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Evemer pounded on the door. “Anyone out there?” he called. “Guards!”
No answer.
“What are you doing?”
“I didn’t have a wedding cloak for you,” Evemer said simply. Kadou choked, spluttered. “I ought to give you something to make up for it.”
“Evemer,what?”
Evemer felt again for the hinges of the door. The hinges which were, brilliantly, on the inside. Well oiled, too, they felt.
“Don’t be rude to the man who is about to get you out.” He was grandstanding, wasn’t he?Showing off.Well, and who could blame him? Kadou deserved to have someone show off for him.
“How am I being rude?” Kadou asked, his spluttering now colored with laughter.
“I have it on good authority that I’m styledPrinceEvemer these days,” he said crisply. Evemer, with a little effort, pried and twisted the pins out of the hinges. “Hold out your hands.” He felt for Kadou’s open palms in the dark and dropped the heavy pins into them. “These are the first part of your present.”
Then he turned around, found handholds on the door (the knob on one side, a crossbar on the other), and lifted it clear of the frame, angling it so the deadbolt slipped free of its slot. Lamplight streamed into the room. The door was solid wood and enormously heavy, but Evemer only had to shift it a step to the side and lean it against the wall.
He turned around. Kadou was still standing there, framed in the light with the hinge pins in his palms, wide-eyed.
“Happy wedding,” Evemer said. “I got you this door.”
Kadou’s look of astonishment shifted to one of pure hunger. Evemer was certain, for a moment, that Kadou was going to stride forward and seize him by the back of the neck, kiss him until he’d all but forgotten his own name. Again.
“What a thoughtful gift,” Kadou said in a low voice. “Thank you, Your Highness. I don’t have anything for you.”
“You’ll think of something.”
Setting aside his whirl of outraged bewilderment at the outlandishness of being calledYour Highness,Evemer grabbed one of the bottles of wine from the rack—it would make a good club for the first guard they ran across and a decent dagger for the rest, so long as it shattered correctly.
They slipped out into the hall, and a surge of pure delight so vivid that it felt alien swamped Evemer as he glimpsed, in the corner of his eye, Kadou pocketing the hinge pins.
Kadou had known the pins were iron before he knew what they were or what Evemer was doing. The unexpected weight of them hit his palms, and as his fingers closed over them, the signature of the metal bloomed into his senses—a memory of carrying something heavy, the creak of leather, the sight of a cloudy night sky, the smell of lightning . . .
Except then, all at once, the signature changed. The heavy weight in his arms became a heavy weight at his back, the pressure of being held against a wall; the creaking leather sound softened into someone sighing into a kiss; the smell of lightning became the taste of salt on skin. Only the glimpse of a sky full of stars remained, but even that changed: the clouds melted away and the stars glinted brighter.
The pinswereiron, there was no doubt of that. This was not like the wrong, corrupted signatures of the counterfeit coins. He’dfeltthe change happen. This was simply what iron felt like now, a new imprint on his senses. That happened from time to time, he’d heard. Just as someone’s palate changed over time, making delicious foods repulsive and vice versa, so too might their sense of a metal change. It was interesting but not, in and of itself, remarkable.
Remarkable, and ominous, was the fact that it had happenednow. Remarkable was what it had changed to.
He was never again going to be able to touch iron without remembering this: The wine cellar. The door. Kissing Evemer. It was imprinted on him permanently, written into his fingertips. A memory to hold on to for comfort one day when he eventually lost this. Because hewouldlose it, he thought sadly. It couldn’t last, except in the way that Grandmother had with her most loyal kahya. But that . . . that wasn’tthis. It wasn’t the same.
None of that now. Kadou followed behind Evemer, likewise taking a bottle of wine to arm himself.
There was another locked door at the top of the stairs, and this one had the hinges on the outside. “Do you know how to pick a lock?” Kadou asked.
“No.”
“We can’t break it down.”
“Not unless we want the whole house to come running,” Evemer agreed darkly. “We could try picking it anyway. Do you have any hairpins?”
“You were the one who fixed my hair today. You’d know better than I would.”
“But in your pockets?”
Kadou checked them—empty, except for the hinge pins. He felt the memory of the kiss again when his fingertips brushed against them and nearly shivered. “We could smash one of the bottles and hope that one of the shards is the right shape.”
