Later, much later, perhaps one or ten or fifteen days after he had bound his life to hers, light streamed through the open windows as the palace slept away the midday heat. She murmured sleepily beside him, lashes feathering the tops of her cheeks. The book bound to her soul lay at ease in the room just beyond.

He lifted her arm and touched his mouth to the skin inside her wrist. This was what he feared more than the dark, more than the power at his grasp: the whisper of her pulse, petering to silence. Taking her from him.

Fear made his love grow. To fear was to live and to strengthen. It was maddening as it swelled in his heart, and yet, amid all his feelings was one more, stirring foreign and raw: contentment.

I once loved, he had inked on his wrist. I will again, he inked on the other. He opened his palm and a plume of shadow curled to life. It was a reminder: People lived because he did.

And to think, once upon a time, Nasir Ghameq, Caliph of Sarasin and Crown Prince of Arawiya, had wished he could feel nothing at all.