As Talasyn embarked on her long, slow walk down the aisle, the awful possibility that she would stumble echoed through her mind. Once she started thinking it, she couldn’t stop. It filled her head until she was sure that each next step would be the last. She’d fall flat on her ass and everyone would laugh . . .
Alaric probably wouldn’t laugh at her, but only because he was too joyless to laugh at much of anything. As she walked toward him, with his impassive face and his cold gray eyes, she couldn’t shake the sensation that she was marching toward her downfall.
The memory of Darius at Khaede and Sol’s wedding, wryly asking her if she thought she would be next, couldn’t have picked a worse time to surface. Once it did, Talasyn’s steady pace faltered as she was seized by the urge to laugh. Or to scream. Or to turn around and run for it, run as far as her shoes and her dress would take her—which wouldn’t be very far at all.
By some miracle, though, she managed to make it to Alaric’s side without incident. Her nape prickling with the weight of hundreds of gazes, she numbly handed the bouquet to Jie, who took it and gracefully melted back into the crowd, and then she looked up at the man that she was about to marry.
Alaric was dressed in a high-collared, long-sleeved black tunic, embroidered with silver curlicues along the cuffs, as well as black trousers and black boots. As if to offset the relative plainness of his attire, he wore a livery collar of obsidian gems, from the back of which hung a brocaded cape of platinum and midnight. His hair was . . . perfect, as usual, all lush and artfully tousled dark waves, topped with a circlet inset with black enamel and wine-red rubies. From afar he looked too tall and forbidding, but up close his pale face was not as harsh as it could have been, and those eyes that had seemed so cold were warmed somewhat by the emerald-tinted light of sunset.
Holding each other’s gazes as the music played on, Talasyn and Alaric moved at the same time. He executed a courtly bow while she sank into a curtsy as far as her billowing skirts would permit. This part of the ceremony had been a source of contention between the two negotiation panels; in Nenavarene culture, the groom had to bow to the bride, but the Night Emperor bowed to no one and the Lachis’ka curtseyed only to the Dragon Queen. Daya Rasmey had solved the issue by suggesting that both actions be conducted simultaneously as a sign of mutual respect, so that the couple could proceed to the altar as equals.
Once they’d righted themselves, Alaric held his arm out to Talasyn. She tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and together they ascended the platform’s steps. A sigh rose from the crowd—Talasyn knew that at that moment her train and veil were spilling down the glass staircase like a river of white and gold, an aesthetic effect that had been carefully calculated by a battalion of dressmakers.
Due to the fact that she was navigating a series of slippery steps, Talasyn held on to Alaric tighter than she would have liked. He seemed to instinctively understand what she needed, slowing his pace and keeping his arm steady to support her. She glanced at him, and his sharp profile contained a trace of haughty amusement.
“Oh, you try climbing the stairs in these infernal shoes and this kind of skirt,” she snapped under her breath.
“I’d rather take my chances with the shoes,” he murmured. “Your dress is so loaded down with diamonds that I’m surprised that the floor hasn’t cracked yet.”
“Shut up.”
Once they reached the top of the platform and stood before the altar and the officiant, they signed the two contracts that the initiates brought forward. They were beautifully embossed documents stating that, on this day, Alunsina Ivralis of the Nenavar Dominion was marrying Alaric Ossinast of Kesath.
After raising the parchments to the light to ascertain that the ink had dried, the officiant carefully rolled each one up. She gave one to an initiate and placed the second one inside the censer hanging from the dragon’s crystalline jaws. Smoke spewed forth, the acrid smell of burning parchment soon engulfed by the perfume of incense as news of the union was carried to the great warships of the ancestors that sailed paradise, the Sky Above the Sky—or so the Nenavarene believed. Talasyn was absolutely certain that, if the afterlife did exist, the ancestors of House Silim would be rolling over in their graves right about now.
She and Alaric turned to face each other, their hands reaching out across the space between them to, with some hesitation, clasp their fingers together. He wasn’t wearing his usual gauntlets and her eyes widened at the brush of skin on skin. It was as though a static charge rushed into her veins at every point of contact. Her pulse began to race.
And yet there was also something about his touch that was soothing. Like a cool drop of water sliding down her parched tongue. Talasyn had been running on anger her whole life, be it the inferno or the fumes. The burning was what her magic was built around, was at times all she knew.
But this was . . . anchoring. The Lightweave that often surged so restlessly through her veins was now crooning, reaching for its opposite, its dark mirror that lurked beneath Alaric’s own skin. The cradle of his hands hinted at somewhere quiet and safe beneath the storm of her hammering heartbeat. It offered a dream of peace.
It—
It wasn’t real.
Alaric’s lips were pressed into a sullen line. He was entirely unaffected, and this went a long way toward spurring Talasyn to gain control over her odd reaction to the feeling of his bare fingers laced through hers.
The officiant produced a red silk cord and looped it around the couple’s wrists, to signify that fate had bound them together. The music came to a stop and the scarlet-robed woman lifted her arms to the stained-glass ceiling, intoning in a solemn voice that echoed through the room, “We are gathered here today to celebrate the union between two realms, which in itself signifies the dawn of a glorious new age for the Nenavar Dominion. With the blessing of Her Starlit Majesty Urduja Silim, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, these two souls now pledge their troth . . .”
Perhaps Talasyn would have been more interested in the officiant’s words if she’d actually wanted to get married. Perhaps then this farce of a ceremony would hold some meaning. As it was, though, her attention drifted during the speech, distracted by the weight of hundreds of gazes and Alaric’s hands holding hers—so strangely gentle, for some reason, as though she were some fragile thing. She had never expected gentleness from this dour, hulking specter of a man. She had never expected to deem him not unattractive.
And she definitely had never expected to find herself concentrating solely on him as the officiant droned on. He made her forget the crowd. He centered her, in this beautiful, treacherous place, where he was the only one who had known her in the time before, where he was the only thing she could honestly say that she knew. They might have been thrust into new roles, but there was still a war’s worth of memories between them.
Talasyn remembered the clash of blades in the moonlight, in the ruins, under burning skies. She remembered moving with pure instinct, light against shadow, and how alive she had felt every time she and Alaric fought, the aether singing between them. His fingers tightened reflexively around hers, and for a moment she thought that she could see those memories in his eyes, flashing silver in the setting sun.
The officiant gestured over their joined hands. “These are the hands that will love you for all the years to come and comfort you in times of sorrow,” she told them. “These are the hands that will work alongside yours to build an empire. These are the hands that will hold your children and help you carry the world. These are the hands that will always reach for yours.”
The blessing shook Alaric to the core. These hands of his could never do any of the things that the officiant had mentioned, not when they were so irrevocably stained in blood. He would never be able to fulfill any of the promises that he was making to Talasyn, because his parents’ relationship was his only blueprint for what made a marriage, and it had ended in betrayal, in flight.
It was ridiculous—it defied all logic—that the ceremony was affecting him in this manner. It was all for show. But there was a part of him that wished . . .
He should never have eschewed formal gloves. His father had drilled into his head that they were his armor, that they insulated him from the distractions of the physical realm. But Daya Rasmey had sternly advised him that wearing them would be disrespectful to the significance of the wrist-binding rite, and so he’d gone without. As a consequence, he couldn’t marshal his defenses when Talasyn’s fingers were intertwined with his. A warmth like sunlight flooded into him at every point of contact, seeping into all the icy places where the Shadowgate had taken root. It sated the buried hunger for touch that he thought he had overcome long ago.
He couldn’t get enough. He never wanted to let go.
It was all going so, so wrong.
Alaric sped through his vows while trying not to make it too obvious that he was in a rush to finish saying them. He told himself not to meet Talasyn’s eyes, but it was impossible to look away. He was trapped within sunset and stained glass, holding the hands of his bride and gazing upon her face as he recited words that he wished he could mean. If only it had been any other life.
And then it was her turn.
“I t-take . . .” Talasyn faltered, trailing off, and closed her eyes briefly before trying again. “I bring you the whole of my heart at the rising of the moon and the setting of the stars.”
Alaric wished that she’d kept her eyes closed. Her gaze crackled with intense energy, and it made the words that emerged from her lips all the fiercer, somehow, all the more poignant, even if she was merely echoing what he’d said to her scant moments ago.
“Fire of my blood, sun of my soul, I would raise my armies in your defense and I would stand by your side though the Eversea itself be against us.”
A dull pain stabbed through his chest. They were just words, and not even original words at that, but no one had ever before told him that he didn’t have to fight alone.
“I pledge to love you wholly and completely,” Talasyn continued, her brow slightly furrowed in concentration, “without restraint, in times of good fortune and in times of trial, in light and in darkness, and in life and beyond, in the Sky Above the Sky where my ancestors sail, where we shall meet and remember, and where I will marry you again.”
The officiant removed the red cord and the initiates stepped forward once more, this time with the rings. Talasyn slipped Alaric’s wedding band onto his finger, then stood there with a tremulously beating heart as he did the same to her. There was one last hurdle to overcome, and she wasn’t sure if she could bring herself to do it.
“I now pronounce you bonded for life,” said the officiant. “Lachis’ka, you may kiss your consort.”
I can’t, Talasyn thought, panic setting in. But she had to. There was simply no getting around the kiss. It had since time immemorial been the gesture that concluded the marriage rites.
Talasyn inched closer to Alaric, who for a split second looked as if he wanted nothing more than to run away. She was grateful for her heels for the first time since putting them on, because the added height meant that she wouldn’t have to tiptoe. However, it was still a bit of a ways up. Why did he have to be so tall? She screwed her eyes shut, and—
It was supposed to be a quick peck lasting no longer than a fraction of a second, with none of the mess of complications that the kiss at the Lightweaver shrine had brought in. She’d had it all planned out. But his lips were warm against hers, and as soft as she remembered. She hadn’t counted on the pleasant spark, on the skipping in her soul, on the way her magic shifted inside her like a wild thing pricking up its ears with interest.
And she hadn’t counted on Alaric circling an arm around her waist and returning the kiss.
Her head spun. When she could no longer hold her position and shifted her full weight back onto solid ground, he was the one who leaned down, his mouth chasing hers, his arm keeping her firmly to him. Her hand slid up his chest, feeling his heart beneath her fingertips, how it echoed hers in its wild fluttering.
It lasted too long. Or—it ended too soon. Talasyn didn’t know. Her sense of self-preservation kicked in and she broke away first, her entire being teetering on the edge of a cliff. Alaric blinked down at her, his plush lips just the slightest bit parted.
Her ears were ringing, and it took her an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that it was due to actual gongs. The ones threaded throughout the Starlight Tower were being struck, sending their brassy musical notes all across Eskaya. The orchestra was playing again. The guests in the pews were standing up to properly herald the wedding exit. The sun was about to dip below the horizon.
Talasyn and Alaric stared at each other in the shadow of the dragon altar. They were married.
