by SM Reine
Grim realization crept over Konig. “I’ll be king of both unseelie courts.” He seemed to take no pleasure in the knowledge.
“Take one another’s hands,” Jibril said.
Konig grabbed Marion’s wrists since her hands were limp. “Skip the ceremony. Just do the important parts.”
Jibril put his hands over theirs. He focused on the prince first. “Do you consent to marriage with Marion Garin, and swear to love, honor, and obey her until death parts you?”
Sidhe magic flared over Konig’s flesh, sparking throughout the crystalline walls of Myrkheimr. The oath was not merely words.
“I will love, honor, and obey you, Marion,” Konig said.
It felt like chains were looped around Marion’s throat, tightening with every syllable.
Myrkheimr shook. Smoke billowed up the sides of the tower, spreading black clouds into a perfect blue sky. All of the Autumn Court was falling into darkness.
Jibril was calm as he turned his focus on Marion. “Do you consent to marriage with Prince ErlKonig, and swear to love, honor, and obey him until death parts you?”
Magic flashed again. In the glint of light, Marion remembered being struck by Konig. She remembered the fear. The pain.
She remembered Seth’s promise to never hurt her.
And then Seth plunging into balefire with Arawn.
“You have to consent,” Jibril said. “You have to say the words.”
Marion blinked, and the tears started flowing down her cheeks. They dripped from her chin and splattered on the chest of her torn wedding dress. “I will love, honor, and obey you, Konig,” she said hoarsely.
The magic yanked tight.
Under calmer circumstances, it would have been a beautiful thing—the way that it wound around them like loops of spider webbing, joining their hearts and bodies.
Marion and Konig joined eternally in holy matrimony.
It was Konig’s moment of triumph, but he looked every inch as ragged as Marion. It might have been delusion that led her to think that he looked regretful.
“Hold me,” Konig said. “Don’t let go.”
She continued to grip one of his hands while he extended the other toward Jibril.
The angel slashed his palm.
Blood the color of silver-edged sapphires gushed from Konig’s flesh. And then there was no flesh at all. There was only the power at Konig’s core. Reality’s loose grip unraveled to reveal the truth of him—the sidhe rather than the man she’d married.
Marion had seen him like that before, when he’d been trying to rescue her in Port Angeles. He was raw Earth energy. He was the wind that carried in the first storms of winter. He was the thunderstorm, the hurricane, the tornado carving valleys into planes and flattening every human habitation in its way.
Konig was magic.
He was Myrkheimr.
The wave of the new king’s power crested over the Autumn Court, carrying Marion’s consciousness along with it. She could see every inch of his kingdom—their kingdom. She saw fires extinguished in a heartbeat. Walls lifted from victims trapped within the wreckage. Hounds ripped apart and flung into the ocean.
Konig’s presence was so mighty that he consumed Marion’s senses. She was only half-human, but half was enough.
He overwhelmed her. All sense of the world shut down.
And then Marion awoke, lying on her back at the center of the tower. There was no howling, no screaming, no magic. She sat up, her hair frizzed into a foam around her head, with no sign of the pins that had carefully held it in place.
Konig braced himself on the altar, back in his man-like form. He shined brighter than the moon. His eyes radiated. He had taken over the wards on Myrkheimr and driven out all invaders—not just the Hounds, but the possessed human beings, too.
Nothing remained in their kingdom but silence.
There was very little to recover in the wake of the wedding.
At another time, Marion would have been impressed by how effortlessly Konig’s magic reassembled the Autumn Court. Myrkheimr didn’t seem to require reconstruction, but simple healing; within minutes, it was restored to the same state as the day before without so much as a bloody Hound paw print marring its halls.
Fixing Myrkheimr didn’t bring back the dead.
Marion and Konig agreed to make their first appearance as king and queen barely an hour later. It was just enough time for Marion to strip off the bloody wedding dress in numb silence. The diadem that Violet had commissioned was in a box on her dresser, but Marion didn’t put it on.
She attended the mass funeral with her hair loose around her shoulders and wearing the one black dress she’d found in her closet. It must have been designed for another funeral. That was the only occasion Marion could imagine warranting such a modest gown.
Konig was stiff beside her as all the bodies were laid out in the courtyard.
Two hundred thirty-six in all, counting Violet and Nori.
In the wake of battle, the ruling king and queen were meant to spend a night holding vigil over the people they’d lost. Marion doubted that the vigil had been held by freshly coronated newlyweds before, but then, the sidhe hadn’t had very long to practice their traditions.
“We don’t have to do this,” Marion said. “We can have them buried immediately.”
“It’s sidhe tradition,” Konig replied dully.
She didn’t offer to end the vigil early again.
They didn’t sit, didn’t move, and barely spoke as hours passed. They should have been celebrating their wedding night. All of the sidhe courts should have launched into weeks of partying.
Instead, they waited with the dead.
It wasn’t his mother’s body that he lingered over as the evening wore on, but Nori’s. Her body was cast in shades of crimson and amber from the sunset, which made the smears of blood on her body look black.
“Arawn said you were having an affair with her,” Marion said. She wasn’t sure if she hoped he’d deny it or not. At that point, it seemed like cheating on her was one of the less damaging things he could have done.
He didn’t deny anything.
“I need sex the way you need to breathe, princess. Should I have suffocated while waiting for you? Or should I have forced myself on you? I chose to fulfill my own sexual needs so you’d have room to rediscover yourself. What would you have preferred I do?”
“There had to be better options than those,” Marion said. “Ymir saw everything, didn’t he? That’s why he’s not talking. You did that to him.”
“Yes, a hex,” Konig said.
That made her angrier than learning he’d slept with Nori.
Marion walked away from him to try to compose herself. She didn’t go far—only to the fresh growth of vines against one pillar, where she could inhale the scent of its pollen and stroke her fingers over the soft leaves.
Once they left the courtyard, the surviving members of the Autumn Court would come in to pay their respects, the bodies would be buried, and there would be other matters of state to address. This might have been Marion’s only opportunity to talk everything over with Konig for weeks to come.
“We can’t divorce,” he called to her.
She had already been inching toward that thought, trying to avoid drawing the same conclusion. “It exhausts me, the thought of staying with you. I’ll worry you’re hexing people to hide information from me. Or I’ll worry you’ll throw yourself at Heather if I withhold sex one night. Or worry that you’ll be enraged by some perceived insult and take it out on me, physically or magically. It is exhausting.”
Those words didn’t evoke fresh anger from him. When he looked beaten like this, it was difficult to imagine that Konig could ever have become angry enough to hit her. “I’ve made mistakes.”
So had Marion. Her entire life had become an attempt to rectify the errors she’d made before losing her memories, and the errors she’d made in the weeks since. “Are you sorry?”
He nodded as he
stared at Nori’s face. “I’ve never been sorrier for anything. I’d do better by you, if you let me.”
“I don’t know why I should.”
“If not for me, then for our people. We rule all of the unseelie now, Marion. I just don’t think I can do it without you.”
“I won’t be able to trust you ever again,” Marion said. “How can we rule together when we can’t win the war between ourselves?”
“Because we need to.” He stepped between the bodies to join Marion, gripping her hand the way that he had when they’d exchanged vows. “You deserve better than me, but I need you now more than ever. Thousands of people need you.”
She didn’t respond.
Yet the silence from the dead was deeper.
Marion could punish Konig by leaving him—and what a satisfying punishment that would be. The easiest thing to do, by far.
All of the unseelie would suffer for it.
“I’ll stay with you,” she said. Konig leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled back before he could. “We’ll rule together, but I do this for the people, not for you. I want to love you, Konig, but until you prove that you can do better, I’m not going to be with you…like that.”
Some of that familiar old anger flickered in his eyes. “You’ll want me to remain chaste too, won’t you?”
“If you want to salvage our marriage,” she said. “Yes. You’ll be chaste. You’ll suffocate. And you’ll be happy I’ve given you the opportunity.” Gods, that was a cruel thing to say. It hurt to say it. It was the sweetest pain she’d ever felt.
“I’ll wait for you if you’ll wait for me,” Konig said. “Stay away from Seth. I don’t want you to see him anymore.”
“I’m the Voice of God. I can’t stay away from the gods.”
“I’m a sidhe you’re asking not to have sex,” he said. “You’d have to be selfish to expect me to commit when you won’t do the same.”
“There’s a difference between selfishness and self-care,” Marion said. And right now, what she most needed to do to care for herself was walk away from Konig.
She left him holding vigil alone. One last moment with Nori before the earth took her body.
Marion wished she could have been angrier about it.
It would have been nice if she’d been angry at all, really.
Yet she was only exhausted.
She walked the empty wing of Myrkheimr for the first time as queen. Not steward, not “princess,” but queen. The wards didn’t speak to her at all. The Winter Court had reluctantly responded to Marion when she’d been the sole ruler, but the Autumn Court had no interest at all. Myrkheimr knew that its prince had risen to become king. It cherished Konig in the way that Marion couldn’t.
The throne room was emptier than Marion’s heart.
“Queen of nothing,” she said, stopping to stand in the burned circle where balefire had been.
“But a queen nonetheless,” said someone behind her.
She spun, bow leaping into her hands, an arrow instantly in her fingers.
Marion didn’t shoot.
There were two people in the throne room who hadn’t been there when she entered. Neither of them belonged, but Marion recognized both.
One of them was a curvaceous woman with mounds of chestnut curls that were streaked with gray near the roots. Her breasts were lifted by a tightly cinched corset dress. She cradled a large glass vessel in her arms, which was filled with some kind of glowing potion that tinted her flesh crimson.
Ariane Kavanagh looked much like Marion, in a way—the same hair, the same graceful way they wore their gowns, the same fierce mischief in their eyes.
And she was standing beside a child-sized demon wearing an orange cloak. When that creature pushed her hood back, she revealed the head of a goat, with large eyes marked by oval pupils. “My name is Onoskelis,” said the goat-headed demon. “Your names are Marion Garin, Marion Kavanagh, Queen of the Unseelie, and Voice of God. It’s finally time for us to talk again.”
Marion and Seth’s story continues in Cast in Balefire.
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