Pride watched.
Pride watched from the edge of the bed, hands at his sides, his gaze very still.
“You have broken it,” he said. “The contract. I know you didn’t mean to. But still, it is a serious breach, Little One.”
Low. Certain.
“You have gone small. You have lowered your head. You have stood less than your height. You have called yourself unworthy of a thing I have asked for, which is the same as calling me a fool for asking.” A pause. “You agreed, on the parchment, in your own blood, that you would not do this. The contract is holding you to your word.”
The heat in my shoulders pulsed.
“I understand,” I said.
“Good.” He picked up the boots. He held them in one hand with the care due something precious. “There will be punishment for this, Maria. The contract requires it. I require it. Your worth is not a thing you are permitted to throw on the floor in my hall.”
I nodded. The heat pulsed again.
“First,” he said, “we skate.”
The door was not in the gallery. It was not in the colonnade. It was at the end of a passage I had not walked, behind an arch I had not seen, and when he opened it the air that came through was not the air of the citadel.
It was colder. Cleaner. It carried the scent of stone and water and something old but fresh. Possibility.
He led me through.
The passage gave onto a stair. The stair gave onto a terrace I had not stood on. The terrace gave onto a view I had no preparation for.
The High Citadel from the outside.
I had seen it from the inside for two days. I had walked its halls, slept in its chambers, signed a contract in its most private room. I had not seen what it looked like from the ground. It rose above us—white marble and pale gold, the columns climbing into the deep wine-purple of the evening sky, the windows lit from within by a light that had no source I could name. It was magnificent. It was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen, and it was his, and he had built it, or his father had built it, or the realm itself had built it around the shape of his pride, and standing at the foot of it with the boots in his hand and the shift against my legs and the bond humming at both wrists, I understood, for the first time, what it meant to be chosen by a being like this.
He took my hand.
We walked down from the terrace. The path was pale stone, gold-veined, the same marble as the halls, curving toward a stand of trees I had not noticed. The trees were silver-barked, their leaves the color of old bronze, and they parted as we came near, as columns part in a hall when the lord walks through.
Beyond the trees was the lake.
I stopped.
It was vast—a sheet of ice so smooth it threw the deep wine-purple of the sky back at itself in a perfect mirror, and under the ice, running through it, the living gold. The gold of the realm. The gold of his blood. It lit the ice from beneath, a warm honey light that moved in the same long languid loops as the veins in the marble, and the ice above it was clear, perfectly clear, so clear I could see the gold moving under my feet before my feet had touched it.
The shore was pale stone. A natural bench, curved, the stone warmed by the same gold that lit the ice. The air above the lake was warm—warm over cold, the infernal contradiction, the air holding the heat of his domain while the ice held the cold of something made for me. There was no wind. No sound. No boards, no glass, no Zamboni rumble in the distance. No crowd holding its breath. No judge with a clipboard. No eyes in any of the seven realms but his.
He had made it.
He set the boots on the stone.
He knelt.
Fully. Both knees on the pale warmed stone of the shore, the Lord of the High Citadel at my feet. The embodiment of pride, giving himself to me. He took my right foot in his hands. He lifted it. He set the boot on, and his fingers worked the laces with a coach’s certainty—each pull measured, the waxed white cord threading through the hooks with a precision that had nothing to do with haste and everything to do with care.
He tied the first bow.
He took my left foot. Did the same. His hands on my ankles. The bond humming where his fingers touched skin. The iron band cool against the inside of my heel. He tied the second bow. He looked up at me.
“Stand, sweetheart,” he said.
I stood.
