My head stayed where it was. There was no need to lift it.
“I will let the cracks show. I will ask, aloud, for what I want. I will kneel when it is required. I will be magnificent because you are watching, baby, and for no other reason from this hour forward. I give myself to you.”
He shifted me. He drew the wine-red blanket from the foot of the bed across us both. He tucked it at my shoulder, at my hip, at the bare line of my legs where the silk shirt ended.
“Now,” he said. “The process of you forgiving yourself has begun. We rebuild your pride. And tomorrow, when you are ready, we complete the bond and your transformation will be complete.”
I closed my eyes.
I drifted.
I let it take me.
He remained there for hours.
Chapter 7
Iwokeintogold.
Not the lavender of his sky, not the cold pale of the citadel’s daylight halls—gold, low and warm and constant, the living vein of the realm thrumming under the dark stone of his private chamber as though the floor itself had a pulse and the pulse had decided, in the night, to match mine. His shirt was still on me. The wine-red blanket was still drawn up to my shoulder. His arm was still under my head, the long bare line of his forearm warm against the back of my neck, the iron band cool against the place where my jaw met my throat.
“Good morning, precious one.”
“Good morning, my Lord.”
For a long count, he stayed where he was. He let me have the gold-lit dim, the warm dark, the small mortal fact of my body fitted against his at the root of a realm I had not yet, in any honest accounting, agreed to keep. Then he turned toward me, laid his palm at the side of my face as he had in the gallery, and his golden irises gave their long pulse.
“Today,” he said. “If you will have it. We close the bond.”
I inhaled.
“There are things you must understand before you answer, baby. I will say them in front of witnesses. I will ask aloud, as the contract binds me to ask aloud, once a day, for one thing I want. This is the thing I want today. Do you understand.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He rose.
He dressed me himself. Not in the silk shift, not in the white linen of his own shirt that had slept on me all night—in something new, something he lifted from the same low chest the shirts had come from. A long unornamented robe of pale stone color, soft as water under the hand, the seam at the shoulder closed with a single small clasp of dark iron. He drew it down over my arms. He fastened the clasp. He combed my hair down with his fingers and let it fall loose along my back.
He dressed himself in white and gold. Full court. The deep-red sash. Then he opened the door.
The two who entered were not Pride’s household guard. I knew, the moment they stepped through the arch, that these were older. They were tall—taller than the fiends I had seen in the passages—with the long lambent skin of the lords’ kind, scaled faintly at the cheekbones and the inside of the wrists, eyes the cool bronze of an unstruck coin. Greater demons. Archdemons, the bond whispered. They moved without sound. They stopped three paces from where I stood at the side of the bed, and they did not look at me. They looked at the floor in front of him.
He set them in place along the far wall with a small motion of his hand. They went where he set them.
He turned back to me.
He crossed the chamber to me, the floor seeming to brighten under each footfall, and he stopped a single pace off, and he sank.
He went to one knee.
My breath stopped.
It was the third clause of his side of the parchment. I will kneel to you when you require it. He was not waiting for me to require it. He was kneeling without being asked, full court, in front of his own archdemons, the great horn-less head of him below the line of my own, his eyes lifted, steady, to find my face.
“Maria Price,” he said. “I am asking aloud. Today, at the long dusk, if you will have it, we will close the bond between us. The closing cannot be undone. Not by my hand. Not by my father’s, nor any of my brothers’. Not by the throne, should it come to the throne. Not by the Veil, should the Veil itself be torn again. The closing is final. It is a thing that lasts as long as I last, and as long as I last is a very long time.”
He inhaled.
