It had taken a thousand things. It had never once been given one.
I had worn the skin for three days before I understood what the mouth was for.
The man I borrowed it from had signed it over willingly — his face, his hands, the warm machinery beneath. Patrons of the House of Red Vows pay in many currencies, and he had paid in flesh, which is the only currency I have ever wanted. I have walked through Velnaris in a hundred forms. I have stood in the smoke above the city and let its prayers pass through me like wind through a torn sail. I take. It is the single verb I have ever conjugated.
Then the door opened, and Saryne came in carrying a lamp, and I learned there was another.
She did not kneel. They always kneel, the ones the House sends, because the borrowed face is beautiful and the contract is gold and kneeling is the grammar of the trade. Saryne set the lamp on the table, looked at me the way a jeweler looks at a stone she suspects is glass, and said, "You're not him."
The borrowed throat had never been used to lie. I let it tell the truth. "No."
"I thought not." She did not run. She crossed to the window and drew the red drape against the lamps of the lower city, and the chamber closed around us — the brazier's low coals, the smell of myrrh smoke and warm lacquer, the wide bed under its coverlet the deep red of the House, the little bronze vow-bell by the door that a patron rings only once, at the very end, when the night has earned its gold. The candlelight pooled around her like something spilled. She wore the House silk, the color of an opened vein, and beneath it the shape of her was a fact I had no word for. "Patrons who buy the Red Vow buy a night with no walls. He bought it. Whatever he traded it to — that's his folly, not mine." She turned. "But the Vow is mine to grant. Not yours to seize. Do you understand the difference?"
I did not. I have never in all my ages understood the difference between granting and seizing. I told her so.
Something crossed her face that I would learn the name of only later — pity first, and beneath the pity a hunger of her own. She had granted this Vow a hundred times to men who took it like a levy and were gone before the bell, men who held her the way one holds a coin already counted and spent. Some part of her — I understood this only long after, turning the night over for years — had been waiting a great while for a thing hollow enough to be worth the filling.
"So," she said, unhurried, "I'll teach you. If you want to be taught."
Want. Another word I owned only as theory. I reached for her the way I reach for everything — to fold it into me, to make the having complete — and she stepped back one precise step, and the having did not happen.
"No," she said. "That's seizing. Sit down."
And the borrowed body, traitor that all bodies are, sat.
And as it sat, the old thing in me woke and stood up in the borrowed flesh. There was no malice in it; there has never been malice in me, no more than there is malice in a tide or a grave. Only the single logic I have always obeyed — that what can be held should be held, that what is near should be ended into me. It would have cost less than a thought to take her. I have unmade cities that fought harder than a woman alone in a red room. For one long beat the chamber tilted toward that ending, the only ending I had ever authored: reach, fold, have, finish. The lamp guttered. The bronze vow-bell shivered on its cord though no hand had touched it.
Saryne did not move. She watched the old thing surface behind my borrowed eyes — I saw her see it — and she set her jaw and refused it the inch it asked for.
"I know what you are," she said, very low. "Take me the old way, and you'll have a body that stops being worth anything the instant it stops being yours to ask. Stay, and I'll show you what the asking is worth instead. Choose."
The flood held at the lip of the stair. I chose to stay. It was the first choice I had ever made; until that night I had only ever had appetites.
She came to me without hurry, and made me wait inside the slowness, and the waiting was its own dark instruction. She stood between my knees and unpinned her hair, and the smell of her — myrrh, salt, the faint copper of the silk's dye — arrived before her hands did, and arrived was the strange word, because I am not accustomed to being arrived at. Things do not come to me. I go to them and they end.
"You can touch," she murmured. "When I let you. Give me your hand."
I gave it. She turned it palm-up and traced the borrowed lines there with one finger, and the nerves the man had left behind lit like a city seen from altitude, and I made a sound I had no precedent for.
"There." Her smile was not kind. It was worse than kind; it was interested. "You felt that. You didn't take it — it was given. Tell me what it was."
"I don't —" The throat closed. "I have no name for it."
"Good," she said. "Names are for things you've finished having. Stay nameless with me a while."
She knelt then — not in submission, I understood now, but the way a sovereign kneels to lift something off the floor she means to keep. She parted the borrowed robe. The man's body answered her with a frankness that humiliated and astonished me, the cock rising flushed and insistent under her gaze before she had laid a single finger to it, and she considered it the way she'd considered my face — appraising, unafraid.
"This much honesty," she said, "and still you call yourself a thing that only takes."
Her mouth closed over me.
I have stood inside collapsing stars. I tell you this so you understand the scale of what I am, and then understand how thoroughly it failed me. The wet heat of her, the deliberate dragging pressure of her tongue along the underside, the way she hollowed her cheeks and lifted her eyes to be certain I was watching — none of my ages had prepared the borrowed nerves for it. My hands found her hair. I did not pull. I had been forbidden to seize and I discovered, astonished, that I did not even want to; that holding still while she gave was a kind of feast I had never once been served.
She drew off, lips slick, and I nearly spoke a word that was almost please.
"You're learning," she said. "Up. On the bed. I'm not finished, and neither, I think, are you."
I obeyed. I, who have never obeyed.
She undressed without performance, which was its own performance — the red silk unwound, the lamp gilding the curve of her hip, the dark crown of her, the heavy fall of her breasts as she leaned to set the silk aside. She climbed over me and held herself just above, her thighs bracketing mine, the heat of her a breath from where the borrowed body strained up toward her, and she did not lower herself. Not yet. She made me feel the not-yet.
"Here is the last lesson," she said, low, her hand coming to my jaw, her thumb against my borrowed lip. "Anyone with enough gold or cruelty can take a body. What you cannot take — what has to be given — is the moment I choose to let you in. That moment is mine. I'm about to hand it to you. Do you understand now what it's worth, that I'd give a thing like you what a thing like you can never steal?"
"Yes," I said, and for the first time in the long arithmetic of my existence the word was true all the way down.
She lowered herself onto me.
The borrowed body had no language for it and so I had to make one. She took me in slowly, slick and tight and unbearably warm, sinking until she was seated full against the cradle of my hips, and she shuddered — she shuddered, the giver, undone by her own gift — and that wrecked me further than any pleasure of my own.
She set the rhythm. Of course she set the rhythm. She rolled her hips in long deliberate strokes, rising until I nearly slipped free and sinking again to the root, and each descent dragged a sound out of the borrowed throat I no longer troubled to govern.
"Feel that," she breathed, grinding slow against me. "I'm wet for a thing with no pulse. That's mine too — the wanting. You don't get to take it any more than the rest. I'm spending it on you." And the knowledge that her pleasure was a coin she had chosen to spend on me, of everything in the world, undid me past bearing.
I held her waist. I did not direct. I learned the geography of her by permission — the place along her spine that arched her when I traced it, the breast that filled the borrowed palm, the pace she quickened when my thumb found the slick knot of her and circled, the clench of her around me when I got it right. She gasped and gripped my shoulders and called me nothing, no name, because I had none, and the namelessness was the most intimate thing that had ever happened to me.
"There," she breathed. "There. Don't stop — that's it — you're not taking it, I'm giving it, say it —"
"You're giving it," I said, ruined, reverent.
"Say what it's worth."
"Everything." The word tore loose. "It's worth everything."
She came with my name absent and my hands open, clenching around me in long pulsing waves, her head thrown back, her throat a column of candlelit gold, and the borrowed body could not survive the generosity of it. I followed her over with a sound that was almost grief, spilling into the heat of her, gripped and milked and kept — and for one impossible instant I was not the thing that takes. I was the thing that had been given to. I was a vessel someone had chosen, deliberately, to fill.
After, she lay against the borrowed chest and listened to the heart she had borrowed it back into beating.
"You'll have to give him his skin back," she said. "It was never yours."
"I know."
"And you'll go back to taking. It's what you are."
I looked at the red drape, the coals gone to ash, her hand spread open over the borrowed heart as though she were holding a place in it for herself, for later. "I'll go back to being able to take," I said. "That was never the same as wanting to. You've spoiled it. Nothing I seize will ever taste the way one given thing tasted tonight."
She didn't answer. She only pressed her open hand a little harder to the borrowed chest, the way one folds a corner to mark a page worth returning to — and I understood, long after, that she had taken something from the night as well, and meant to keep it.
And lying there in the wreck of a borrowed body, beggared by a gift, I understood at last what the mouth had been for. Not to consume — to ask. To say please. To say thank you. To say the one word my long and graceless eternity had never had cause to learn.
I have taken a thousand things since. I have never again wanted one.