He crossed it without breaking the line of his eyes off mine, and the marble that was failing under his feet caught a little of the gold off the soles of his boots as he came—a thread of warmer gold, a small living vein of it where his foot had passed, the citadel rousing the smallest amount under him as he moved. He stopped a pace away from me.
He looked at my feet.
“Bare,” he said.
I looked down. The slippers I had put on this morning—the pale leather, the soft sole, the loose easy fit—were on my feet. They were not, by any standard I would have used at the rink, bare. I opened my mouth to say so.
He raised his right hand. Just enough.
“Bare,” he said again. Quieter. “For this place. It is sacred. Flesh should touch stone. You should not have come down herein slippers, precious one. You should not have come down here at all.”
The heat came into my face.
He put his right hand at the small of my back.
Without asking, he laid it there—the heel of it just above the dip at the base of my spine, the fingers wide, the ring cool through the loose fabric of the robe—and the weight of his hand was so steady, so settled, that the small bracing tension I had been holding in my lower back since Tokyo went out of me in a single breath.
A small sound escaped me.
“This way,” he said.
He turned me and led me back along the long dim floor toward the passage I had come down.
“You will not come here again,” he said. Low. Even. “Not without me. If you wish to see this place, you will say so, and I will bring you, and you will be dressed for it. Simple robes. Barefoot. Do you understand me, precious one.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
At first, I could not tell what he was asking for.
Then I did.
“Yes, my Lord.”
The hand at the small of my back made a small approving press. It was the smallest movement. It moved everything inside me by a great deal more than its size.
“Good girl.”
I almost shivered.
He walked me up the passage.
The grade rose under us. The ashen gold in the marble of the walls strengthened by small degrees as we climbed—paler at the first turn, fairer at the second, the thread of it picking up speed and color the higher we got, until by the time we reachedthe dark archway at the top, the gold was the gold I had been walking with all morning, the gold of him.
He crossed the threshold first.
He kept the hand where it was. He walked me through, the heel of his palm steady at the small of my back, the fingers wide, and the gallery on the other side of the arch caught us both, and the soft no-source light of it found my face and his, and he turned me, gently, with the hand, until I was facing him in the long bright room of the things he had been given.
He held me like that for a long count.
“My father,” he said. “Was once so much more than he is now. Incandescent in his magnificence. Unassailable. Perfect.”
It struck me then. He prized magnificence above all else. He admired it in his father, in himself, in all the objects in this room.
I opened my mouth.
“I’m not magnificent.”
