Chains of Gold

The first shackle closed on her left wrist with a sound like a coin dropped in a well.

It was not a loud sound. It was small and flat and definite, a click of old metal against old metal, and it went through her entire body. She had worn this gold before. She remembered it, the way one remembers a childhood illness: not the details, but the shape of the weakness. The cold crept in at the place where it touched her skin and ran up her arm in a thin bright line, and she felt her fire, which had been roaring in her veins for an hour, shudder, and bank, and sink.

"Be still," said Kieran.

He was kneeling at her feet.

She had not expected that. She had expected the Pontiff's acolytes, or the silent soldiers of the Church, to come forward with their staves and do it in a single efficient motion, like men shoeing a horse. Instead it was the Emperor who rose from the black glass, gray-faced and swaying, with the lines of the Hollow still crawling under his skin like worms, and took the chain from the ground in his own two hands. The cables had dimmed. The surge had ebbed. She had stepped toward the column and the dark in him had withdrawn, sullenly, like a beast called to heel, and he had gotten to his feet and walked to her without a word.

"I will do it," he said. "No one else."

"Kieran."

"Let me." His voice was a ragged whisper. "If it is to be done. Let it be me."

She held out her other wrist.

The second shackle closed. The third was at her ankle, and she felt his fingers shake as he fastened it, and the gold slid up over the bone of her foot and settled there, heavy and cold. The fourth followed. Then the chains. They ran from her wrists and ankles, four long coils, to the iron ring at the foot of the column, and when the last link snapped home she was fixed against the black stone with her arms drawn out to the sides, like a figure in an old painting, her white gown spilling about her feet.

She stood very still.

It was not painful. That was the surprise of it. The cold in her limbs was only a deadness, a slow numbing, as when one has slept on an arm. Her mind was perfectly clear. She could feel the column behind her back, humming, warm as a living flank, and the silver web overhead, and the hundred-foot spiral of the stair. She could feel the great hollow seat above her, waiting.

And she could feel, very faintly, behind a wall of gold that had not been there a moment before, the thing in her chest that was her.

Still there, she thought. Still mine. Just very far away.

…

Below the platform, in the courtyard of the pillars, someone began to scream.

It was not a human voice. She would have known it anywhere. It was the sound she had heard on the night of the Festival, torn out of a throat as large as a doorway, a long raw shuddering cry of pain and betrayal. She turned her head as far as the chains would let her, and looked down over the black rim.

Gron.

They had caught him at the foot of the steps. He had been waiting, patiently, where she had left him, with his great head lowered and his wings folded; and now a ring of white-robed priests had closed on him from every side, a dozen of them, with long poles in their hands. At the end of each pole hung a loop of silver cord. As she watched, the loops dropped, one after another, over his neck and horns and jaw, and drew tight.

He thrashed. The ground shook. A priest was flung ten feet through the air and landed in a heap, but there were more of them, and the cords were fine as hairs, and where they touched, his scales smoked.

"Gron!" she cried.

Mother, said the dragon, in a thread of voice. Mother. It burns.

"Stop it! Stop it, please—"

"It is a precaution," said the Pontiff mildly. "I do not wish him to interfere. He will be released when the ceremony is complete."

"You're hurting him."

"Only a little." The silver mask was turned to the courtyard. "A temporary collar. It will do no lasting harm."

She could see the red glow spreading under Gron's scales. She could see his great golden eyes rolling, and the long convulsive shudder that ran down his spine. And behind her, she felt Kieran flinch.

"Take it off him," he said.

"Presently."

"Take it off him."

"My son." The old man's voice was almost tender. "You have been so very good. Do not spoil it now."

Kieran's hands closed into fists.

For a moment she thought he would do it. She thought he would turn and strike the old man, and the Hollow would flare, and the ring of silver cables would answer. She saw the muscle jump in his jaw. She saw the black crawling in his veins. And she saw, with perfect pity, what it cost him to unclench his hands.

"I am sorry," he said, to Gron, or to her, or to the sky. "I am sorry."

…

"You can still stop it," said Solaia.

She said it softly. She said it only to him.

He had come to stand in front of her, an arm's length away, with his back to the Pontiff and the crowd. The sun shone on his bare black head. He looked, in that light, like a man at the end of a very long illness, spent and gaunt and curiously clean. The tears were running down his face. He did not seem to know it.

"No," he said.

"You could. Now. You could take the chains off and say no."

"And he will take the Hollow with his own hand, and I will be dead before you reach the stair." His voice was steady. "I have felt it, Solaia. I felt the cables. The thing in me was never mine. He has had his hand on my throat since I was born."

"Then I'll hold it."

"You cannot hold it and be well."

"I can try."

"You have tried." He said it with sudden, terrible tenderness. "You have tried every night. You have tried until you bled. I have watched you give pieces of yourself to a thing that has no bottom, and I have said nothing, because it kept me alive." He drew a ragged breath. "I cannot ask it again."

"You didn't ask. I offered."

"And I took."

She looked up into his face. It was an inch from hers. She could see the tiny scar at the corner of his eye. She could see the places where the black had settled in the whites of his eyes like ink in water. She could see the love in him, huge and ruinous and unmistakable, and she thought, with an aching clearness: there it is. That's all of it. That's the whole of the thing I fell for. A man who would pay any price but the right one.

"Kieran," she said.

"Yes."

"Look at me."

He looked.

"I'm not angry," she said. "I want you to know that. I should be. I think I will be, later. But I'm not, now." She smiled, shakily. "I'm standing on a mountain in a white dress with my hands chained, and I'm not angry at all. I'm just... sad. I'm sad that you couldn't ask."

"I could not ask you for this."

"You didn't have to ask me for this. You could have asked me for time." Her voice cracked. "I'd have given you time. I'd have given you anything. All you had to do was say: Sol, I'm afraid."

His face broke.

She watched it happen. It was like watching a wall of ice give way: a slow groaning fracture that ran from the brow to the chin, and then the whole structure falling. He made a sound she had never heard from a human throat. He bent forward. His forehead came to rest against hers, and his hands came up to cradle her face, rough and cold and shaking, and she felt his breath on her cheek, hot and ragged.

"I am afraid," he whispered. "I am so afraid. I have been afraid since the day I carried you out of the fire."

"I know."

"Do not let me do this."

"I can't stop you."

"Tell me no."

"I trust you," said Solaia.

It was the only thing she had.

She said it in a whisper, with her wrists in gold and her gown spread like a banner around her feet. She said it with the cold seeping into her bones and the stranger's pulse in her breast and the dead man's last word still ringing in her ear. She said it because it was the truth. She did not know what she trusted. She did not know if it would hold. She knew only that she had said it in the tower, and the garden, and the dark, and that if she did not say it now, here, with everything gone, it would never have been true.

"I trust you," she said again. "Whatever you do. I want you to hear that."

He stood quite still.

Then, very slowly, he kissed her.

It was not like any kiss they had shared. It was not hungry. It was not fierce. It was soft, and brief, and trembling, and tasted of salt. His mouth moved against hers as if he were memorizing it. And when he drew back, his eyes were closed, and a tear ran down his cheek and fell onto the white silk of her bodice and spread there in a small dark stain.

"I will remember it," he said hoarsely. "Always."

"Good."

"Whatever happens."

"Good."

He opened his eyes. They were not the eyes she knew. They were very bright, and very far away, and there was a shadow in them that she recognized with a shock of cold horror, the look of a man standing at the top of a long flight of steps, who has decided to go down.

"Forgive me," said Kieran.

And he stepped back.

…

Behind him, on the platform, the Pontiff had begun to climb.

He went up the spiral stair like a man mounting a throne, one hand on the rail, the other holding his staff, with his white robes trailing on the silver treads. His footsteps rang on the metal: a slow, steady, unhurried tread. Above his head the great pale seat waited, hung with its cables like a spider at the center of a web. The sunlight had gone gray. A wind was rising, thin and wailing, out of the north.

"The hour is come," he said, over his shoulder. His voice rolled down the column, rich and calm and grave. "Let the Emperor take his place."

Kieran turned.

He did not look back at her. He walked across the black glass with his head up and his hands at his sides, as he had walked into a hundred councils, and stopped at a bronze lever set into the base of the pillar, hip-high, with a handle of dark horn. It was an ugly, simple thing. A lever. A plain iron arm, like the brake on a mill.

She had not noticed it before.

It was the thing that would start the world.

"Kieran," she said, in a voice that did not sound like hers.

He put his hand on the handle.

"Kieran."

His head bowed. His shoulders shook, once, and were still. And across the platform, across the dust and the dead man's body, across the long silent gulf of the ring of pillars and the hundred thousand kneeling faces, she saw his lips move. She could not hear what he said. She did not need to.

A little pain, said his mouth. Only a little.

And he pulled the lever down.