Page 48

I had taken the strong brew that morning, so I was wholly myself. Every finger was my own. The coarse streak lay quiet and silver under my loosened hair, and there was no gold in my eyes. Standing before Selene’s glass in the river-robe, looking at my own true face, I did something I had not done since before the curse took everything from me. I liked what I saw.

I turned, watching the hem swing against my knee. I liked the weight of it, and the feeling that stirred in my chest was not for any man. It was the simple, animal pleasure of being a body that could be lovely on purpose, after so many months of being a body that could only run.

“Right,” Selene said briskly, covering the sudden tightness in her voice. “Tsuki, deliver the lady to her temple. And do not let her stoop, she stoops when she is nervous. Shoulders back, Liora. You are about to be the truest thing in that whole gilded barn.”

The truest thing, and the most false. Between these four walls, I was Liora, speaking my own name among the only people who knew it. The moment I stepped out the door, I would become Lady Liora of House Marenne again, a fictional woman carrying the crest of a house that had only lent her a name. I was carrying that lie straight into the one building in the empire I should never have set foot in: the gods’ own house, kept by the man who had unmade me. I would walk in lit, memorable, and dancing, all under an identity that would shatter if anyone pulled hard enough. Never had I been so exposed. I went anyway, because my body wanted to move, and because I wanted one evening that was purely good. That desire was new, too.

* * *

The palace temple was cold when I had stood in it at night, empty save for Auden. By daylight, with the clergy moving through its vast halls and the gold height fully lit, it was worse. It was the coldest, most beautiful place I had ever seen.

The great house of Tateharas, god of wealth, rose into the dark in tiers of pale stone and gold leaf. Everything inside was costly, yet nothing was warm. It was a mountain of marble raised to a mistake by people who confused the price of a thing with its worth. It should have made me feel small. Instead, standing in my blue river-robe among all the stark white and gold, I felt like the only lit candle in a hall of mirrors. I think that contrast was the entire reason Auden had brought the rite here.

He met me at the side entrance, out of his silver veil and grey robes. He wore the plain, undyed linen of an officiant. The scent of him reached me before he spoke: sweet incense, woodsmoke, and the plain bread of a poor altar. He carried the entire atmosphere of the lower city into this gilded barn, and the tension in my shoulders eased as it always did around him. It was a feeling of homecoming that had nothing to do with a physical house.

He stopped short when he saw me, making no attempt to hide his surprise.

“You came in the river forms,” he said, his voice quiet.

“You said the rite would follow them.”

“I did.” He went still, his eyes taking in the cut of the robe, the weave of silver thread, and the bare curve of my throat. Then he had the grace to look back up into my eyes, leaving the rest unsaid. “I am glad you came. There is something I want to tell you before we start, because you are the only person in this place who will understand why it matters.”

He drew me aside into the shadow of a stone pillar, lowering his voice. “Tonight we open this temple to the lesser gods, the ones with no house left. The clergy think I have merely talked the high priest into an indulgence, but this is the first stone of a larger path. I mean to open this place to the city, to the people who actually live here, not just the ones who enter in fine clothes to have their coin blessed before carrying it back out.”

He glanced up into the vast, gold-leafed dark above us. “What is a temple worth if nobody comes to pray? I am one of the few who sets foot in here without counting something. The rest bring their wealth to be blessed, then take it home again. None of them come looking for true luck. Luck is not what a man keeps in his strongroom. It is whether he can still be stopped in his tracks by a small gift given for nothing.”

He looked back down at me, his gaze fierce and direct. Here was the whole truth of him: a man with no home of his own, who spent his life making room in other people’s houses. “I have never had a home, so I have grown very good at warming the spaces I stand in. Even this one. Especially this one.”

I had no words to offer that would not give my secrets away, so I only nodded. He saw that I understood, which was all he wanted, and led me into the main hall.

* * *

The capital performs its rites as it handles everything else: stiffly, correctly, and at a safe distance from anything that might move a human soul. Six of us stood to perform the ceremony. Auden took his place at the great drum that stood waist-high at the head of the floor. I was given the river-sticks, two lengths of dark, resonant wood that are struck, turned, and struck again to make a sound as sharp and bright as rain hitting a roof. The other four were high clergy who picked up their standing instruments with solemn, displeased faces. They looked like men asked to muck out a stable, having performed this rite a hundred times as a flat recitation, mere words and stillness, with the holy element pinned beneath glass.

The river rite is not a recitation. I had danced it a dozen times in my village temple and in the small shrines scattered through the rice valley of my childhood. The river rite must be danced. The gods of the water-country do not answer to stationary words. They come to a body in motion, because water itself is always moving through the earth.

When the drum began to pulse under Auden’s open hand, the clergy fell into their stiff, droning chant. I struck the first sharp beat on the river-sticks, stepped out of the line they expected me to keep, and danced.

I had not known the movement was still inside me. It rose up as if it had only been waiting for permission to break free. The turn, the strike, the long, slow fold, and the quick, bright step, the sticks marking each rhythm against the drum. My human body, returned to me for the evening, did what it was made to do. It moved for the pure joy of moving. I was not fleeing through the dark, nor clawing at a muddy riverbank, nor twisting into an animal shape. I simply turned. The blue fabric opened and closed around my legs and arms with every movement, the silver thread catching the lamplight in bright flashes. The strike of the wood was crisp, and the drum beat underneath it all like a steady heart. For the length of the rite, I was only a dancer, the dance was beautiful, and it belonged to me.

Then my eyes met Auden’s.

He had stopped chanting the responses. The clergy ground on beside him, but Auden had gone still at the drum. Only his hands kept moving, maintaining the rhythm on instinct while the rest of him watched me. He was not looking at me as the court nobles had, weighing my worth or calculating how best to draw me into bed. He looked at me as a man looks at the only warm flame in a freezing room. His careful, grave expression had completely opened. In his eyes was pure wonder, and beneath the wonder sat an unmistakable, quiet longing.

Something inside me that had been clenched tight since the garden finally let go.

I had been looked at with hunger before, and it had always been the first step toward being bought, controlled, or broken. Auden was not calculating my price. He was struck motionless. He had forgotten the clergy, forgotten the rite, and forgotten the cold gold temple around us. He kept the drumbeat going for me alone, his attention narrowed down to the woman dancing in blue and silver in the centre of the hall. The rhythm was the only way he had left to reach out and touch me.

So I danced for him.

I did not make a conscious choice. The part of me carrying the rite decided for me. I had been dancing in my own private pleasure, but when I turned and found his eyes waiting, the next turn became an offering to him. The strike of my wooden sticks answered the beat of his drum. We were not touching. We stood the entire width of the floor apart, yet we were dancing together as surely as if his hands were resting against my waist. He provided the pulse and I gave it shape, call and answer, drum and stick, his rhythm and my body. The clergy droned on, unaware that the true rite, the one the gods would answer, had caught fire between two people who had not even laid a hand on each other.

I have been touched by men, and I know what intimacy feels like. Dancing across that marble floor with Auden’s drum vibrating up through the soles of my feet was raw and completely naked. We both felt it, and neither of us looked away.

The performance ended where the river rites always end, on a single, long-held beat. The drum and the wooden sticks fell silent at the same instant, as if guided by a single hand. I came to rest in the centre of the floor, my breath coming fast, my heart hammering, and the final resonant note echoing up into the high rafters. For a long moment, no one in the temple moved.

Then, far above us, the temple answered.