The Forbidden Dance

The stone fell silent. All that was left in the gallery was the crackle of the light and the distant creaking of the glacier.

Lianor drew back. Not far: one step, the time it takes to realize you were too close to something that burns. She felt Darian's heart in her wrist, racing, and couldn't tell it apart from her own.

"You heard her," she said. "You'll live."

"Lianor."

"It's all right. She's your grandmother. I'd have done the same for..." Her sentence broke. She had no one to do the same for. Not anymore. "It makes sense."

Darian took the stone out of his shirt. It was smooth and black, the size of a pigeon's egg, still cold from the voice. He held it in his palm a moment, looking at it, and through the mark Lianor felt something she didn't expect: not doubt. Anger. An old, childish anger, like someone who finds out they've been lied to about the thing they loved most.

"She raised me," he said. "When my mother died, of grief, the winter after the bridge, she raised me. She taught me to weave. She taught me to hate your house. And she tied me to you knowing what for." He closed his fist around the stone. "I'm not letting go of anyone's hand because a stone tells me to."

He went to the edge of the gallery, where the floor opened into a bottomless blue crevasse, and threw it. They didn't hear it land.

Then he came back and sat down facing her, not beside her. He waited.

"You don't know if you'd do it," Lianor said. "When we're there. When it's right in front of you."

"No. I don't know." He looked straight at her. "But I know I never want to find out. Is that enough?"

Lianor took a while to answer. Then she nodded.

They found the entrance to the crypt behind the mural, where the bridge was painted. In the middle of the white arch there was a stone that wasn't paint: a slab set into the wall, with two handprints carved side by side. They put theirs in. Lianor's golden, Darian's black. The slab sank with a sigh of old air, and behind it a spiral staircase went down into the rock.

At the bottom was a round room.

It wasn't large. It had a low domed ceiling and smooth walls, unadorned, with nothing written on them. The floor was the only thing worth looking at: tiles of two colors, gold and black, laid in a spiral that began at the edge and ended in the center, and on the spiral, carved into the stone, footprints. In pairs. Some large and some small, some forward and some back, some turning.

"Sylva said the prophecy was carved in the stone," Lianor said. "There's nothing here."

Darian crouched and ran his fingers over a pair of prints.

"They're not for walking," he said. "They're steps. It's a dance."

"A dance?"

"The crypt of the ones who danced. That's what she said." He stood and stepped onto the first pair of prints, the black ones, and looked at her. "The people in the mural danced on the bridge while they wove. Maybe the walls only talk if you do the same."

"I can't dance."

"Neither can I. My grandmother said dancing was an Aurion thing."

"My Keeper said it was an Umbral thing."

They looked at each other. Lianor stepped onto the golden prints, facing him, and held out both hands.

At first it was a disaster. She stepped in the wrong place, he turned too early, and the light and shadow came out in fits and starts, colliding, going out. Darian trod on her foot and swore. Lianor laughed, and as soon as she laughed, the light came more easily. They started again. Slowly. A step forward for him, a step back for her, a turn, and at every turn their hands crossed and a thread of violet came out and hung in the air, like a trail.

On the fifth try they stopped looking at the floor.

Lianor couldn't have explained it afterward. Her feet knew where to go. The prints were worn exactly where she set her heel, as if a thousand couples before them had set their heels there. Darian's shadow held her when she turned, cool, at the waist, and her light flowed down her arms toward him the way water runs downhill. The violet filled the room. And on the walls, where the violet touched, letters began to appear.

They were carved so finely that they could only be seen in that light. They ran around the whole room in the old tongue, and as they danced toward the center of the spiral they lit up one after another. Lianor read them as she turned, in pieces, between one step and the next, and Darian read them from the other side, and between the two of them the sentences came together.

They spoke of a city with a bridge. They spoke of a quarrel and a wound that opened in the sky. And at the end, just above the door, in letters larger than the rest, they said:

"No forced bond closes the wound. Only the chosen one. And the bond that is chosen knows no distance."

They reached the center of the spiral just as they read the last word, and stopped. They were very close again. Closer than in the gallery. Lianor could feel Darian's breathing, quickened by the dance, and her own, and she couldn't tell which was which.

"I choose it," she said.

She hadn't thought it. It came out, the way the laugh had.

Darian didn't say anything. He let go of one of her hands and laid it on her cheek, slowly, giving her time to pull away. Lianor didn't pull away.

The kiss was clumsy at first, like the dance. Then it wasn't.

When they drew apart, the violet light still hung in the air, and the mark on Lianor's wrist burned in a new way, warm. She looked at her arm. The two strands, the gold and the black, were no longer braided. They had melted into one, fine, the exact color of the last minute of evening. Darian pushed up his sleeve. His had too.

"And the bond that is chosen knows no distance," he repeated slowly.

They tested it like two children. Lianor climbed the spiral staircase, crossed the mural gallery, went on across the ice, counting this time herself. A hundred paces. A hundred and fifty. Two hundred. Nothing happened. Not a sting. Only his pulse, calm, far away, the way you sense someone who is in another room of the same house.

She ran back. He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs, with a smile Lianor had never seen on him.

That was when they heard the boots.

They were coming down through the mural gallery, many of them, with a noise of iron and trodden snow. White lights spilling through the entrance of the crypt. And mixed with the white lights, shadows that belonged to no one, moving across the floor on their own the way the shadows of the Hollows hunters move when they track.

"Aurion," Lianor said.

"And Umbral," Darian said.

Together. Both houses, coming down the same stairs together, in the same hurry, looking for the same thing. Lianor heard Orestes's voice giving orders, and then, answering him, a man's voice with a Hollows accent, and the two voices weren't insulting each other. They were dividing up the work.

Darian took her face in both hands.

"Listen to me. They don't know." He ran his thumb over her wrist, over the violet strand. "They think we're still tied at a hundred paces. They think if they separate us, we'll be in agony all the way and arrive at the Rift docile."

"Darian..."

"Let them take you. Me too. Let your people take you to your home and mine take me to mine. And let's find the proof. What they did on the bridge. What they did a week ago." He pressed his forehead to hers. "We'll pretend it hurts."

The first white lights came into the crypt. Lianor closed her eyes for a second. Then she nodded, let go of his hands and stepped back, toward her own people, while the shadow hunters closed in on Darian from the other side.