The Invitation

Kieran had been standing in the courtyard for an hour when she came down the steps, and he did not recognize her.

It was the only way he could ever describe it afterward. He had been looking at the doorway, at the great carved arch of the east portico, where the sentries stood stiff and sweating in their dress blacks, and he had known that she would come through it. He had planned for this moment for six weeks. He had rehearsed his face. He had a speech ready, short and plain, with a pause in it for her to answer. And then a figure in white stepped out of the shadow into the sun, and the speech went out of his head like a candle in a gale.

She was not walking. She was arriving, in a slow white drift of silk, with her chin up and her hands loosely folded and a veil lifting about her face. The sun struck the pearls at her throat. The little silver dragons on her bodice flashed and dimmed as she moved. She came down the steps one at a time, with no hurry, and the sentries, he saw, had gone entirely still, as soldiers do before a flag.

He thought: this is what I took from the world.

It came into his mind with great clarity, and then, as quickly, was put away. He had learned to do that. He had learned to put things away so thoroughly that he could stand in the sun at the foot of a flight of steps and feel nothing but joy.

"You are very beautiful," he said.

"Berylla did most of it."

"I did not mean the gown."

She smiled. It was a small smile, a little wary. She stopped on the last step, which brought her eyes level with his, and looked at him for a long moment. He looked back. There was something new in her face, a stillness, a kind of listening quality he had not seen before. It sat behind her gray eyes like water behind a pane.

"You haven't slept," she said.

"I have not."

"Are you nervous?"

"I am the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom. I do not become nervous." He smiled crookedly. "I am merely aware of a number of things that could go wrong."

"Such as?"

"A wedding is a dangerous affair. It is full of relatives."

"We don't have any."

"No. That is the one blessing." He held out his hand. "Come. Gron is waiting."

She looked at the hand.

He had meant it as a gesture of courtesy. It was an ordinary thing: a man offering an arm to a lady. But she looked at his open palm, in the bright morning, as though it were an object she had never seen before, and he felt his heart, which had been beating quietly for an hour, give a single, heavy, terrible thump.

She knows.

The thought came swift and cold. It slid between his ribs like a knife. She knows. She has known for days. She is looking at me and waiting for me to say it.

He did not move.

Then she lifted her hand, and laid it in his.

Her fingers were warm. They closed lightly around his own. And the voice in his head, the cold tired voice that had spoken to him for ten years and had been so quiet in the last season, said gently, there. You see. She trusts you.

He believed it. He believed it with his whole heart, in that moment, because he needed to.

…

They flew in silence for the first hour.

It was a clear day, with a light wind from the west and the sky an enormous pale blue. Gron rose over the city with slow wing-beats, and below them the capital opened like a map: the gray river, the white Cathedral, the black bulk of the palace. People were lining the streets. He could see them, tiny and dark, crowded on the bridges and the rooftops, all faces turned upward. A bell began to ring, and then another, and a thin sweet clamor rose from every quarter of the city.

"They know," said Solaia.

"I had it proclaimed. At dawn. The crowning of the Empress, on the Black Ridge, at noon." He spoke close to her ear, over the wind. "I thought it would be good for them to see."

"Do they know why it's on the Ridge?"

"It is the old seat of kings." It came out smoothly. "Aldren was crowned there, before the City fell. It has a certain symbolism."

He felt her go still.

Not rigid. Nothing so obvious. It was the stillness of a bird in the grass when a shadow passes over. She sat in front of him in the saddle with her back to his chest and her gloved hands on the pommel, and he felt her ribs move once, in and out, and then not again for a time.

"Is that so?" she said.

"So the records say."

"I didn't know that."

"It is an obscure fact."

"Yes," said Solaia. "I expect it is."

The silence stretched.

He tightened his arms around her, a fraction. He wanted to say something. Something warm, something plain, something that was not a lie. He had an enormous quantity of things he wanted to say, and they all seemed to be jammed together in his throat like stones in a sluice. The wind pulled at his hair. Gron's wings beat. Far ahead, on the northern horizon, the black bulk of the Ridge had begun to rise.

"Solaia," he said.

"Yes?"

"I love you."

It came out so low he was not sure she had heard.

"I have not said it. I do not think I have, in so many words." He swallowed. "I have said a great many other things. I have called you mine. I have called you the only thing in this world I could not bear to lose. But I have never simply said it, because I did not know how, and because I was afraid that if I did, it would be the last thing that I said."

She did not answer.

"I wish you to know that it is true. Whatever happens today. Whatever you think of me, afterward." He drew a breath that shook. "I loved you from the first moment you spat in my face. I loved you in the tower, and in the garden, and in the dark when you held me down and made the Hollow stop. I have loved you every hour of every day for a year and a half. And I would give anything I have to be worthy of it."

The wind took the words and carried them off.

For a long moment he thought she had not heard. She sat quite still. Then she turned, slowly, in the saddle, until she was half facing him, and he saw that her eyes were wet.

"Kieran."

"Yes."

"Is there anything you want to tell me?"

It was such a quiet question.

It was the quietest she had ever asked. She did not say it in anger. She did not say it with reproach. She looked up at him, with the pearls at her throat and the veil blowing back from her face, and her gray eyes were clear and calm and bottomless, and in them was a thing so patient and so open that it was like being offered a door.

Say it, said something in him. Say it now. Turn the dragon round. Tell her.

He opened his mouth.

He saw the Ridge, rising out of the plain ahead. He saw the white ring of the pillars, small and clear and beautiful in the morning light. He saw the black column at its heart, finished at last, climbing into the sky like a finger. He saw the folded page against his chest, and the Marshal's last line, and the thin steady lightning of the Hollow behind his eyes.

One day, it said. Not long.

She cannot do it again and again.

There is a way.

"No," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom. "Nothing."

She looked at him a moment longer.

Then she nodded, once, slowly, and turned to face the front, and he felt something go out of her. It was a tiny thing. A relaxing of a muscle he had not known was clenched. It was not relief. It was the opposite of relief. It was the quiet that comes over a person who has asked a question for the last time.

…

The Ridge was crowded.

He had expected that. He had arranged for it. A hundred thousand people had been brought up from the plain in carts and on foot, to watch the crowning: the nobility, the Cathedral clergy, the army in its black and silver. They stood along the ramps in orderly ranks, held back by lines of Guards. A great hush fell as the dragon descended. Gron touched down on the summit with a thud that shook the stone, and folded his wings, and lowered his head.

The place was white.

It was whiter than he had remembered. The pillars rose around them in a vast ring, curving inward, their tips lost in a haze of thin cloud. They gleamed in the sun like ivory. Between them ran the silver web, humming faintly, and at the center of the ring the black column stood on its platform, with a flight of broad steps leading up to it. At the foot of the steps waited the Pontiff, in white and gold, and behind him the long ranks of the clergy, and behind them, in a ragged line along the edge of the ring, a crowd of gaunt, silent men in gray.

The laborers. They had been brought up to watch.

Kieran saw Solaia see them.

She did not move. She did not make a sound. But her hand, which had been resting on his arm as he helped her down from the saddle, tightened, and he felt every one of her fingers through the sleeve.

"They've come to see," he said.

"They look hungry."

"They have been given a feast."

"They look as if they've been told to smile."

He had no answer for that.

She straightened. She took her hand from his arm and shook out her train, a long white ripple across the dusty stone. And then she lifted her head and looked out over the ring: the pillars, the web, the silent crowd, the waiting old man at the foot of the steps. She looked, for a long moment, at the sky.

It was perfectly blue. A single white cloud lay over the pinnacle of the black column, like a feather.

"Kieran," she said.

"Yes?"

"Give me your hand."

He held it out. She took it. Her fingers were warm and steady, and they closed over his with a strength that surprised him. She stood close, so close that the pearls of her collar brushed his chest. She looked up into his face, and he thought, in that moment, that he saw her entire self: every day since the wagon, every bruise, every kindness, every laugh in the dark. All of it, laid open, in a pair of ash-gray eyes.

"I love you too," said Solaia.

"I know."

"No. Listen." Her voice was very low. "I want you to know it. Whatever you do. Whatever happens next. I came up this mountain on my own feet. I chose it. You didn't drag me here."

"Solaia—"

"I'm choosing you. Right now. In front of everyone." She smiled, and it was the old crooked smile, the one from the tower. "Don't forget it."

Something moved in his chest. He could not name it.

Far to the north, beyond the plain, beyond the glaciers and the range, there was a sound. He did not hear it. He felt it, in the soles of his feet, as he had felt it a thousand times in the last year, patient and slow and vast: thum.

Then, as he held her hand in the sun on the white summit of the Black Ridge, with a hundred thousand silent faces turned toward them, it faltered.

Thum.

A pause.

Thum.

A longer pause. Longer still.

And then, so gently that he almost thought he had imagined it, the heartbeat of the mountain stopped.