each side of her the four-armed female attendants smiled warmly, but their eyes were fierce, eager, urgent. They moved onto the first step with her and gently compelled her deeper, down the next step, the hems of their skirts now immersed.
Across the pool Diverus was likewise naked and no less uncomfortable. He and his two attendants all but mirrored every move. On the second step, he stared back at her with wide eyes, his body lean and, she saw, aroused. The look in his eyes was of hunger, yearning, and fear, as though the emotions he felt shocked him. Those beside him looked at her with hunger alone. They were waiting for something to happen, and all that expectation focused on her. She puzzled as to why.
The Brazen Head spoke up suddenly, the voice such a shock that she nearly stumbled and fell in. “The waters of desire!” it proclaimed. “Of eternity, if you desire that, though I could not recommend it.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You did, but you didn’t notice. It is no normal pool they wish you to enter.”
The women beside her hissed and said, “Shush!” to the lion.
She stood in the pool to her thighs now, on the third step, and the attendants beside her, their skirts darkening from white to blue. “What if I go in?”
“Then what you desire will consume you. It is the opinion of those around you that you most desire your companion as he does you. Most travelers here arrive alone and are persuaded to stay, by a maiden or a gallant, by beauty or by indulgence upon which they are fixed. But you have brought your own.”
“And the traveler swims in the pool,” she said, “to what end?”
Behind her the girls urged, “Go on. You must. Don’t listen to that.”
“Bliss,” the lion replied, “at a price.”
“Go,” said the attendants. “Swim.”
Even as she hesitated, Diverus stepped into the water.
“Your friend is in. You must join him,” urged the attendants.
“Why must I?”
Diverus swam into the center of the pool. His head went under, and when it came up it was blue, stained somehow by the water. He treaded water as if lost and unsure where to go, turning in a circle until he spied her. Then he swam straight to her. She held her place on the final step even though she was revealed, naked before him. He drew up below the step. His eyes burned into her. “Oh, Lea, I love you,” he said.
“Go to him. Take him,” the girls urged. “He wants you. You’re his desire, all he can see. You feel the same, you know you do.”
The tug of that desire almost drew her off the edge of the step but, tottering, she pulled away from it and fell back, with a splash, onto the second step. The two attendants stood over her. “You can’t, you mustn’t! He wants you. You want him.”
She looked at Diverus, at the passion in his gaze. For her and nothing else. It was love without conditions or limits, and to resist it cut her like a searing blade. All the desire that had twisted inside him and driven him to flee from her, all that he’d held in check, denied, or confessed to himself alone—all of that blazed in his eyes. If she entered the pool with him it would bind them both. With all the passion of a thousand lovers from all the stories she knew, they would be the kitsune and the emperor, Akonadi and the Stone Man, the thief and the princess—the love that lived in dreams, in all of the stories. She would have all of that and more, an eternity of it, and she had only to surrender, let the color of bliss inundate her. Diverus already bathed in it, and she wanted that no less than he.
She could not bear the look in his eyes. It brought tears to her own. She closed them and answered through clenched teeth, “My greatest desire is not to remain here forever!”
The women gasped. “No one refuses,” they cried. “No one can.”
“Enough!”
The word echoed through the hall, off the columns and balconies. Even the water seemed to shiver. The hands let go of her. Leodora opened her eyes.
A figure emerged from the entryway and strode to the head of the pool. Light thrown off the pool danced across his fine red robe, so that it shimmered as if knit of liquid. His features, also subject to the rippling, were so transformed that she didn’t