined by a fissure at the back of his right hand, and a fissure ran from his right temple down into the collar of his white-and-gold tunic, and the light from all of them began to bleed.
It bled into the air around him.
It crossed the marble. It lit the columns from underneath. It lit the gold veins running through the stone from within, and it lit me—I felt it on my face, I felt it on my forearms, I felt it on the back of my neck—and it lit Envy.
Envy stepped back a single pace. He did it without breaking the line of his shoulders, without lifting a hand, without changing the set of his mouth, but he stepped back. The pale flat eyes had narrowed by a fraction. The hands behind his back had unclasped. He had, somewhere inside himself, made a quick adjustment.
