He closed his eyes.
He spoke it into my mouth, a secret that would destroy him if anyone else heard.
“Lucan,” he whispered.
It was a beautiful word. Not quite human. I repeated it, uncertain of the accent and the movement it required from the tongue.
He shuddered.
He shuddered with his whole body, and his hands gripped my waist, hard, and I felt the power in them, not the hurting kind, the kind that could have shattered marble, but was now holding me with the terror of a thing that had never, in an age, let itself be held.
I said it again.
“Lucan.”
He wrapped his arms around me and held me to his chest, and I heard the heartbeat under my ear, fast and wild and so alive I thought it might tear itself open.
“You are the only being in this world or any other,” he said, “who will ever know that name.”
I kissed him gently, at the center of the chest. Over the heart.
“I know,” I said. “And I love it.”
The hush deepened.
We lay together and the only thing I wanted was to stay there. To never move. To be the thing he curled around at the root of his realm, and to know, for the first time, what it meant to be home.
Chapter 8
Idressedalone.
Lucan had left the new gown for me on the edge of the bed. It was red. Deep, arterial, the color of old royal blood, with the gold of his realm threaded through it in a veinwork so fine you could only see it in motion. The collar was high and the sleeves long, but the line of the dress—fitted, then loosed below the hips, the skirt breaking into a thousand silk shards with every step—was nothing I would have put on myself, not in any life, but now, after the change, it felt exactly right.
He was waiting for me outside the chamber, at the head of the passage, dressed for the court.
He looked me over.
“You are a marvel,” he said, “and you are mine.”
He offered his arm. I took it.
Thehallwasfull.
They looked at me, all of them.
The old reflex came up, a wave, to round the shoulders, to duck the chin, to look away from the looking. The contract burned a line up my arm, not pain but a bracing: no, baby. Stand. Present. Stay.
I did.
I saw the other women before I saw the king.
They stood across from each other, at the far side of the hall, three in a row, each in her own color—Lydia in Wrath’s infernal red, the fabric so stark it made her smallness even starker, her hair braided tight and the green eyes steady, unblinking; Nora in Greed-amber, the dress cut to her broad shoulders and thick with the shine of a thousand tiny sequins, her face bare, her chin up, freckles visible across the bridge of her nose; Rachel in Envy’s prismatic silk, the color impossible, the cut severe, hair let down for the first time, glasses gone, eyes wide and brown and searching.
They were all looking at me.
I nodded, once, to each.
They nodded back.
