The chamber was as I had left it. The bed, with the white silk turned back. The pitcher of cold water. The mirror, with the tea towel still draped over it from above. The arched door to the Dawnless Terrace was closed, now, the wine-red cord untied and the silk fallen across the opening, and the morning was somewhere outside it doing its bronze-into-lavender thing without me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and what happened next was not what I had been expecting.
The bond opened.
The low warm tone under my sternum, the one I had been getting used to, the one that hummed and stilled and hummed again as if it had a small life of its own, did not hum. It opened. A door inside me swung wide, mirroring the chamber wall that had opened to the terrace that morning, and through it came —
Him.
Not him in body. Him in everything else. It came as sensation, not as words. It came up the inside of my wrist where the markswere, and it came up the inside of my forearm, and it came across my shoulder, and into my chest.
I felt him. His feelings.
The first was shame.
Not my shame. Bigger than my shame. Older than my shame. Grander. The shame of having been seen breaking. The breaking stung, but not as much as being seen by me and his brother.
The shame was on top. Under the shame: terror. An ancient cornered terror.
And deeper still, under the terror: fury.
Fury at himself. Fury at the cracks themselves, at the muscles of his face that had not held, at the body that had betrayed him. Fury, white and hot, the white of the light that had bled out of him. Fury that had been on the verge of becoming something else, something he had been holding back —
Under the fury, the heat.
The fissures were still open. He was not in front of me, he had walked away down the passage, but I felt them. I felt them on the inside of my own jaw, on the back of my own right hand, down the line of my own right temple. Hot. The heat of air over a fire; the heat of a flush when the body has been told something the mind has not caught up to yet.
Under the heat —
Under everything —
The want.
The want to know that his pride was not unfounded.
It was so raw it frightened me.
It was so raw that a small sound escaped me, in the empty chamber, into the white silk, and did not entirely belong to me either.
And under the want, last, smallest, the worst of it all—he was gripping cold marble. He was somewhere very high in the citadel, somewhere far above me, and his hand was onsomething cold, on a parapet or a sill or the arm of a chair I could not see, and his hand was holding the cold marble so hard it hurt him, and he was alone.
The isolation of pride.
I pressed my marked wrist to my chest. I could not bear it. I could not bear that he was alone with it.
I stood up. I put my hand on the latch and opened the door. I had to find him.
I do not entirely know how I knew where to go. The bond knew. Out of the silk chamber. Down the long marble passage. Up a stair I had not seen before. Up another stair. Across a colonnade open to the lavender-going-deeper sky, the wind moving cool against the shift and against my bare arms.
Up another stair.
I came out onto a high place.
It was the highest place. I understood that the moment I saw it. A narrow parapet of pale marble, gold-veined, jutting out from the body of the citadel into the open air, the columns shorter here, the sky bigger, the drop on three sides absolute. The light was the cool deep lavender of late afternoon in a sky that did not have an afternoon.
He was at the far rail.
His back was to me.
