Chapter 19: Gold

The plates would not sink.

Linus had his bare palm flat on Ambrose's chest.

The old trick, the one that had worked in the car on the first day, did nothing at all.

The black chitin kept climbing.

It reached the Marshal's jaw and crept up under his eyes.

The heat coming off him dried the sweat on Linus's arm.

"Get Wystan," Ambrose said through his teeth.

"No."

"Linus."

"The physician said the fire eats him from the inside. So I'll give him more to burn."

He said it out loud to make himself believe it.

Then he thought about a ship full of people.

He thought about his own hands lit from wrist to shoulder.

He remembered what it had felt like to push everything he had into something that needed it.

Zane had done it once, to the end.

Linus meant to do it without the end.

"Look at me," he said.

Ambrose looked.

His eyes had gone entirely gold, with the black plates framing them.

"I'm going to put it into you," Linus said. "Slowly. Not all of it. I've done it before. I know where to stop."

"You will burn yourself."

"I'll burn a little. You'll burn less. That's called a trade."

He pulled the sheet off them both.

He knelt over the Marshal in the grey morning, with his palm over Ambrose's heart.

He pressed the mark on his wrist to the Marshal's glowing left hand.

Gold met gold.

It was like nothing Linus had felt on the stage, or in the keep, or on the stair.

It came up through his hand with a slow roar, and went down into the other man.

Ambrose arched under him.

A sound came out of him, rough and long, not pain exactly.

"Easy," Linus said, shaking. "Take it. You can take it."

He leaned down and kissed him, open-mouthed.

The fire went between their mouths too.

Ambrose's hands came up and gripped his bare hips, the plates under his fingers hot enough to sting.

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