The Devil's Debt: A Kiss That Binds the Damned

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Mirror Ball

The invitation arrived at dusk on a silver salver, carried by a herald whose face Kael could not remember a moment after he looked away.

The House of Pride requests the honor of the King's company at the Great Gallery. Midnight. Come as you are, and see what you are.

"Pride," said Seraphine, reading it over his shoulder. She did not touch the card. "It does not lie. It only reflects. That is why it is the cruelest of the Houses."

"Will you be there?"

"I am always there." She said it flatly. She had barely spoken since the morning corridor, and he had not pressed, and the silence between them had grown a delicate, careful shape, like glass.

Captain Rowan escorted them to the Great Gallery himself. Kael noticed, as he always noticed things when he was frightened, that the Captain kept his eyes on the floor as they passed the long row of windows, and that when they reached the gilded doors, he stopped.

"I will guard the entrance, sire."

"You are welcome inside."

"I would rather not." Rowan's jaw tightened. "I do not care for mirrors."

Kael had known him twenty years and had never once heard him say so. He filed it away and went in.

---

The Great Gallery had been built by his great-grandfather to hold forty tall mirrors, and tonight every one of them was lit.

Candlelight multiplied down the endless hall until the room seemed to have no walls. Courtiers in silver masks drifted between the glass in clusters, murmuring, and in every surface he caught his own reflection, black coat, pale face, the silver thorn burning at his wrist. Something moved at the edge of his sight. He did not turn his head.

"You are learning," murmured a voice.

Lady Isoreth of Pride stood at the center of the gallery in a gown of mirrored glass, every shard of it catching and returning the light so that she looked like a woman made of reflection. Her silver hair was unbound. Her eyes were the pale gray of an overcast sea. She did not smile.

"Majesty. You came."

"You gave me little choice."

"I always give a little choice. It is the only generosity I know." She turned a slow, deliberate circle, and the glass of her skirts threw fragments of light across the ceiling. "The rules of my House are simple. Each mirror in this hall shows its viewer the thing he is most careful to hide. We dance. We drink. We look, or we do not look. And at midnight, we pay."

"Pay what?"

"Patience, King. It spoils the surprise."

The music began, soft and stately. The bride, in her stained white gown, was swept into a minuet by one of the twin lords of Envy. Isolde stood at the wall with her arms crossed, unimpressed. And Seraphine, in black, held out a hand to Kael with the stiff courtesy of a woman performing a legal duty.

"The Collector's Clause keeps me an arm's length from you," she said. "A dance is the least conspicuous way to manage it. Do not make it a spectacle."

He took her hand.

It was cool and steady, and she held herself very straight, and for the first few turns they did not speak. He had danced with a hundred women at a hundred courts. He had never once been aware of a hand as he was aware of hers, the slight pressure of her fingers on his shoulder, the place where her wrist lay against his, where the silver thorns almost touched.

"You did not ask," she said, very low.

"No."

"Why?"

"I told you why."

"I know what you told me." Her eyes were fixed on his collar. "I want to know why it is true."

He thought about it, turning her carefully past a mirror. "Because I spent twelve years not being the kind of man who stays. I would like to start practicing."

Her step faltered. It was the smallest hitch. He felt it down his arm.

And then they passed a mirror, and he looked.

He had not meant to. His eyes simply slid sideways to the glass, and what he saw there stopped his breath.

His own reflection was not dancing. It stood alone at the top of a long stair, seventeen years old, with a stone in its pocket and a half-finished letter in its hand, and its face was gray with terror. As Kael watched, the boy in the glass turned and fled. Again. Again. The same terrible half-second, looped without mercy. A young man running, on and on forever.

He heard someone behind him gasp. Several people.

"Do not look," said Seraphine.

"I cannot—"

"Kael."

She spun him away. But as she turned, he caught her own reflection in the next pane, and he forgot the boy entirely.

She was standing in the glass in her black gown, quite still, with a small black scroll in her hand. And she was fading. Slowly, from the fingertips inward, as though she were made of something that had been left in the rain. Her hands had gone pale, then translucent, then to a drift of fine white grains that sifted down onto the glass floor like salt. Her face stayed whole for a long moment, white and exhausted and so unbearably young. Then her mouth moved.

I am sorry, said the woman in the mirror.

And she was gone.

Kael stopped dancing.

"What was that?" he said. His voice was not steady.

"Nothing."

"Seraphine, I saw—"

"You saw a mirror." Her fingers closed around his wrist, hard, and her face was bone white. "Mirrors in this House show you what Pride wishes you to see. It is a trick. Do not—"

The music stopped.

Every candle in the Gallery leaned toward the center of the floor, where Lady Isoreth stood alone in her shards of light, smiling at last.

"Midnight," she said.

The forty mirrors dimmed in unison. A hush fell over the court.

"The House of Pride has a price," said Isoreth. "It is the oldest price in Hell, and the cheapest, and the one no one wishes to pay. The King will say aloud, before this court, the thing for which he is most ashamed. And he will kneel to the one he wronged."

Kael did not look at Seraphine. He did not need to.

"I accept," he said.

"I thought you would. It is almost dull." Isoreth's gaze turned, slowly, to the woman at his side, and her smile sharpened to a blade. "But Pride is a balanced House. It does not take from one hand without taking from the other. So the Collector, too, will speak aloud the thing she hides. The thing she is carrying in her sleeve."

Seraphine went rigid.

"No," she said.

"Refuse," said Isoreth gently, "and the mirrors will speak for you. Every one of them. To every one of us. All at once."

Across the gallery, the bride lifted her head, and for the first time all night she was not smiling.

Seraphine's grip tightened on Kael's wrist until it hurt. When she spoke, her voice was a thread, pitched for his ears alone.

"If I tell them what I hide," she whispered, "we lose everything."