The bond carried the meaning of it up the inside of my wrist into my chest and the meaning of it was mine, the meaning of it was finally, the meaning of it was the long age is over, and the gold in him was bleeding from more cracks now—I felt them on his jaw, on his temple, on the back of the hand still cradling my face—and he hid none of them, and the light came up around us in the long bright gallery and lit the tributes on their plinths from a new direction, from him, from us, and the cracked hand under my mouth had gone hotter, and his other hand had slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, and his thumb was under the line of my jaw and his fingers were in my hair and the loose braid was coming down by inches without his having pulled it, finally ready to fall.
The kiss broke.
“I will not have you without the contract.”
“I will not take what I cannot keep. I will not touch you as I want to touch you, precious one, until your name is on the seal, and my name is on yours, and the bond is closed and no one—no brother, no Veil, no throne, no thing that walks—can reach across it again. Do you understand me.”
I lifted my marked wrist.
I laid it against the cracked hand at the back of my neck, and I held it there, and I said—
“I’ll sign.”
“Maria.”
“I’ll sign, my Lord, I’ll sign.”
“Baby.”
The word came out of him broken.
“Baby. Baby.”
The bond on my wrist flared.
It flared like fire when a door opens beside it. The vibrant gold of the sigils threading up the inside of my forearm went, all at once, prismatic—the gold breaking into a long run of every color I had ever seen and three I had not—and the light of it lit the gallery from my arm outward, lit the tributes on their plinths, lit the milk-white bird from the Mirror, lit the cup from the Vault, lit the blade from the Scourge, lit every gift he had ever been given by every domain in this realm.
And in the middle of all of it, the only thing in the long bright gallery he had not been given.
The one thing in the room that had chosen him.
Me.
Chapter 5
Hedrewbackfromme by inches.
The prismatic light at my wrist settled down to its living gold again. He kept the cracked hand at the back of my neck. He kept the other at my jaw. He looked at me for a long count, his gaze very still, and then he said—
“Come.”
That was all.
He took my hand. He led me out of the long gallery, down the colonnade. Up a stair I had not seen before. Up another stair. Finally, we stopped at a door.
It was set into the pale gold-veined marble of an upper passage, a single arch no taller than he was, a dark wooden door with no handle, no carving, no ornament of any kind. He laid his palm flat against the wood, and the door opened inward onto a room.
It was small.
Pale stone walls hung with nothing. A single window, narrow, opening onto a sky that had gone past lavender into something deeper, the deep wine-purple of his evening colors. A low tableof white marble in the middle of the floor, inlaid with the same living gold as everything else in the citadel, but quieter here, banked, the gold running in straight lines instead of loops.
On the table, two things.
A sheet of dark parchment that drank the light. It was the color of a deep well. The light from the window did not catch on it. The lamps from the passage outside did not reflect on it. It was a piece of paper that ate. Beside it, set on a small rest of pale wood, a stylus of gold-veined bone. The veins in the bone moved.
He closed the door behind us.
The room got smaller.
