The Ring

He gave it to her on a morning of pale rain, in the kitchen garden, between the leeks and the beans.

It was an absurd place to do it. She would think so afterward, with a pang. He could have chosen the terrace, or the Archive, or the quiet hour in the evening when the whole palace lay hushed and amber with candlelight. Instead he found her kneeling in her oldest gown among the seedlings, with mud to the elbows and a trowel in her fist, trying to persuade Soot that the cabbages were not food. He stood at the end of the row under an umbrella that a footman had been holding, and which he had at some point confiscated, and said, in a voice that was almost shy, "May I interrupt?"

"You may stand there and be rained on."

"I have an umbrella."

"Then you may stand there and be dry. I'm busy."

"I see that." He came down the muddy path, picking his way with extreme dignity, and stopped at her side. "I have brought you something. I did not know where to put it. I find that I have no gift for ceremony."

She sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her skirt. He held out his closed fist.

When he opened it, there was a ring in his palm.

It was a plain band. Black, and narrow, and cold-looking, set with a single small stone the color of smoke. It had no ornament. It was not the kind of ring the court wore, with great gaudy gems and the arms of a house. It lay in the center of his hand like a drop of dark water, and the rain fell on it, and it did not shine.

"It was my mother's," he said.

She went still.

"Not the pin. The pin was only a pin." His eyes were fixed on the ring. "This she wore every day of her life. It was the one thing in the palace that my father would not touch. When she died he had it put away in a vault, and I found it, years later, among the effects. I do not know why it was kept." He swallowed. "It has been in my pocket for two months."

"Kieran."

"I wish you to have it."

"It's your mother's."

"I do not wish to be alone in having kept her." He said it very plainly. "I should like to see it worn."

She looked up. The rain was falling in a fine silver mist between them, and his face above her was wet and pale and absolutely serious. She had not seen him so uncertain since the first night in the tower. A drop of water hung at the tip of his nose. His hair was plastered to his forehead. He looked like a man waiting for a sentence, and she found, with a swell of tenderness, that she could not bear it.

"Put it on me," she said.

He did.

His hand was cold. It shook very slightly. He took her left hand in his and turned it palm down, and slid the ring slowly over the third finger, past the knuckle, and it settled into place with a faint click, as though it had been waiting. For a moment it was merely metal against her skin, cool and slightly heavy.

Then she felt a hush go through her.

It was a strange sensation. A kind of quieting, as when a roomful of people stops talking at once, and she stands in the middle of the silence, listening. Something that had been running quietly under her skin since she woke up in a ditch, a warmth, a hum, a faint quick pulse, grew still. She had not known how loud it was until it stopped.

"Oh," she said.

"What is it?"

"It's... quiet."

"Is that bad?"

"No." She turned her hand in the gray light. The smoke-colored stone seemed to drink the rain. "No. It's restful. It's like when the wind drops." She smiled up at him. "It's lovely, Kieran."

He let out a breath she hadn't known he was holding.

"I had hoped," he said. "That is, the book that I found it in. It said that it would ease the burden of the fire. That it would take the strain from you when you heal. That you would not be drained."

"That's what it's for?"

"That is what I believe." His voice shook very slightly. "I do not want you to bleed from the nose again."

She rose and kissed him, muddy hands and all, there among the beans, and he put his arms around her and held on so hard that she squeaked. Soot, abandoned, ate a cabbage.

She did not see the way his eyes closed. She did not see his face over her shoulder, drawn and gray, with a deep line cut between the brows. She did not see that the hand which held her was not entirely steady, nor hear what he said, so low against her hair that it was almost a prayer.

Forgive me.

…

It was Berylla who noticed first.

She was not a woman given to fuss. She had dressed the Lady Solaia every morning for months, and laid out her gowns, and brushed her hair, and said nothing of her own concerns. But on the third day after the ring, as she knelt to lace a boot, she paused with the ribbon in her fingers and said, abruptly, "My lady. You are very pale."

"I'm fine."

"You were fine yesterday. And the day before." She sat back on her heels and studied the girl's face with her narrow, practiced eye. "You slept ten hours."

"It's the rain."

"It has not rained in two days."

"Then I'm lazy." Solaia tried to laugh. It came out a little thin. "I'm sorry. I'll do better. I only feel as if I'm walking through water."

"Since the ring."

"Berylla—"

"I say nothing, my lady." The older woman's mouth tightened. "I only observe."

She finished the lacing in silence. Solaia sat quite still, with her hands folded in her lap, and looked at the small smoke-colored stone on her finger. It sat there, cool and dark. It did not pulse, or glow, or tug. If she had not known it was there she would have forgotten it.

I only feel as if I'm walking through water.

She did not take it off. She told herself it was foolish. She told herself that the Emperor had given it, with his own hands, in the rain, and that she had seen his face. She told herself that it was an heirloom, a mother's ring, a token of love. And she slept ten hours, and woke tired, and slept again.

…

On the ninth night, she could not sleep at all.

It was past midnight. The moon was down. The palace lay in the deep stillness that comes only in the last dark before the birds, and the sound of her own breathing seemed very loud in the room. Beside her, Kieran slept on his back with one arm flung over his head, his mouth a little open. His face in the dark was young and strangely unguarded.

She lay and looked at the ceiling.

It's the ring, said a small cold voice in the back of her mind. You know it is.

She sat up. She slid out of the bed, careful not to wake him, and went barefoot to the window. The shutters were open. A breath of night air touched her face, smelling of wet stone and growing things. Far off, the dark ridge of the northern hills was a faint blue line against the sky.

She held up her left hand.

The stone was black in the starlight. She looked at it for a long time. Then, very slowly, she put her right hand over it, closed her fingers about the band, and pulled.

It came off with a sound like a sigh.

The roar hit her.

She had to grip the window ledge to keep from falling. It was like stepping out of a still room into a storm: every nerve in her body leapt awake at once, bright and burning and screaming. The warmth. The hum. The pulse, so strong that it shook her, thundering in her throat, her wrists, her skull. The air around her glowed. She looked down and saw her own hands gleaming faintly white, as if lit from within, and the veins at her wrists standing out, violet, alive.

Oh, she thought, with a kind of dazed, shaken joy. Oh, there you are. There you are.

She had not known how much of herself she had been missing.

She stood there for a long moment, drinking it in, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, and the fire sang in her blood like a held note finally released. It was glorious. It was hers. She wanted to run. She wanted to fly. She wanted to laugh aloud and wake the whole palace.

Something moved at her feet.

She looked down. Soot had crawled out from under the bed, and was sitting on the rug in the starlight with his head cocked, looking at the ring in her hand. His eyes were very bright. His nostrils flared. Slowly, his forked tongue flickered out and touched the cold black metal, a single curious lick.

He recoiled.

He made a sound she had never heard from him, a sharp, strangled, wheezing cough, and then another. His small body convulsed. His mouth opened wide, and out of it, instead of the cool silver mist she knew, came a thin curl of black smoke. Oily. Thick. It rolled across the floor in the moonlight and gathered in a dark puddle, and where it touched the rug the fibers withered and went gray.

"Soot!"

She dropped to her knees. She gathered him into her arms. He was shaking, small and hot, his heart racing under her palm. She stroked his spine, murmuring to him in the old tongue, and the black smoke thinned, and thinned, and was gone. He coughed once more. A last wisp curled from his nose. Then he lay limp in her lap, panting, and looked up at her with huge wet gold eyes that said, as plainly as any words: wrong. Wrong. It tastes wrong.

She stared at the ring.

It lay on the rug where it had fallen, a small dark circle. It did not glow. It did not hiss. It was only a ring. And yet she could see now that it was not a plain ring, not quite: that the inner surface was etched, very fine, in a script she had learned from Osric only a month ago. A single line, running round and round like a coil.

She picked it up, and held it to the starlight, and read.

Hold. Quiet. Be small.

For a long time she did not move.

From the bed behind her came a slow, even breathing. The man she loved turned over in his sleep, and sighed, and murmured something that might have been her name.

She did not put the ring back on. She did not throw it across the room. She closed her fingers around it and held it so tightly that the edge cut into her palm, and sat on the floor in the dark with the small warm dragon in her lap and the whole slow star-lit weight of the night coming down around her, and thought, with a terrible clarity:

Whose mother's ring has words like that?