Chapter 7 - The Wedding

I am walking alone.

The aisle stretches out before me in a long corridor. A tight, heavy pressure builds in my chest with every step I take. It is lined with a thousand faces, and there is no one at my side.

I feel utterly alone.

In the north a bride is given away by her house. My father does not stand beside me, not that I ever expected him to. But a small part of me had hoped that one day, when I was to be wed, he would be there for me. A small part of me had hoped, and yet the grief of the moment crushes that hope down into the bleak reality of the present.

I am alone.

My house is a thousand miles away and does not want me back. As I walk and gaze at the faces, I see Master Torsten near the front, wearing the colors of my house, dark blue and silver, and behind him a scatter of low emissaries sent only after Emperor Theron accepted the marriage.

They sit with careful faces, and that is it.

Six people.

My father sent six people to give me away, and every soul in this cavernous, shadow-draped hall can count them. Six against a thousand. It is an utter humiliation for someone being wed off as an empress to a foreign empire. Even I can see that.

I try to take a deep breath, but my heart is racing so fast I can feel my pulse in my throat. I count my steps, because it is the only thing holding me inside my own body. The dress is heavy, dark blue and silver for my house, before it turns to the black and white of the south at the hem. My face feels hot, and the roar of the crowd has gone strange and far away, as though I am hearing it from underwater.

I think about my mother then.

I wish she were here.

But at least I know she is safe from this den of vipers, resting far to the north in her tower. I think of how the medicine that keeps her breathing depends on how well I perform over the next several hours, and I hold that thought like a rail, because it is the only reason my legs keep moving.

The altar is a dais of black stone, and a priest serving the Lord of Shadows waits on it in robes so dark they seem to drink the light. Beside him, impassive, unreadable, with a circlet of silver on his head and his long white hair pooling to his waist, stands the man I am about to belong to.

Emperor Theron does not smile. I am beginning to understand that he never will, not for a room. But when I reach the dais and stop, and my hands are shaking, he lowers his voice so only I can hear it under the priest's droning.

“Breathe,” he says. “Do not focus on them. Focus on me.”

I do not know why that steadies me.

It should not. But it does.

The priest speaks the rite in the old ceremonial tongue of the south, shadow and binding and the joining of two houses, and I understand none of it and am not meant to. There are responses I am supposed to give, and I give them, after Theron gives his, flat and clear, and I do not stumble, and I am distantly proud of that.

“Then let the contract be sealed,” the priest says, in plain speech now, “before these witnesses, in law, in coin, and in flesh, that what is joined here is not undone.”

And Theron turns to me, and I understand that the kiss is not a kiss at all.

It is a signature.

It is the seal pressed into wax at the bottom of a treaty, a legal and financial pact performed in front of a thousand people so that no one can later claim it did not happen.

He takes my face in one gloved hand and kisses me. I close my eyes, because I am so nervous. I have only kissed someone else romantically once.

A girl.

A maid I had fancied, over seven years ago, before my father got word of it and had her sent away.

I feel something wet, a slight slip of tongue, and I blush heavily, but before the kiss can deepen he draws back.

I blink.

I am unsure how to process this, and when I look up at Theron's face, it tells me nothing.

The hall erupts. Applause like rain on a roof, and somewhere a horn, and then it is done.

I am married.

I am an empress, and I am the most alone I have ever been in my life, in a room with a thousand people.

“Empress,” Theron says, testing the word, and there is nothing in it I can read. “Come. They will want to look at you.”

For a while he stays at my side, and the court comes in a bright, cruel tide, and I learn very quickly that when the emperor stands at my shoulder the tide is careful. Lords bow and murmur congratulations and do not quite meet my eyes, and ladies dip and smile and say how radiant, how fortunate, how kind of His Imperial Majesty to choose me, and peace for his people. He answers with a dominant stillness. I do not like how much I lean on it, but I find I cannot help clinging to his arm a little every time someone new approaches.

Then Cassius appears at his other side and says something low about the northern envoy and the terms, and Theron looks at me once, unreadable, and says, “Stay,” as though I am a thing that might wander, and then he is gone into the crowd, and I am alone again.

The tide turns the moment he leaves me.

“Lady Bree.” Lord Varro is the first, with gold rings on dark fingers and a smile like a crack in ice. “Or Empress, now. Forgive me. It will take time for the whole court to grow used to the sound of it.”

“That is all right,” I say, in my most polite voice. “It is taking me time as well.”

“I'm sure.” He leans in, and his voice drops into something oiled and confiding. “A word of advice, between friends. Our emperor is not known for his patience or his gentleness. I do hope, for your sake, you have the constitution for what comes after a wedding. The north breeds hardy stock, I am told.” His eyes travel down me and back up, unhurried. “Very hardy.”

There is something under the words I cannot get hold of, something that makes my face go hot without my understanding why, and a woman behind him laughs into her wine.

“I sleep well,” I say, because it is true, and because it is the only piece of his meaning I can find. “And I am rarely ill. I think I am fairly hardy.”

The woman laughs harder. Varro's smile widens, and I feel confused. I cannot help but scowl, as if I have stepped into something whose edges I cannot see, and I do not know how, and the not-knowing is worse than any blow.

“Charming,” he says, and drifts away satisfied, and I am left with my heart pounding and no idea what I have done wrong.

“Do not mind Lord Varro.” A man with golden-brown hair and green eyes takes his place. He is olive-skinned, a white blossom turning idly between two fingers, and I watch as it opens further, petal by petal, coaxed by his touch.

“And you are?” I ask, trying to be friendly and engaging despite the pounding of my heart.

“Lord Petros,” he says politely. “The wine here today comes from my vineyards.”

I hear one woman whisper to another. “I hear he wagered a great deal that the emperor would refuse her.”

I look back to Lord Petros, and he grins. The flower keeps opening. “The rest of us are simply curious. A hollow northern bastard, wed to the shadow throne. Whatever will your children be, do you think? Nothing at all, like their mother? Or does he mean to keep you decorative and get his heirs elsewhere?”

“I do not know what he means to do,” I say. “We have not discussed it.”

“No,” Petros agrees, delighted. “I don't suppose you have.” And he too drifts off, pleased with himself, and I do not know why, but my face is burning now, and the hall is very loud. I take a fold of my skirt in my fist and clench it. I do this in a repetitive motion to keep myself from being overwhelmed. I clench my skirt, let it go, and clench it again. The repetition is soothing against the tide of nobles that keeps coming.

That is the thing.

They keep coming, in twos and threes, and I cannot hold their names. Dukas and Livia and Marcellus and Ottavia, and others I have already forgotten, all with jeweled hands and bright teeth, and they say things that sound like kindness and land like something else. And all around me, at the edges, I hear it.

Laughter.

Not loud. But the worst kind.

The kind swallowed behind a hand, the kind traded between two people over the top of your head. A lady looks at my waist and says the seamstress is a genius, which sounds pleasant until another mentions how she must have had to work so hard to find so much lovely cloth on such short notice, and her friends' shoulders shake, and it is at that moment I understand completely.

They are laughing at me.

But I do not know how their cruel remarks land. That is the whole horror of it.

I can feel the shape of the joke pressing on me from every side and I cannot see it. My face is flushed with anxiety and embarrassment. My eyes begin to water, but I blink the tears away, refusing to cry in front of these vultures. Because that is what they are.

“Oh, you poor thing. They've left you quite alone.”

This voice is different. I brace for it anyway, because I have learned in the last two hours that every kindness in this room is a knife, but the woman who has appeared at my elbow is slightly shorter than me, with dark eyes, looking at me with what seems, impossibly, like real amusement and no sign of cruelty.

“I'm Lady Melina,” she says. “Of House Corvus, but nobody remembers the house, only that I talk too much. You answered Petros perfectly, do you know that? Told him you hadn't discussed your own childbearing with a man you met only three days ago. He wanted you flustered, and you handed him a fact instead. It was the best thing I have seen all season.”

“I was not trying to be clever,” I say. “I simply did not know the answer.”

“I know.” She grins. “That is what makes it perfect. Everyone in this room says the opposite of what they mean and calls it manners. You say exactly what you mean, and it cuts them to ribbons, and you don't even know you're holding the knife.”

She lowers her voice, and for the first time it is gentle. “They are being unkind to you. You feel it, yes? You can't tell how, but you feel it. I'm telling you plainly so you stop wondering if you're imagining it. You're not. They're vile. And it's because they're frightened of you, though they'd die before admitting it.”

“Frightened of me?” I snort. “I am the least frightening thing in this hall.”

“You're the one thing here they can't manage,” Melina says. “That frightens people like these more than any sword.”

For a moment, I can breathe again.

“Thank you,” I say, with a smile, and Melina nods and smiles back.

Then a shadow falls over the both of us, and it is a woman all in white and gold, and I know her before she speaks.

“Lady Melina. Monopolizing the bride.” Lady Xanthe's smile is lovely and cold. “Run along. I would have a word with my new sister-in-law.”

Melina's jaw tightens, but one does not refuse a princess of the blood, and she squeezes my hand once, hard, before she goes. Xanthe watches her leave, then turns those gold eyes, her brother's eyes, on me, and looks me over slowly, from the circlet to the hem, and her gaze lingers at my waist and my arms in a way that is more than curiosity.

“They did what they could with the dress,” she says softly. “Truly, they did. It cannot have been easy, dressing so much of a person on so little notice. You must eat very well, up there in your mountains. It is exhausting, the carefulness. I have not eaten a full meal in front of another person in twenty years.” She says it lightly, a little laugh at the end, but the laugh does not reach her eyes, and there is something underneath it that is not aimed at me at all, something old, starved, and bitter that she is only pretending to point in my direction.

I look at her.

I know what I am.

I have always known that I am bigger than most noble women are supposed to be. I am large, the way I am pale, the way I have freckles, the way my hair is red. It is a fact, not a wound. So the cruelty she has built, which needs me to be ashamed to work, finds nothing in me to catch on, and simply falls through.

“I do eat well,” I say. “When there is food. Which is most of the time, but not always. Like during the famine thirteen years ago in the north. But I am glad that hasn't happened since. And there is food here now. Which is good.”

Something crosses Xanthe's face that she did not plan, and for a heartbeat the coy mask slips and she looks almost stricken, as though she has thrown a stone at a wall and it has passed straight through and struck her instead. Then she gathers herself.

“You are a strange creature,” she says quietly, and it is not quite an insult. And she goes.

And I think I am past the worst of it. I think, foolishly, that it is nearly over.

That is when the man with the long blue hair finds me.

He is unlike the others, and with hair blue as deep water, braided back from a brown face, and has rings of pale coral on his fingers. He moves through the crowd like a man who has all the time in the world and knows the current will carry him to me.

“Lord Basileus,” he says, “of the Summer Isles. You will not have heard of us. We are very far from anything, which is how we like it.” He does not bow so much as incline his head toward me. “I have been watching them all descend on you, Empress, and I confess I have been embarrassed for my own court. Vultures, the lot of them. May I stand with you a moment and drive them off simply by being tedious?”

It is the first offer of shelter anyone but Melina has made, and I am so tired and anxious that I nod gratefully.

“You may,” I say. “That is kind of you to ask. I appreciate the company.”

“It is nothing.” He turns to stand beside me, facing the room as an ally would, and his voice drops into something warm, low, and confiding. “Though I will say, I do worry for you. Truly. You seem gentle, and this is not a gentle house. The emperor least of all.”

A pause, delicate. “Unless he has shown you otherwise? In private, perhaps. They say he is one man in the hall and another behind his own doors. I do hope, for your sake, that he has been kind to you where no one else can see.”

And there it is.

He is not asking about the wedding night.

He is asking what Theron is like behind closed doors. Whether the marriage is real, whether I have his ear, and whether there is anything in me worth using. My mind goes toward the true answer, that Theron told me to breathe at the altar, that he cleared a hall of sixty people because he saw I was drowning, and I feel the words rising, but I decide against it.

Any information I gather on Theron should be kept to myself and Master Torsten, because he is the thread that runs from here all the way back up to a sickroom and a vial of pale gold.

His kindness is not worth the risk.

“I do not know him yet,” I say, which is true, and gives away nothing. I glance at a clock on the wall. “We were married barely three hours ago.”

“Of course. Forgive me.” He smiles, unbothered, patient, and yet something feels off about him that I cannot place, despite his kindness. “Still. If you ever find you want a friend who is not quite so tangled in mainland business, the Isles remember a kindness. We are far away, but we are not without our uses to an empress who might one day want, shall we say, options.”

“Why would I want options?” I ask.

“Anyone close to Theron Adrastos will eventually want options,” he says gently. “Ask his sister.” And then he cups my face gently.

It feels oddly intimate, and wrong.

I move his hand away from my face.

“Options, huh? What an odd thing to offer a bride on her wedding,” I blurt out. But before he can respond, a voice like a blade cuts through the crowd.

“Lord Basileus.”

The temperature of the whole room drops. Theron is there, at my side, and he is not looking at me. He is looking at the island lord, and his gold eyes seem to glare with anger.

I cannot help but flinch from the coldness of his tone.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” Basileus bows, deeper than the simple nod he gave me, and every ounce of the ease has gone out of him. “I was only offering the empress the friendship of the Isles.”

“I heard what you were offering.” Theron's tone is firm, brooking no argument. “The Isles may offer their friendship through the proper channels, in daylight, in writing, to me. Not whispered to my wife at a wedding while you take her measure. Do you understand the difference, or shall I make it plainer?”

“Perfectly, Majesty.”

“Go.”

And Basileus goes, and the crowd that had drifted close drifts hurriedly back, and I am standing beside my husband with my heart slamming in my chest again. I feel unbearably restless and hot, and I cannot do one more moment of this.

“Walk with me,” Theron orders.

He moves and I follow, out through a side arch into a stone gallery where the noise of the hall falls away behind us to a dull roar. A warm breeze hits my face, and I begin to sweat a little in the heat. But at least there are no eyes on me anymore, and I put my hand against the wall and try to remember how to breathe.

He watches me do it.

For a long moment he says nothing.

“You did not have to let them speak to you like that,” he says at last, and his voice has an edge now that was not there before.

“You are an empress. You could have cut any one of them to the ground with a word and I would have upheld it. Instead you stood there and let them, and you flinched from me the whole while as though I were the worst thing in the room.”

“I did not—”

“I have spent my whole life being the thing people cannot bear to stand beside,” he says, over me, cold now, and I realize with a lurch that he is angry, and that the anger is not really at Basileus at all. “My sister. My court. The whole of the north. I did not expect it from you as well. But you are shaking, and you will not look at me, and it seems I was wrong. You are no better than them.”

And he turns to go, and it is so wrong, so completely and painfully wrong, that the truth comes out of me the only way it ever does, too flat, too late, and rushed all at once.

“That is not true!”

He stops. Theron gives me a cold look that makes me want to cower back. I avert my gaze, and my voice is shaking as badly as my hands.

“There were a thousand people, and they were all looking at me, and they were laughing, and I could not tell how, and I tried my very best to be polite and to answer them in your absence.”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “You are an empress now. Not a mouse. Try harder.”

His words fill me with anger and dread. I can tell he sees me as a disappointment. My eyes prickle with tears. I press my hand flat to my chest, where it aches, where it has ached all day.

“I am no mouse,” I say defiantly, despite the tremble in my voice and my lower lip.

He arches an eyebrow at that. “Oh? And what are you, then?”

“A fox.”

Theron snorts, as if caught completely off guard. “A fox?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“And why a fox, and not a mouse?” He steps forward, so his six-foot-three frame stands over my own five-foot-five one.

“Mice are meek. Rodents. Prey. I am no prey. I am intelligent, and clever, and I also have red hair.”

He arches an eyebrow again. “You're a fox because of your hair?”

“No, I'm intelligent, and I also have red hair. The fur and the hair are just a bonus,” I say, as though it is the most obvious fact in the world.

The anger that was there is gone from his face now. What is left is something like amusement, and something else I cannot quite name. “Right. Of course.”

It goes quiet for a moment after that. I do not seem to mind it, but I watch his once-amused face return to that passive, unreadable one.

Cold and distant.

“Still. I have expectations of you. I expect you to meet them.”

I nod. “Of course, Your Highness. My apologies. I will try to be better.” I curtsy, the way I did in my homeland when I had misunderstood something in court.

“No.” He shakes his head, slowly. “No. Do not apologize.” He looks at me a moment longer, and then he does a thing I do not expect: he steps back, giving me the space of the whole wide gallery, and lowers his voice the way he did at the altar, plain and even, stripped of the court.

“Stay here as long as you need. No one will come. When you are ready, we can go up to our bedchambers.” He pauses. “I did not realize how much you would struggle alone.”

It is not warm, not exactly. His face is still unreadable, still carved from the same cold stone. But it is not the monster the whole world promised me either.

“It is fine. I… am feeling a bit better, and I will try to be better.” I say gently. “I am also used to being alone,” I blurt out and he gives me a long look, then nods.

“Well, you are not alone anymore. You belong to me now. Come. Let us retire for the evening, if you truly are feeling better.”

I nod.

My heart hammers. I know what is expected of me on my wedding night. I am nervous. Scared. But I am grateful, at least, for a reason to retire, and to not have to speak to one more noble.