Mydreamswerestrangeand I woke alone. There was a folded square of pale paper on the pillow beside my head.
The paper was the color of cream. The handwriting was beautiful—languid characters that knew exactly how much space they were allowed to take.
Precious one — I have business below that will not wait. I will return before the long dusk. The citadel is yours. Walk where you wish. The doors will open. When I return, we will discuss your choice, the contract I am preparing for you. Eat. — P.
The bond made the low warm tone under my sternum. Welcome, it meant, this time. Not warning.
I got up.
There was a robe at the foot of the bed and a pair of slippers in pale leather. I put both on, and looked at myself in the mirror.
She was still me. Not taller. Not, in any ordinary sense, changed.
My hair was the same long brown, the braid at my left shoulder, the loose strands at the temple. My face was still myface, with the right eyebrow only half-there from the skating fall at twelve, and the faint crookedness of the nose I had inherited from my father, and the mouth that I had always thought was the one good thing about my face, though even at my prettiest I had never been what the other girls called pretty-pretty. I was not beautiful, and I was not, in this light or any other, magnificent.
But something had changed. The gold on my wrist was not the only gold in me, now. It was in my eyes, now. Not the lamplit gold of Pride’s hall, not the living current that moved the marks beneath my skin—but a cast to the whites, a faint metal glow at the corners of the iris, as if the bond had put a candle in behind my face and let it burn. I had the sudden, private intuition that if Nova saw me, she would notice it at once. She would say, Coach Maria, your eyes look like rings, and I would have to say, I know, love, I know. I almost smiled, and then I did, and the smile was not the one I wore for children or parents or for anybody, really, but me.
I left the chamber.
The guard at the foot of the passage did not turn his head when I came past, which I took, correctly, as the small dignified version of being acknowledged. He was tall, scaled at the cheekbones, in a long charcoal coat that reflected the light rather than swallowing it. He was Pride’s. The bond knew.
The citadel let me have it.
Door after door opened to me without my touching them—a courtyard of pale gold-veined stone where a fountain ran in measured loops; a library whose shelves climbed past my eye into a vault of dim lavender; a long colonnade open to the bronze-going-rose horizon, the wind moving cool through my hair and through the loose sleeves of the robe.
The chambers got grander.
A hall of pale water in which long silver fish moved with the measured weight of his handwriting. A chamber whose floor was a single slab of polished obsidian and whose walls were hung, every one, with weapons. A small high room with a single chair in it and a window onto a sky no one would believe me about later.
And then, at the end of a colonnade I had not seen before, the gallery.
I knew, the moment I stepped into it, that this was the room. I do not know how. The rink-coach part of me, the part that had spent years walking into facilities and knowing, by the third step, which board they would not let me coach at—the same part knew this. This was the room he had wanted me to find.
It was long. Longer than the hall I had stood in last night.
It was lit by no source I could locate. The light was just present, soft, the color of late afternoon in a sky I would never paint from memory and get right. The walls were the same pale gold-veined marble. The floor was inlaid, in a long unbroken pattern, with the symbol of each of the seven domains—somehow, I recognized all of them. The bond told me. The bond was, I was beginning to understand, my whole literacy here.
The tributes ran down both walls.
Each one set on a plinth of pale stone. Each one lit. Each one labeled in the same hand.
A blade of black volcanic glass with a hilt of fused obsidian. From the Scourge, the seven-hundredth year of the reign of Wrath, on the occasion of the brother’s first ascension to the parapet. A great cup of gold the size of a child’s head, set with a single stone the color of dawn. From the Vault. A small carved bird of a milk-white material I could not name, its wings folded, its eye a single inset bead of dark glass. From the Mirror. A long curl of silk in a color that changed when I tilted my head. From the Veil. A bowl of dark glass full of the dried husks of fruit thatsmelled, faintly, of honey and old paper. From the Feast. A small folded square of something I could not call cloth and could not call paper. From the Still.
And the labels were not labels.
They were inventory.
A display of magnificence. Of importance. Of pride.
I stood at the third plinth and I understood it.
He hid nothing.
He had been given gifts by every domain in this realm for the entirety of a long age, and he had not put a single one of them in a vault. He had not kept his trophies in a private cabinet to be brought out only for the inner circle. He had put them in a gallery the length of a city block and he had lit them and he had labeled them and he had given his fated mate, on the second morning of her arrival, the run of the room.
This was him. This was every inch of him. Pride displayed without apology.
I walked the long floor.
