The words went out of me before I had decided that I was going to let them. They went out of me into the long quiet light of the gallery. The hand at the small of my back made no movement at all.
“My Lord, I have been trying to say this. I’m not. I’m not magnificent. I was. For about three minutes when I was twenty-one. I was the best in the world for three minutes and then I fell and what is left, what you have brought across the Veil into your hall, what the Rite has chosen—it is not the woman who was the best. It is the woman who fell. The woman who was the best died on the ice in Tokyo. I am the ghost. I am the one she left behind.”
Silence.
The hand remained at my back.
“Since I arrived here, I have been waiting to disappoint you. I do not know what a being like you is, and I do not know what a being like you needs, and I do not know what the bond will ask ofme when it asks, but I know—I know—that what you are looking at in this gallery is going to disappoint you, and I—“
My voice cracked.
“—I cannot survive being your disappointment.”
My next breath was shallow.
For a long count, he remained still.
The hand at the small of my back stayed where it was. His right hand stayed at his side. His eyes held still on my face, a deep pool untouched by wind.
When he spoke, his voice was lower than I had heard it.
“Precious one. You do not have to land this one.”
At first, I failed to understand.
He saw it. He let me have a beat with it. Then he said, even lower:
“You landed every jump you took from the age of nine to the age of twenty-one. You earned every measure of regard that was ever offered to you, and you fell the first instant you stopped performing, and you have lived since then in a body that believes the only love available to you is the love you can land. I have watched you do it. I watched you do it across the Veil for years. I have watched you do it in my own hall since you arrived.”
He inhaled.
“I was given my magnificence,” he said. “I have told you this. I know exactly what it is worth. I would rather have, in my hall and in my bed and on the throne beside me if it ever comes to that, the woman who fell—and got up and walked into a strip-mall rink in Washington state and crouched in front of a four-year-old in rental skates every Saturday morning for nearly a decade, never once telling anyone how much it cost her—than a hundred who never risked the jump. Do you understand me.”
“I do not want to be magnificent alone anymore.”
The cracks came.
Not at the jaw, this time. Not at the temple. At the back of his right hand—the gold of him splitting in a fine hairline between his fingers, and the raw white light of him bleeding through the split into the soft no-source light of the gallery. He saw it happen. I felt him see it happen through the bond—the small reflexive flinch of his shame, the body’s old wanting to close the crack before anyone could see—
He let it stay open.
I took the cracked hand in both of my own. I lifted it. I bent my head over it. I pressed my mouth to the seam of raw white light, and the gold there was hot—not the warm of the bond, hotter, the heat of a fire—and I kept my mouth there, and I felt his breath catch, as it had only twice before, both times last night, both at the moment I had touched him.
“Maria.”
His left hand came up.
He cradled my face without hurry, effort, or concession. His palm was vast against my jaw, the long fingers along the back of my skull, the heel of his hand under my chin, and he tilted my face up to his, and the rings in his irises stopped moving entirely.
He kissed me.
First the lower lip, then the upper. He tasted of cold water and clean stone and the faint sweet under-thing I had been smelling on the wind since I arrived, and the bond on my wrist made not the warm tone but a new tone, a high bright one I had not heard yet, and the new tone hummed against the kiss and made the kiss louder.
Then the kiss changed.
His mouth opened mine. His control fell away by degrees and the thing beneath it came up—the want he had been holding, the want I had felt last night through the bond, raw and ancient and unpracticed, the want of someone who had displayed every gift he was ever given and never asked for a single one—andhis tongue found mine and the kiss became deep and the kiss became long and the kiss became the sort of kiss a body learns it has never had before, in the precise moment it is having it.
A rough note rose in his throat.
