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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: What He Owed

The Great Gallery had gone so quiet that Kael could hear the candles burn.

He stood in the center of the polished floor with forty mirrors turned toward him and three hundred masked faces waiting, and for the first time in twelve years he did not reach for the stone in his pocket.

"Take your time," said Isoreth. "Pride is patient."

He did not need time. He had been composing the sentence for twelve years.

"When I was seventeen," said Kael, and his voice carried to the end of the hall, "I stood at the top of the east stair and watched four guards drag a girl to the chapel. She was twenty-four. She had taught me to whistle through a blade of grass. She was bound, and she was innocent, and she looked up and said my name."

The court did not breathe.

"She said it seven times. I counted. I have counted every night since." He swallowed. "I was seventeen, and I was afraid of my father. I was afraid of what would happen if I stepped down those stairs. So I turned around, and I ran."

A ripple went through the masks. In the mirror beside him, the seventeen-year-old stopped running.

Kael did not look. He knew, as certainly as he knew his own name, what was happening in the glass. The boy on the stair had halted in the middle of his flight. He stood with his back to the hall, shoulders shaking.

"I have been a king for three days," Kael said, "and a coward for twelve years. I have told myself I was a child. I have told myself that nothing I could have done would have changed it. Both are true. Neither is an excuse." He turned, slowly, until he faced the woman beside him. "I was ashamed of it every day of my life. I am more ashamed to stand here and discover that I would have done it again, if I had not been given the chance to be better."

He went down on one knee.

He heard the sound that went through the room, the soft rustle of three hundred breaths catching. He felt the marble cold through his trousers. He looked up at Seraphine, who had gone so white she seemed carved, and he said the only thing left.

"I am sorry. I cannot undo it. But I am here, and I am not running."

For a long moment, nothing moved.

Then, in the mirror at his shoulder, the boy on the stair turned around. He came down the steps one at a time, shaking, and when he reached the bottom of the stair, he walked into the great hall and held out his hand to the girl in white.

The glass shattered, quietly, as if it had never been anything else. And behind it, only a wall.

On his wrist, the silver thorn grew a leaf.

A bell tolled, somewhere deep in the palace. The fourth.

"Pride is satisfied with one half," said Isoreth softly. "The other is owed."

Seraphine had not moved. Her hands hung at her sides. Her face was wet, and she did not seem to know it. Kael had never seen her cry. He understood now that she had not cried in front of anyone in twelve years.

"Get up," she whispered. "Please. Get up."

He rose. She turned from him, very slowly, and faced the court.

"I carry a scroll," said Seraphine.

Her voice was steady. He heard what it cost.

"It is the Collector's copy of the contract. For twelve years it was the only thing I owned. It promises that if I deliver the heir's soul at the seventh sunrise, I shall be released." She drew it from her sleeve, small and black and tied with red thread, and held it up to the candlelight. "I wanted that word more than I have wanted anything. I thought it meant freedom."

She turned it over in her fingers.

"It does not. Solvere. To release. To dissolve. The Houses never lied. They only chose which meaning to let me find." Her mouth twisted. "If I deliver Kael Varyn to Hell, I do not go free. I am unmade."

A sound went through the hall like a long indrawn breath.

Kael had known. He had seen it in the glass. But hearing it aloud, in her own voice, in that calm, terrible tone, was different. It went through him like a blade.

"So I will not," said Seraphine.

She said it quietly, but every mask in the room turned toward her.

"I will not deliver him. I came here to take his soul, and I will not. Whatever that costs me."

Nobody spoke. Somewhere, a goblet rang against the floor.

Then, from the edge of the crowd, a soft laugh.

The twin lords of Envy had moved to the front of the court, so alike that Kael could not tell where one ended and the other began. Dark-eyed, smiling, perfectly identical, the one on the left slipped an arm through the other's. They wore their faces like borrowed jewelry.

"How tidy," said the first.

"A Collector who will not collect," said the second.

"Is no Collector at all."

"By the Law of the Seven, her office passes to the next in line."

"And we," said the first, with a bow, "are so very willing to serve."

Seraphine's hand closed around the scroll. The bride, at the edge of the room, had gone utterly still.

"She will be easy to replace," murmured one of the twins, with a glance at Kael that was almost tender. "And so will you."

Something in Kael went cold and clear.

He did not decide. He stepped between Seraphine and the twins before the thought had finished forming, and the words came out of him in a voice he did not recognize.

"No one takes her from me."

It rang in the Gallery like a struck bell.

"No one touches her. No one replaces her. No one lays a hand on her, as long as I am king." He drew breath. "I swear it."

The silence that followed was different.

Isoreth had gone very still. Vespera, in her corner, had pressed her fingers to her lips. And across the room, the bride made a soft, aching sound, the sound of a woman watching a man step off a cliff.

"Oh, King," said the second twin, delighted. "You promised."

On his wrist, the silver thorn went black.

Words crawled up his forearm in letters of fire, in a language he had never learned and understood at once.

PROMISE REGISTERED. THE COLLECTOR SHALL NOT BE TAKEN. PRICE TO BE DETERMINED.

"Kael," Seraphine whispered. She had caught his sleeve, and her face was full of horror. "What have you done?"

He looked down at the burning words, and then at her, and found that he could not make himself regret it.

"I stopped running," he said.

Far below the palace, in the dark beyond the gate, a smooth and courteous voice began, softly, to laugh.

"Thank you, little king," it said. "I do so love a promise."