Page 35

He goes very still.

“Riwal,” I say. “Take it off.”

For a moment he does not move. Then his hand comes up and he lifts the gold away from his face, in my doorway, in my light, and the mouth loses its color and the jaw goes long and the eyes fill in black from edge to edge.

It takes no time at all. The wood comes away and the man goes with it, and what is left is the thing every soul in Morlac stepped away from, standing in my corridor with a piece of gilt in his hand.

He is beautiful like a cliff is beautiful. Nothing about him is arranged for me, and I do not want to look anywhere else.

“Enora.”

He says it the way he said take your time. Low, close, nothing in it but my name. It does not carry past me, and it is not steady. I have listened to this man’s voice since the ball and I have never heard it not steady.

“I know,” I say. “I’ve known the whole time.”

I take the mask out of his hand. Gilt over wood, lighter than it looks, cold from his face like the rest of him. I put it on the chest by the door, where he always puts it, and I shut the door behind him, and I set the candle on the washstand so it throws at the bed.

“The auction floor, or the settlement room?”

“The floor.” I have to stop and get my throat to work. “You could have said anything. You said take your time, and I knew your voice, and I picked you. Then I asked you straight out, and you looked at me and said no.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me why you lied.”

“I lied to you. In the settlement room, with the registrar at the far end of it. You asked me a plain question and I lied, and I suspected you already knew. I kept finding reasons not to believe it.”

“And you did it anyway.”

“I have done worse than that.” He turns his head and looks at the mask on the chest. “Every night since. That is worse, and we both know it.”

And the laugh comes up out of me.

It is not a good one. It comes out cracked and high and it does not stop where laughs stop, and I sit down on the edge of the bed because my knees have gone, going and going, until my ribs hurt and my eyes are streaming, because of course.

I made a rule against names so that I would never have to hear him say yes, it was me. He put on a mask so that I would never have to look at him. And every morning the two of us sat down at the same table and passed the bread.

“Enora.”

“Don’t.” I get my hand up. “I’m not crying. Leave me alone, I’m laughing.”

He waits.

When it stops it stops all at once, and the room is very quiet, and I am wrung out, and clear.

“My turn,” I say. “You’ve said what you did. Now I say mine, or you’ll walk out of this room carrying all of it, and I’m not having that.”

He does not sit. He stands in the middle of my room with his coat still on and his hands at his sides, and the candle finds every long wrong line of his face, and I look at it while I talk.

“I knew whose face it was and I kept you in it. I got what I wanted in the dark, and then I was a cow to you across four yards of table every morning, and I let you watch me do it. I knew I was doing it. I kept doing it.”

“You were not deceived.”

“No. I was in on it.”

He does not say anything for a while.

“I would have taken it off,” he says, “any night you asked. Any hour. You had only to say my name.”