His hands were on the cold pale marble of the parapet. Both of them. The fissures were closed, or mostly closed—I saw the faint white line at the back of his right hand from across the parapet, a hairline, a thread, still bleeding the smallest amount of raw white light—and he was utterly still, a thing built to bear.
His back remained to me.
I knew, somewhere, that he had felt me come up the stair. I knew because the bond spoke to me, and I knew it spoke to him, too. He had felt me at the second door. He had felt me at the mirror. He had felt me on every step.
I crossed the parapet. The marble under my bare feet was cold. The wind moved the hem of the shift around my ankles. I came up behind him, and then beside him, and I put my left hand on the cold marble of the rail next to his right hand.
His breath caught.
I lifted my right hand.
I lifted it and I laid the marked inside of my wrist against the back of his right hand, gold to gold, the living sigils to the faint hairline of raw white light, and I held it there.
He went very still, then let out the breath.
“You should not be here, precious one.”
The voice was hoarse.
“I know.”
“You need time. I must not pressure you.”
“I understand.” He turned and I moved my hand, pushing it flat against his chest.
I felt the place where the cracks had been, the low broken light still warm under the white-and-gold fabric, the even beat of him underneath that.
I lifted my other hand. I put it at the side of his face.
I drew his forehead down to mine.
He let me, with the same surrender he had given last night when he had come down off the dais and stopped three paces off—the quiet yielding of someone long resolved, on principle, not to move this woman unless she chose it.
“Listen to me,” I said.
I spoke quietly, with the small clean weight of something that did not need saying twice.
"I will not be moved across anyone's board. Not your brother's. Not your father's. Not, my Lord, even yours."
I felt him go still under my hands.
"He stood in your hall," I said, "and he told me to make you finish this. Quickly. Before anyone could argue it. He made yourwaiting sound like a danger to me. He made your patience sound like a thing you ought to be ashamed of. And I think he wanted me to carry it up here, and set it down in front of you, and watch it land."
The hairline of white at the back of his hand pulsed, once, under my wrist.
"I am not going to do that."
I pressed my forehead harder against his.
"If I give you the bond—if—it will not be because a man in a coat the color of dark water frightened me into it. It will not be because the Veil opened, or the Rite chose, or you are owed it, or it is simply the next thing that happens. It will be because I looked at you on a parapet with the light still coming out of you, and I decided. And a thing I decide, no one unmakes." A breath. "Not one of your brothers. Not all of them in a row. Not the throne they are so frightened you will sit in. No one."
A small sound left him: the sound of someone who had not been held, seen, or spoken to without first being measured in a very long age.
I felt the gold on my wrist warm against his chest, and the small last hairline of white close at the back of his hand, and his next breath tremble faintly.
“Welcome home,” he said.
Chapter 4
