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His next thrust drove the word out of me again.

“Yours.”

By the third time, I was saying it into his mouth while he kissed me.

The silver thread around my wrist had begun to glow beneath the water.

I noticed it between one breath and the next, brighter than I had ever seen it. Its light spread through the water around us and caught along his wet shoulders and the backs of my hands.

I lifted my wrist between our faces.

“Look.”

His eyes dropped to it.

“That’s us,” I said.

“That’s us.”

He kissed me hard and drove into me again, deep enough to pull a cry from my throat.

The thread flared.

I felt his body tense at the same moment mine did, and then everything broke at once. I came around him while he groaned my name against my mouth, both of us clutching at each other as the light from my wrist flooded the pool for one bright second.

He held me tightly against the stone while the last contractions passed through us.

Gradually, the water settled.

Silas still didn’t let go.

He stayed between my legs with my body wrapped around his, holding me against the wall while I rested my face against his neck. After a while, he began humming again, so quietly that I felt the sound more than I heard it.

For several minutes, neither of us spoke.

Then he pressed his mouth to my wet hair.

“This place is yours now,” he said. “Not theirs. Yours. Every time you come down those stairs, remember that.”

I nodded against his chest.

When I finally lifted my head, my reflection caught my attention in the black surface of the pool.

The lamplight trembled across the water, blurring my face without my glasses. My hair was soaked and plastered around my cheeks, but something about it looked different.

I looked more closely.

I hadn’t used the rinse in months, and most of the brown that had covered the white had already faded. After an hour in the steam and mineral water, the last of it had washed away completely.

A clean white streak ran back from my forehead.

Silas noticed it at the same time I did. He didn’t say anything. He only reached up, brushed the wet strand away from my face, and tucked it carefully behind my ear.

I left it that way.

I didn’t redo the dye that night or the next morning, and after that I stopped thinking about doing it at all.

We climbed the stairs slowly in the small hours with my hand in his. On the way back to the tower, we crossed the Great Hall, where the party had finally run itself down. The candles were guttering in their holders, and people were asleep wherever they had managed to land, sprawled across benches or curled beneath tables.