The Bone Throne

"No," said Kieran.

It was a very small word. It came out of him in a whisper, and the wind took half of it. But she heard, and so did the Pontiff, who made a soft sound that might have been a sigh.

"No," he said again, louder. "It is not a courtesy."

The silence on the platform changed. Behind her, the old man's staff had stopped tapping. The chains lay coiled on the black glass, dull gold in the strange light, and the column hummed above them, and the whole ring of the pillars seemed to lean in.

"Say it," said Solaia.

"I did not burn the plans."

She had known. She had known for two weeks, and for two weeks she had been preparing for the sound of it. She had thought it would come as a blow. It came instead as a kind of dreadful lightness, like the moment when a held breath is released.

"I burned the pages he gave me," said Kieran. His voice was flat and steady, and he did not look away from her. "In front of Crane. I meant it. I stood at that fire and I thought: it is done. And then the Hollow took me, and you healed it, and I watched what it cost you. And that night I sat down with a pen." He swallowed. "I drew it from memory. Every line. I locked it in my father's desk. I told myself it was only in case."

"And the Ridge?"

"The Ridge was never a shrine." His mouth twisted. "I made a bargain, on the night the ultimatum ended. Not with the Pontiff, but with myself. I said that if I ever reached the point where I could no longer protect you from the thing in my blood, I would use it. I said it to be a comfort." A thin, ugly laugh. "It was not a comfort. It was a seed. And I watered it. Every day. With every night that you were tired."

"Kieran—"

"I wrote to the Pontiff myself. In the spring. Not the 'friend at court.' Me. I told him I wished to go forward." The words came faster. "I told myself that I would stop. That I would reach the last day and turn back. And I went on, and on, and the ring went on your finger, and I watched you walk through water, and I said nothing." His voice cracked. "I have been going to turn back for three months. I have not. I am standing on the top of it now, and I still cannot."

"Why?"

"Because you are dying."

It fell between them like a stone.

"Not today," he said. "Not this year, perhaps. But I can feel it. Every time I need you, I take something. A little more. I take it and I take it, and you let me, and you smile, and you say it is nothing. And I look at you in the morning and I think: there is less of her than yesterday." His eyes were bright. "I would rather have you ordinary and alive than a queen and ash. I would rather you hate me for seventy years than love me for ten. That is the whole of my crime. That is all it was."

She did not move.

The wind had dropped. The haze above the platform hung motionless, the color of old pearl. In the stillness she could hear her own pulse, slow and loud, and under it, very faintly, a different rhythm. The ring of pillars. The silver web. A pulse that was not her own, beating in the bone.

"Thank you," she said.

He stared at her.

"For telling me," said Solaia. "You could have gone on. You could have chained me and said it was a coronation. I'd have known the difference, but you could have done it." Her voice shook. "You said it. In front of him. That's something."

"It is not enough."

"No. It isn't." She drew a long breath. "But it's the first thing you've said to me in two weeks that I didn't have to translate."

"Beautiful," said the Pontiff.

…

He had been waiting.

She understood that now. He had stood a pace behind, silent, with his hands folded on his staff, listening to every word, and not once had he interrupted. It was the patience of a man who has watched a clock for five thousand years. He stepped forward now into the shaft of pale light, and the silver mesh of his veil gleamed, and for the first time she saw that the mask was smiling.

It was not a change in the metal. It was a trick of the light, a slant of shadow. But it was a smile.

"I had hoped for something of the kind," he said. "A little confession. It does the heart good. It is so rare, in these days, to see a man take his sin by the throat and say its name." He turned toward Kieran, and the voice softened. "Do not reproach yourself, my son. It is a very natural thing to love. I would not have chosen you, otherwise."

"Chosen me."

"Of course." He tilted his head. "Did you suppose that the plans were an accident? That the ring was a courtesy? I have known you since the day you were born, Kieran of Aldren. I knew your father. I knew his father. I have watched your family walk this road for five thousand years. And I selected you, from all the men of your line, because you were the one most likely to love her enough to do it."

Kieran's face went the color of ash.

"You are lying," he said.

"Am I?" The Pontiff sounded mildly regretful. "You came to me. You wrote in the spring. I did not ask you."

"You sent the plans."

"Because you asked what I could offer." The staff tapped once. "I told you a truth, my son. I did not lie to you. I told you that there was a third way. I did not tell you who would sit at the end of it."

He lifted one long white hand, and pointed.

She followed it with her eyes, up the black flank of the column, up and up into the haze, past the place where the ridged stone narrowed and the silver cables gathered into a bundle as thick as a tree. She saw nothing. Then the haze shifted, thinned, and she saw it.

It hung in the air above the column like a bird's nest on a mast.

A seat. A great, curving, hollow seat of pale bone, fashioned of vertebrae as large as barrels, lashed together with silver, with ribs for its arms and a skull's crescent for its back. It was set on a platform at the very peak of the pillar, a hundred feet above her head, wreathed in thin cloud. A flight of narrow stairs, spiral, delicate as a spider's web, wound up the outside of the column to reach it. And from the base of the seat the silver cables ran down into the stone like roots.

The Seat.

Whose? Osric had asked. I should like to know, before any of this is built, whose.

She knew.

She had known the moment she saw the old man's staff.

"It's yours," she whispered.

"It is a throne, child." He sounded gently amused. "I have not sat upon one in five thousand years. The last was in the Citadel of the Sky, on the night of the fall, and it was not comfortable. I find that I am looking forward to it."

"You're going to take my fire."

"I am going to keep it. As I have always kept it. But it has been a thin, poor, scattered thing, divided among ten thousand lamps and bled out drop by drop through the collars. A drudge's wage." The silver mask turned to her. "This is the first time it will be whole. All of it. Brought down through the stone, from the one who bore it, and carried up the column to the Seat. And held by me."

"And what happens to me?"

"You will sleep." He said it quite tenderly. "A deep, sweet sleep. When you wake, the fire will be gone, and the memories you never had will not trouble you. You will be a woman named Solaia, who loves a man named Kieran, and lives in a palace beside the sea. I have designed it so." A pause. "I am not a cruel man."

"And the Debt?"

"Will be paid."

"By whom?"

The silver slits glinted.

"By me," said the Pontiff. "It is what the Seat is for. When the fire is mine, the line of Aldren is quit. I shall bear the interest. I have borne it already, for five thousand years." The old voice dropped to something almost intimate. "You see, I am the only one who can. The Gift of Night was never given to your house, Emperor. It was given to me. Your family has merely carried it for me, like a mule. The day I take her fire, I take it all back, and you are free."

For a moment Kieran did not breathe.

"You made me a servant," he said.

"I made you a steward."

"You let my father die in a tower."

"I tried to spare him." There was something that might have been sorrow in the mask. "I am sorry for it. I am sorry for a great deal. But I am an old man, and I have a task, and I have never once forgotten what it costs."

Solaia heard the sound of her own teeth grinding.

"And if I refuse?" she said.

"Then you will leave."

"Leave."

"Of course. I would not hold you." The mask inclined. "The steps are there. Gron is waiting. You may fly out of here this instant, and take your Emperor with you, and I shall wish you joy of the north." A very gentle pause. "But I should warn you, child. The Debt is not something I keep. It is something I carry. The moment you step off this platform, I shall put it down."

She felt the cold go through her like a blade.

"What do you mean?"

The Pontiff lifted his staff.

…

The first thing she knew was the sound.

It was a deep, groaning, metallic note, like the moan of a ship's timbers. It rose from the black column, from the silver cables, from the pale ribbed pillars in their great ring. Every cable on the platform lit at once, a bright thin white, and a blast of cold air went across the glass. The staff struck the stone. And beside her, with a sound she had heard once before in a crowded banquet hall, Kieran screamed.

He went down on one knee.

His hands flew to his chest. His face was gray. Black lines had burst from his wrists and were running up his forearms like ink spilled on wet paper, and they were not slow. They were fast, so fast that she could see them move, branching and branching, a spreading web of dark that raced up his neck and into the corners of his eyes. His mouth opened. What came out was not a word.

"Kieran!"

She was on her knees beside him. Her hands were on his face, his shoulders, his chest. The black hammered against her palms like a living thing. It was colder than it had ever been. It poured into her fingers and she felt her own fire flare up to meet it, bright and furious, and the two of them clashed and tangled and tore, and she cried out.

The ring was not on her. She had refused it. There was no dampener, no barrier. And for an instant she thought: it's enough. I can do it. I can hold him.

Then she saw the cables.

They had gone from white to gold. They pulsed. And with every pulse, a surge of dark flowed up the web, from the stone, from the bone, from the silver coils. It was feeding him. It was feeding the Hollow with a power so vast that she felt it break against her like a wave on a pier. She had fought the thing in his veins a dozen times, and it had been a small cold beast. This was a god.

"I told you," said the Pontiff, calmly. "It is a thing I carry. And I am putting it down."

"Stop it!"

"I cannot. Not once it has begun. Only the Seat can hold it." The staff lifted a fraction. "Take the chains, child. Stand at the stone. Let the circuit close, and I shall draw it back into myself in a single breath. It will take less than a minute." The voice was soft with pity. "Or take your leave, and let him burn. I shall not mind. I have never grown fond of him."

Kieran's hand closed on her wrist.

It was shaking. It was ice. His eyes, huge and dark and ringed with black, found hers across a space of six inches, and his lips shaped one word, over and over, with all the force of a dying man.

Go.

Go. Go. Go.

She knew what he meant. He meant leave me. He meant fly. He meant you were never supposed to be here. He meant a thousand things, and she could see them all in his face, written in the black, and not one of them was a lie.

She laughed.

It came up out of her like a bubble from the bottom of a well. It was soft, and wet, and helpless. She bent over him, with the pearls swinging and the veil falling forward, and pressed her forehead to his.

"Idiot," she said.

"Solaia—"

"I told you not to forget it."

She stood up.

The black glass shone under her feet. She shook out the white skirts and turned, slowly, away from the dying man on the platform, toward the column. It rose before her, black and humming, with the iron ring at its foot and the four coiled chains of Dark Gold beside it. Beyond it, high in the haze, the pale throne waited with its ribs spread open, like a hand.

Love him anyway, said Obsyra, in the vast gentle voice of the mountain. It was your gravest fault.

"I know," she whispered. "I know."

She took a step.

"Wait," said Kieran, hoarsely, from the ground. "Solaia. No. No—"

She took another.

And then, from somewhere far below, at the foot of the hundred glass steps, rising through the silent kneeling crowd, came a voice. Cracked and thin and furious, high with age, and ringing with a command that belonged to no man alive.

"Stop!" shouted Osric Wenn. "Stop! In the name of the Keepers of the Record, I forbid it!"