He took my face in both hands. He looked at me.
“My beautiful, magnificent, precious girl,” he said. “You are mine, now. Forever.”
I kissed him.
I tasted myself and him and the whole realm, and for the first time I understood what it was to have a body that was not for landing, not for performing, but for being.
The bond between us was a steady, living thing, as real as the pulse at my wrist, as real as the heat in my chest, as real as the arms around me.
I had never felt more alive.
We lay entangled.
I could not have said whose arm was whose, whose leg, whose rib, whose heart. My hair was damp and plastered to the curve of my neck. The sweat of us had dried where our bodies touched and left a fine salt at the hollow of my shoulder. He lay behind me, one long arm curled around my waist, the other tucked beneath the curve of my breast, and every so often he would draw me tighter, as if the bond needed to be reaffirmed at intervals the length of a heartbeat.
I traced the cracks at his wrist with my fingers.
We did not speak, at first. The hush was deep, but not silent. His breathing. The pulse of the well beneath us. The sound of the realm’s gold moving, far below, as though the whole kingdom was settling into a new geometry and wanted us to have time to notice it.
I rolled in his arms, so we were face to face.
I touched his face. The seam at the jaw. The high plane of his cheek. The ridge of his brow.
He smiled. Not the half-smile. The whole thing.
I grinned back, then let the smile drop. I let him see it. Not the apology, not the joke, not the flinch. Only me.
He took my chin in his hand and kissed me, not hard, not even for long, but with the weight of an age behind it. Then he put his forehead to mine.
“You are a miracle,” he said.
I offered no argument. The contract would not have let me.
I put my hand to his chest, to the pulse there, and said, “So are you.”
The air changed.
It was small. Not in the realm. In him.
A shiver ran through the muscle of his chest, under my hand. I felt it in the bond, too, a tremor, like a bell rung at a distance.
He pulled back, just enough to see my face.
“I have never,” he said. The sentence stopped.
I waited.
He tried again. “I have never given this. Not to any being.”
“What?”
He inhaled, and the cracks at his jaw widened, just a hair.
“My true name,” he said. “The one from before. With it, you have the power to undo me.”
He was so beautiful, with the gold under his skin and the white at his scars, with the careful precision of the man who had courted me in the gallery and the shattered glory of the demon who had worshipped me at the well. I reached up, with a shaking hand, and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear.
“Say it,” I told him. “I will guard it.”
