So he has sent you at last, Edwin said. Is it the hour?

Father Cuthbert, the king's chaplain and the only man still permitted to descend into the rock beneath the hall, set his lantern on the sill of the grate and lowered himself to the bench. He was old, older than the memory of him that Edwin carried, and the scent of the upper world clung to his robes — woodsmoke, wax, the green breath of rain on the court's high lawns. The king has not sent me, he said. The king is dying.

Edwin Marsh had kept the Golden Path for nineteen years. He had known every stone of it as a shepherd knows his flock, the slight rise of the seventh, the worn heart of the twelfth, the socket of the corner stone that drank the light of winter dawn. He had swept it barefoot at sunrise and anointed its seams with oil and gold-dust, and there had been mornings, no more than a handful across two decades, when he had believed in his ribs that the road was his, truly his, and that the king who walked it was only a guest upon it. Then the fire had come. A deserter from the northern wars, a man with a chisel and a leather pouch, had crept to the causeway's edge in the dead of winter to peel the gilding from the corner stones. Edwin had found him there. There had been a struggle, and a lantern had shattered, and the oil had run in a ribbon of burning light from the gate to the steps of the throne. The deserter lay dead among the stones, and Edwin had stood over him with his hands raw and his eyes blind with smoke, and when the morning came the path was a scarred black thing, weeping its gold in long dried tears.

The king had been carried down the long flight of steps that morning, Aldric the Golden, he who had worn the crown for fifty years and never once set foot beyond the path's far gate. He had looked upon the wound of the causeway in silence, and the court had waited, and at last he had spoken only eight words. The Keeper will be held until the path is whole. No sentence. No hour. And Edwin had been taken down into the rock, and the stone of the king's word had been laid upon his chest, and it had not lifted in two years.

You will forgive the hope, Edwin said. But when I saw you, I thought he had sent you with the hour.

Cuthbert folded his hands upon his knees. They were the hands of an old man who has poured a great many cups and broken a great many pieces of bread, and they shook a little, but his voice did not. There is no hour, he said. The king does not command it. The hour commands the king.

I do not understand you, Father.

The king will not leave this world until the boundary is closed. You know this. You have always known this.

Edwin looked away toward the dark of the cell, where the water wept down the stone in a seam like the seam of a wound. I know that the path burns in my mind every night. I see it as it was, gold to the gate, and I see it as it is, and I am not the same man in either seeing.

Then come and walk it, Cuthbert said. The king has granted you the walk.

This was the old law, older than the hall, older perhaps than the gold itself. A man condemned could walk the causeway from gate to throne, barefoot and unbound, and if he reached the throne the sentence was spent and the debt was paid. Every stone was a confession. Every cut was a penitence. The walk was the justice, and the justice was the walk.

The king has forgiven me, then, Edwin said. He had meant to make it a question, but it came out as a hope, and he was ashamed of the sound of it.

The king has not forgiven you, Cuthbert said slowly. He has asked you to walk. There is a difference, and it is the whole of the law. The court calls him the Golden Master, but he is not. The Master is the path itself. The king is its servant, as you were, and you forsook that serving the night you looked upon the gold and loved it. Come, Edwin Marsh. Put on your own shoes and walk out of the dark.

The descent from the rock took a long time. Edwin found he had forgotten the shape of the world — the breadth of the corridors, the lean of the light, the ache of his legs at the ends of the flights of stairs. The guards walked ahead of him and behind him, and their silence was the same silence that had lived with him for two years, only closer now. The court was gathered when he came out into the open. He had not known the court would be gathered. The long hall stood open to the evening, and the people stood along its edges like a border of dark trees, and no one spoke. The path lay before him, from the gate where he stood to the foot of the high throne, and it was worse than his memory. The fire had eaten the gold and the stone beneath, and the years had eaten what the fire left. The causeway was a broken tooth. The socket of the corner stone gaped like a missing eye, and the wind off the river moved through the hall as if nothing were there at all.

At the high throne sat Aldric the Golden. He was not the man Edwin remembered. The fifty years of the crown had folded him down to a small pale thing, and his hands upon the armrests were the hands of a bird, and his eyes were the only gold left in him. They burned. They held Edwin from across the length of the broken road, and they did not blink.

Father Cuthbert came to stand beside him, and the two of them looked at the path together for a while. Then Cuthbert said, quietly enough that the guards could not hear: You think he has summoned you for justice, Edwin. You are wrong. He has summoned you to return what you took.

I took nothing. I defended the path.

From the thief. Cuthbert nodded. And the thief is dead. But you are the keeper who stood over him and looked at the gold and loved it. The thief peeled a little of the gilding from the corners. You had already taken the whole of it into your own heart, and when the fire came, you found you had taken the road itself. That is the theft. That is why the path has not healed.

That is not the law, Edwin said, and his voice shook.

It is the law before the law. The path was never gold, Edwin. It was the shape of the king's going-forth, made visible. Every dawn he walked it from the world to the throne, and the gold was only the memory of his steps. You swept those steps. You anointed them. You were not their master. You were their prayer, and you made yourself their god.

Edwin felt the old stone of the king's word shift in his chest, and behind it, beneath it, a deeper weight he had carried so long he had forgotten he carried it at all — the weight of his own face, turned down, in the mask of the gold. What would you have me do? he said.

Walk, said the old chaplain. And when you walk, give back the stone you have kept hidden. You have held it in your cell for two years, under your shirt, against your heart. I know this, because I have watched the shape of it through the grate. I have watched you sleep with your hand upon it.

Edwin put his hand to his breast. Through the cloth of his prison shirt, the corner of the stone found his palm, and the stone was warm, and he knew he could not cross the hall without it.

The guards fell away. The court leaned forward into the hush. And Edwin Marsh, the Keeper of the Golden Path, condemned by the word of the king and held for two years in the rock, took off his shoes and set his bare feet upon the first blackened stone of the causeway.

The walking was a confession in the old sense of the word — bone and breath, one step at a time. The fire had burst the stones in their beds, and the edges of the broken places came up at him like teeth. The first cut was a bright line across the ball of his foot, and the second was a deep pocket of pain on the heel, and the third did not cut so much as it remembered him. By the eighth stone the path was bloody beneath him, and the court was silent, and the king on the high throne had not moved.

He had thought he would be afraid. He had thought he would be ashamed, to walk his failure in front of them all, the keeper who could not keep. But the shame did not come. The fear did not come. What came was a strange and terrible clarity, the clarity of a man who has dropped a burning branch and watches it fall, and understands for the first time that he has been the fire. He looked down at the path as he walked, and the path looked back at him. It was his mirror — broken, blackened, scarred by his own hand and by the hand of the one he had killed, yet still holding the shape of a road, still stretching from gate to throne, still entire in its intention if not in its flesh. And Edwin understood: the road had never been the gold. The road had been the going. The Keeper had kept it and worshiped it, but he had never once seen that he was only a footstep in it, a servant of the motion, a cup held beneath a stream.

Give back the stone, said Father Cuthbert from the end of the world.

Edwin reached the throne, and the court let out its breath all at once. He stood at the foot of the high steps, bleeding onto the last whole stone, and he saw that the socket of the corner stone gaped at the very step where the king's feet would rest when he descended. The missing eye. The empty space. The shape of the thing he had held against his heart for two years. He knelt. The stone came out of his shirt, wrapped in the cloth he had torn from his own sleeve, and the warmth of it was the warmth of his own body, and he unwrapped it as a man unwraps a wound. It was the corner stone, the keystone, the one the fire had not cracked, the one he had lifted from its bed in the smoke and carried down into the dark so that something of the golden path would remain his.

He set it in the socket. The stone settled with a sound like a closing breath, and the path, whole for the first time in two years, lay from gate to throne in a single unbroken line of gold and blood and dark.

And the king rose.

Aldric the Golden rose from the high throne, and the court went to its knees as one, and the old man walked down the steps of the dais. He did not look at Edwin. He walked the causeway, from the throne to the gate, as he had walked it every dawn for fifty years. His bare feet were the feet of a skeleton, but they did not falter. He walked the whole of the Golden Path over the stones Edwin had bound with his own flesh, and he passed through the gate at the far end, and he stopped, and he turned. The sun was going down beyond him, and the path was a line of fire.

The boundary is closed, the king said. His voice was small and clear in the hush of the hall. I have passed.

Then he lowered himself to his knees in the dust of the outer world, and he died.

Edwin Marsh knelt at the foot of the high throne, and he felt the deep ache of the cut in his heel open like a mouth, and he understood at last. The king had not summoned him to receive justice. The king had summoned him to become the stone that closed the gate. He had held the path for two years because the path had held him, and now the holding was over. Father Cuthbert came up the length of the causeway, stepping carefully between the bright stains, and he stood over Edwin with the evening light over his shoulder. The walk is done, he said. The sentence is spent. You are free.

But Edwin Marsh was not listening. He was looking at the path, and the path had become his body — every stone a bone, every stain a breath, and the corner stone at the height of his chest still warm with his own heart. He had been the keeper, and the keeper is the road, and the road goes where it is sent. I am not free, he said quietly. I have only just begun to be the path.

He settled back upon his heels, and the blood went out of him through the many mouths of his feet, and the court watched the Keeper of the Golden Path close his eyes beneath the emptied, lifted throne. The path lay whole from the gate to the dais, gold and red and dark, and the king lay at the one end of it and the Keeper at the other, and between them ran the long bright road of their going.