The largest living being I had ever seen.
The Demon King.
The bond had stopped warning and started watching, the small attentive low warm tone of a thing that had not been here before and was here now and was paying attention to everything.
He was enormous.
Even lying down. Even with the linen drawn up over the long bulk of him. The shoulders alone would not have fit in the doorway of my apartment in Spokane Valley. The hands—one rested outside the linen, on the cream—were the size of a small dog. He had the age of mountains. The horns, what I could see of them, were grey at the points and chipped at the bases, and the face—what I could see of the face—was the face of what had once been the most magnificent thing that had ever ruled any underworld, and was now fading.
The gold under his skin had gone grey.
It was the same gold. I could see it. The same living gold that ran through the marble of the column under my hand and through my own bonded wrist and through the throne at the head of the hall—the gold of this realm, the gold of his blood—and in him, in the high planes of the cheekbone above the linen, in the bare forearm of the hand that lay outside the cover, the gold had gone grey. It still moved. Barely. It threaded through him like a late-summer river through marshland, finding paths around the stones it could no longer push.
I had not, until this moment, understood what the Rite of Ascension was for.
A father, ill. A father whose power was leaving him. Seven sons. One throne. The unbearable old domestic arithmetic of it.
And then I saw Pride.
He was beside the bed.
He was not on the dais. He was not on the throne. He was not standing at any kind of high place. He was sitting on a low seat—a stool, I realized, after a count, a plain pale wood stool with no back and no cushion—pulled in close to the side of the bed at the height of the failing king’s shoulder. The white-and-gold tunic was unfastened at the throat. The long sleeves of the under-shirt were pushed back to the elbow.
He was holding a cup.
It was a small cup. Pale. The kind of cup you give a child. He was holding it with both hands, one steady at the base, one bracing the rim, and he was tilting it carefully against the mouth of his father, and his father was drinking—a small swallow, a pause, a small swallow more—and Pride was watching the throat of his father to see the swallow go down, and when the swallow went down, he was tilting the cup again.
I had seen him be a lord.
I had not seen him be a son.
He knew I was there.
I felt his awareness through the bond, through the strange connection we now had.
He tilted the cup a final time. He waited for the swallow. The swallow went down. He drew the cup back and he set it, with the same precise care he set everything down, on a small low table on the far side of the stool, where the failing king would not knock it with his hand if his hand moved in the night.
He lifted his hand to his father’s brow.
He brushed the hair back.
Pride pressed his palm to the forehead for a count of three.
He drew the linen up.
He rose.
He rose without hurry, effort, or concession. The white-and-gold of him fell into place around him as he stood, and he turned, fully, and he looked at me across forty feet of dim brown marble.
The expression that found me was new.
The eyes were calm. The set of the shoulders was easy. The mouth—when he spoke, when he finally spoke, his voice came across the long floor with the same weight the citadel above used to deliver his words to me.
“It was naughty of you to come here, precious one.”
Quietly. Gently. There was no trace of the shame I had felt come off him on the parapet, or of the fury beneath it. The small bright forward-tilt I had been getting used to under my sternum went tilt, hard, and stayed tilted.
He crossed the floor.
