“You will cease to be mortal. The body that crossed the Veil will not be the body that walks out of this chamber tonight. You will be of my kind, of my blood, of my making. You will be ageless, as my kind are. You will be braided to me at a level beneath thought. There will be no end of you, beloved, that is not also an end of me.”
The rings in his eyes did not move.
“I will give you the long age. I will give you the citadel and the gallery and the lake under my sky and every gift I have ever been given by every domain in this realm, and I will give you what I have never given any being, which is the name beneath the title. I will give you my cracks when they form and I will give you my pride when it has to be put down. I will give you the throne if it comes to me, and I will give you the lack of it if it does not, and I will give you, baby, a very great deal of myself I have not yet learned how to give.”
A pause. He had been formulating it somewhere very deep for an entire age.
“Will you have me?”
I stood at my full height. The contract demanded it.
“Yes, my Lord. I will.”
The archdemons at the far wall bowed their heads.
They did it in the same beat. Once, deep, without sound.
He rose.
He came to me. He lifted me into his arms—one beneath my knees, one behind my shoulders, the pale stone-color of the robe falling around us—and he turned, with me, toward the door.
Instead of rising, he descended.
I had assumed up. The parapet was up. The terrace was up. Everything in this citadel that mattered to him had been, until this moment, up.
He went down.
The gold in the marble brightened as we descended. The living vein that had threaded the upper walls in long measured loops gathered, as we went down, into wider channels, into rivers, into a single broad flood of warm light running along the floor and the walls of the deepest stair. The air thickened. The faint sweet under-thing I had been smelling on the wind since I arrived gathered into a fragrance I had no name for, the smell of warm metal and old water and something like honey burned at the edge of a flame.
The stair ended at a door. Plain dark stone, no veining, no ornament, like the arch in the gallery—only this one was at the very bottom of him, and through it the gold did not bleed dimmer. Through it the gold roared.
He set me on my feet.
He laid his palm on the dark stone. The door opened as all the doors of his realm opened for him, without sound, without hurry, without any acknowledgment that the opening was a thing.
The chamber beyond was carved from the living stone of the realm, deep and round and warm, the walls slick with the wet glow of living gold, and at the heart of it, sunk into the floor in a wide unornamented basin of pale stone, was a well of liquid light. Not lit from above. Lit from below. Gold rising from the dark beneath the citadel like the deep steady breath of something that had been breathing for an age and would breathe for another.
The wellspring.
I recognized it immediately, as I had recognized the gallery and the chamber of the failing king. This was the source. Of every gold vein in every wall of his citadel. Of the gold under the ice he had made me. Of the gold in his gaze, in his blood, in the marks at my wrist that braided his with mine. The root of his power. The most hidden place in his domain.
He had brought me to be bound at the heart of him.
He turned me to face him at the edge of the basin.
The pale stone of the rim was warm under the soles of my bare feet. The light from the well rose past my hips in a steady column and lit the underside of his jaw, the long line of his throat.
He lifted his hands to the single clasp at my shoulder.
He undid it without looking. He drew the long pale robe down the line of my arm, inch by inch, echoing the removal of the cotton at the chair, and the robe fell along my back and pooled at my ankles on the warm stone, and I stood at the edge of the source of his realm in nothing at all.
He stepped back a single pace.
He looked.
He had brought something precious down into the deepest part of himself to bind it, and for one count he simply looked.
And the panic came up the back of my neck like a tide.
