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

CHAPTER TWENTY: The Question

They buried Lord Chancellor Dray at dusk, in the cathedral crypt, with a priest who could not stop looking at the walls.

Kael stood through the rites with his bandaged hand clasped behind him and his mind a hundred miles away. Ask who never sleeps. Beside him, Isolde watched the mourners with narrowed eyes. "A dagger and a crowd," she murmured. "I know that kind of killing, Majesty. It was done by someone who knew exactly where to stand."

At the back of the crypt, Captain Rowan stood with his hand on his sword. Kael had not yet asked him. He had told himself he would, and had not, because he did not want to hear the answer. And in the shadows by the door, in her stained white gown, the bride stood perfectly still, not praying, not weeping, not smiling.

By nightfall the palace had gone quiet, and Kael took the three of them back to his chamber and shut the door.

"Seraphine. The wards."

She laid her palm against the wood. Silver light ran across the lintel and sank into the stone. "No one hears us now. Not Hell. Not the Houses." A pause. "Not the Devil, I think. Not for an hour."

"Then we speak plainly." Kael turned to the bride, who sat on the edge of his bed with her feet drawn up under her skirt, and who looked at him with huge eyes. "You scratched your hand on a mirror," he said. "In your sleep."

"Yes."

"You were not asleep."

She looked down at the silver line across her palm. For a long moment the room held its breath.

"No," said the bride.

Seraphine had gone very quiet. It was the quiet of a blade being drawn.

"I took the shard," said the bride. Her voice was small and steady. "From the Gallery, after midnight. The piece of glass where you turned around. I gave it to Lucan of Envy. He pressed it to his face, and he became you." She drew a breath. "I knew what he meant to do with it. I knew it was the price of your promise. I knew, and I gave it to him anyway."

"Why?" said Seraphine. Her voice was perfectly level, and the level was terrible.

"Because he told me to."

"Who told you?"

"You know who."

The silence was long. Kael watched Seraphine's face, and saw the thing she had been trying not to understand finally arrive, like a stone dropped in a still pond.

"He speaks to you," she said. "Through the vows."

"He has spoken to me every night for twelve years." The bride's voice cracked. "I am the part of you that said yes to him, sister. I do not know how to say no. I tried. I swear I tried. And when I would not rise, he said..." She stopped.

"What did he say?"

"That he would make you stop breathing in your sleep."

Seraphine's hands closed slowly into fists.

"He cannot kill you without killing me," the bride said quickly. "I know that. I know. But he can make it hurt, and I could not bear it, and I thought: if I just give him the glass, no one will be harmed. No one will die. It is only a face." Tears ran down her cheeks, silver in the candlelight. "I am so sorry. I did not know about the decree. I did not know about Dray."

"Did you kill him?" said Kael.

"No."

"Did you throw the first dagger?"

"No." Her eyes lifted, wet and fierce. "I was in your bed all day. I have never left this room except at his command, and he has never commanded that."

Kael studied her face for a long time. He had learned, over twenty-nine years of courts, to tell when people were lying, and what he saw was not a liar. It was a woman who had been tied to a post for a dozen years and had only just learned the length of the rope.

"You should have told me," said Seraphine, hoarsely.

"You would have gone to war with Hell in your nightgown."

A short, broken sound escaped Seraphine that might have been a laugh. She crossed the room and sat down on the bed beside her sister, stiffly, as though she had forgotten how, and put her arm around her.

The bride went rigid. Then she collapsed against Seraphine's shoulder and began, silently, to shake.

Kael looked away. He turned toward the window, to give them the privacy of his back, and stood watching the red sky bleed into the roofs of Valmere.

Who never sleeps.

Rowan, who had stood outside his door every night. The bride, who lay in his bed every night. Dray had had his last breath to spend, and he had spent it on a riddle.

"Is he speaking to you now?" he asked, without turning.

"No." The bride's voice was muffled. "That is what frightens me. He has gone quiet. He never goes quiet unless he is planning."

"Then what does he want next?"

There was a pause so long that he turned.

The bride had lifted her head from her sister's shoulder. Her face was white. Her mouth was open, a little, as though she had begun to speak and could not finish, and her eyes had gone strange and blank, the color of ice.

"Sera," said Seraphine sharply. "Sera?" It was the first time Kael had heard her use the name, a pet name, he guessed, from a time before Hell.

"He told me to ask a question."

It was not the bride's voice. It was warm and smooth, a courteous baritone, and it came from her lips as if from a pipe. Seraphine shot to her feet. The wards on the lintel flared once, bright silver, and went dark.

"One question, little king." The bride's mouth smiled. It was not her smile. "That is all I want tonight. One question. One answer."

"Do not answer it," Seraphine said, very low.

"Which would you save?" said the Devil, gently. "The kingdom, or the woman you love?"

The silence in the chamber was absolute.

Seraphine had not moved. She was looking at Kael with an expression he had never seen on her, that of someone waiting for a verdict she had already read.

Kael did not move. He felt the thorn on his wrist begin to burn. He felt Seraphine's eyes on him, and the bride's blank, glittering stare, and behind them both the immense, patient attention of something that had waited six hundred years.

"I will not answer," he said.

"You already have," said the Devil, and the bride's mouth curved. "The silence was very long."

The light went out of her eyes. She slumped forward into Seraphine's arms, gasping, herself again, and the three of them stood in the dark with the question still hanging in the air like smoke.

Kael had not said Seraphine's name.

But he had not said the kingdom's, either.