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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: What the Bride Remembered

The Bride

The bride could not sleep, which was only fair. She had not slept in twelve years, and she did not intend to start now.

She lay across the king's bed in the dark, listening to the three of them breathe. Kael on the hearth rug, one arm flung across his chest, his bandaged hand curled like a sleeping child's. Seraphine in the great chair beside him, rigid even in rest, one hand still closed around the black scroll. And herself, the third thing in the room, the thing that did not quite belong, with no heartbeat to count her minutes by.

She had a name once. It was a small name, a warm name, and Hell had taken it first.

He swore, she thought. In front of everyone. He stepped in front of her and swore.

It was the loveliest, stupidest thing she had ever witnessed. She had wanted to weep. She had wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. And beneath both, lighter than either, something old and sweet and aching had stirred in the place where her heart should have been.

She remembered what it felt like to be chosen.

Rise, my darling.

She went rigid.

It did not come through her ears. It never did. It came up through the vows she had spoken in a white dress twelve years ago, through the hollow place where the vows lived, a smooth, courteous baritone as warm as breath on the back of her neck.

You have been very good. Very quiet. I am proud of you. A pause, kind. Now I need a small thing.

No, said the bride.

You have not heard it.

I do not need to. She held herself utterly still, the way one holds a cup that is too full. He is kind to her. I will not help you.

Kindness, said the voice, gently, is the most expensive thing in the world. Do you know what it will cost him? Rise.

And she did.

She hated it. She hated every moment of it. Her feet found the floor. Her body unfolded from the bed with the neat, obedient grace of a puppet, and she crossed the chamber without a sound, past the sleeping king, past the woman in the chair who looked, in sleep, almost young, and her hand lifted of its own accord and brushed the hair from Seraphine's forehead.

I am sorry, she thought. I am so sorry, sister.

Then she opened the door.

Captain Rowan stood in the corridor with his back to the wall. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he did not seem surprised to see her. He did not ask where she was going. He inclined his head, very slightly, and stepped aside.

"My lady," he said. "The Gallery will be cold."

The bride stopped.

She had not told anyone where she was going. She had not known herself until the voice told her.

She looked up at him, at the tired, familiar face of the man who had stood outside the king's door all her days in this house, and something in her went very quiet and very careful, the way a hare goes quiet when a shadow crosses the field.

"Thank you, Captain," she said, and walked on.

---

The Great Gallery was dark, and the dark smelled of broken glass.

Forty mirrors had stood here at midnight. Now thirty-nine of them waited in the black like patient doorways, and the fortieth lay in a drift of silver splinters across the floor, where the young prince had turned around at last and walked out of his shame. The bride knelt among the pieces. The moonlight made them look like water.

She found it without searching. It lay near the wall, no longer than her thumbnail, a sliver of silver glass that still held a faint, steady light.

She picked it up.

Inside the shard, very small, a seventeen-year-old boy stood at the foot of a long stair, hand outstretched, face wet and wide open. He did not look afraid. He looked as though he had finally set down something heavy.

Oh, thought the bride. He is beautiful when he is not running.

"Sister."

She did not turn. She had known they were there. They had been waiting in the dark of the Gallery like two cats on a wall.

The twins of Envy came out of the shadow arm in arm, dark-eyed, smiling, so alike that she could not have told them apart if she had wished. She had never been able to. She had never wished to. The one on the left wore a coat the color of wine. The one on the right wore the same coat, a half-shade darker.

"Cassian," said the bride.

"Lucan, actually," said the one on the left, delighted. "Everyone gets us backward. It is half the fun."

"You have been very good," Cassian said. "He told us you would be."

"He told me nothing of the kind."

"No?" Cassian tilted his head. "He is shy."

The bride held the shard against her chest, as if she could keep it warm.

"What do you want it for?"

"Oh, nothing terrible," said Lucan. "We only wish to borrow a face."

"His?"

"Whose else?"

"The King has made a promise," Cassian said softly. "A promise to protect the Collector from being taken. By the Law of the Seven, a promise to Hell is a debt, and a debt may be collected by anyone who can make the debtor break it." He smiled. "We cannot lay a hand on the lady. We cannot replace her. But a king who signs a decree stripping her of her office, in his own handwriting, in his own voice, with his own face..."

"...has broken his own promise," Lucan finished. "And Hell takes the forfeit."

The bride felt the floor tilt.

That is the price, she thought. He did not even have to name it. It was always going to be this.

Give it to them, said the voice in her bones, tenderly. Please.

She did not move.

Give it to them, my darling. Or I will make the lady in the chair stop breathing in her sleep.

The shard went cold in her hand.

She closed her eyes. She thought of Seraphine's hair under her fingers, the small, familiar warmth of it. She thought of the garden at dawn, and two girls laughing so hard they could not breathe. She thought: Everything else was a lie. That was not.

She opened her fingers.

Lucan took the sliver with a delicate, reverent hand, as one might lift a pearl from a shell. He held it up to the faint moonlight, and his smile widened, and he pressed the cool glass flat against his own cheek.

The bride made a sound.

Lucan's face rippled like water. His cheekbones sharpened. His jaw squared. The eyes shifted, darkened, took on a stormy gray, and the wine-colored coat hung differently now on shoulders that were broader and taller and heartbreakingly familiar. The soft, mocking mouth hardened into the stern, careful line that Kael wore when he was afraid.

In the dark of the Gallery, a king smiled at her.

"Thank you, sister," said Kael Varyn, in Kael Varyn's voice. "That will do very nicely."