by P. J. Fox
That they were going to be married seemed almost like an afterthought.
She stood in front of the mirror, studying herself.
Her wedding gown was the most beautiful gown that she’d ever seen, a creation of grass-green satin that was deceptively simple in its lines. The bodice was as stiff as a board and laced almost too tightly to permit breath; pearl and gold clusters at the ends of the ties made certain that they hung perfectly. Black pearls and white. Yellow gold. The bodice itself was embroidered down the center in a luxuriant and swirling pattern of thread of gold, the neckline dipping down between her breasts to form a heart shape. A collar of sorts, embroidered with pearls, looped up from this deep point to wrap around her neck.
Her sleeves were attached only at the base of the arm, their embroidered caps barely covering her pale shoulders. Her hands were lost inside her overlong sleeves, capped from elbow to fingertip in draping muffs of brown ermine. Her skirt spread around her feet, the edges of her overskirt touched with the same thread of gold. The satin made a soft rustling sound each time she moved.
Her hair was piled high on her head. A slender belt hung at her hips, more of the same black pearls and white, strung between beads of yellow gold. She looked like a queen.
She looked like a stranger to herself.
Below, in the chapel, waited her groom. A man whose presence she could feel in her mind even as she thought of him, both pressing in on her and enveloping her in a way that was strangely comforting. She wasn’t certain when she’d begun to regard it as such; perhaps only just now, as she stared at her reflection. He’d been with her the whole time, even as she’d wished he wasn’t. He hadn’t left, or turned from her in disgust. Just as he hadn’t, after that night when he’d glamoured her. He’d seen her at her worst, she reminded herself; he’d already seen inside of her, into the core that no one else had ever been allowed to penetrate. And he’d still wanted her. Wanted her more, even.
And he wanted her now.
She ventured a small smile, meant for herself alone.
Perhaps she was a stranger to herself; she didn’t know. All she did know was that there was no going back. And, if truth be told, that there hadn’t been for a long time.
Her transformation complete, she turned toward the door.
FIFTY-FIVE
“No one helped me get ready,” Rowena complained. They were standing in the small—by Caer Addanc’s standards—vestibule adjoining the chapel. And then, regarding Isla curiously, “you look different. Is that new face powder?”
Isla turned. She’d been studying the room’s sole decoration, a tapestry hung above a small sideboard. The sideboard itself was well carved, if plain. Someone had left an ewer of water there, and cups. Pouring some for herself, Isla drank. Her throat felt parched, like she hadn’t had a sip of water in days. Still, she had no appetite for it. The water tasted like the lake smelled: heavy and mysterious with minerals, like the interior of a cave.
“What?”
Rowena made a face. “I asked, where did you purchase your face powder?”
“I’m not wearing face powder,” Isla said distractedly.
Rowena sniffed.
The silence stretched. Guests were still filing into the chapel, late as usual. Luci, who’d come downstairs with her mistress, had peeped through the fretwork panels in the broad double doors and reported on what she’d seen. She wouldn’t let Isla look; said it was bad luck. Bad luck seemed like a foolish concept, at this point.
But Luci, who was wearing her finest livery, seemed surprisingly taken with the whole spectacle. A closet romantic. Who would have known.
And then, “I hate it here. I feel sorry for you that you have to stay here.” Rowena paced back and forth, her hands clasped behind her back. She was wearing a lovely confection of cornflower blue that she must have sewn herself, because Isla had never seen it before. Cornflower blue and seed pearls, or at least beads that looked very much like seed pearls.
“I get to go home, to civilization.” She sniffed again. She undoubtedly resented her role as Isla’s handmaiden for the service, and on this one occasion Isla didn’t blame her. Given the current state of affairs, a more awkward pairing could hardly be imagined. Wiser heads than the earl’s would have acquiesced to the notion that perhaps Rowena was indeed not best suited to carry her sister’s train; the earl, however, had staunchly insisted that this was correct. It’s what people do, he’d told his daughter before absenting himself to find more wine. Neither Isla nor Rowena had seen him since.
“Where the food is edible and the company bearable.” She stopped, regarding her sister. “Where people actually laugh. Truly,” she added, “I do not envy you.”
“You prefer salt cod to blanc manger and apple muse? Or perhaps,” she continued, a touch of venom in her voice, “it’s the sour wine you prefer. As ill-spiced as it is.”
“Rudolph serves excellent wine.”
“He serves the same swill that we do.”
“At home, I have my own servants. They wouldn’t have let me get dressed on my own.”
“Well they did,” Isla snapped. “Rose is here. And Alice is gone. And Rose,” she pointed out, “is remaining here. Had she wished to help you, this morning, I’m quite certain that she could have managed to do so. But she didn’t, which leads me to believe that you’re not quite as popular as you think.”
Rowena’s eyes widened. “You’ve changed,” she said.
“No I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have. You’ve grown cold.”
“No, I’ve just grown up.” Isla turned back to the tapestry, studying the myriad detail without seeing a single thing. “You reject me and humiliate me at every turn, turning my love for you against me until I’m at the point where I could almost believe that hurling myself from the battlements would be preferable to the pain in my heart. The pain of betrayal, or the pain of discovering that the family I’d sacrificed for was a figment of my imagination. That my loving sister and my father who needs me, and who knows deep down that he needs me, are as real as Boll the Goblin King.”
She barked a short, mirthless laugh. “Yes, teach me what a sister’s, and a father’s love truly is and then blame me for changing. Do you imagine,” she asked, more coldly, “that these lessons would teach me warmth?”
“I think you’re blaming me for your own problems.”
“Yes, for the problem of not being the lovely Rowena, engaged to the man of her dreams.”
“You were never cruel.”
“You were never evil.”
Rowena paused. “Now you’re both.”
Isla spoke without turning. “Yes, perhaps I am.”
The conversation was cut short by the arrival of their father. It wasn’t even mid-afternoon and his face was flushed from drink. Unhealthy red spots glowed on cheeks stretched taut from bloat. His eyes squinted in their sockets. He was a broken man, and an ill one.
Rowena subsided, again, into griping about Caer Addanc: the lackluster nature of her current accommodations, which she thought should be much better seeing as how she was the sister of the bride. Evidently an entire room to herself didn’t suffice, although it had at home. She also continued to take issue with the food, which was too rich and would undoubtedly send them all to Hell. The connection between food and the afterlife seemed, to Isla, a tenuous one at best but Rowena had somehow convinced herself that salvation lay in a diet of broth.
She didn’t like the weather in the North; it was too cold. She didn’t like the herbs used in the rushes; they were too fragrant. She didn’t like mulled cider; she didn’t like the tapestries in her room. She didn’t like the fact that she’d been relegated to holding Isla’s train as though she were some sort of servant, herself.
And then it was time to open the door.
Isla stood at her father’s side. She touched her fingertips very lightly to his elbow, in service to propriety, but that scarce contact was as much as she could bring herself to allow. The earl mus
t have shared her feelings, because he didn’t press the issue. Her expression set, Rowena took her place behind Isla and lifted up her train.
And then the door opened.
Before her stretched a long hall, bounded on either side by rows of pews. Each was narrow enough, holding perhaps three or four adults; the chapel itself was narrow. Columns reared up, massive things that dwarfed the average tree trunk, and connected to each other by pointed arches. Each column, she saw, was composed of three separate columns that had been joined to form what would resemble a clover leaf if it were sliced width-wise.
The arches themselves appeared to hold up a balcony, which must have been three stories above her at least. That would be where, during regular services—if there even was such a thing, here—the lord and his family would sit. Which would now mean Tristan—and her. The lord and his family and, of course, any distinguished visitors.
Like the king.
Isla swallowed.
The columns seemed to stretch upward almost to the heavens; she scarcely dared to look up, lest she be overcome by vertigo. So she stared fixedly forward. And there, at the far end of the hall, standing on the dais that supported the altar, was Tristan.
The altar was, itself, bracketed by an enormous pointed arch so that it seemed almost to be contained within a separate room. Unlike the rest of the chapel, which was an expanse of gray marble, the curved tower walls enclosing the altar were a riot of color: pink marble and gold leaf surrounding a series of stained glass windows that mirrored the arches in shape and design. Where the rest of the chapel was austere and chill, here light poured through. Light in every color of the rainbow, making the arch look almost like the entrance to another world.
The windows faced full west and the sun was hitting them at just the right angle. The ceremony had been timed perfectly. Never had Isla seen any structure made by human hands that so stole her breath and fired her imagination.
She knew, in that moment, that Tristan felt the same; that he’d chosen this for her.
She took a tentative step forward, and then another.
The floor was paved in black and gray marble, buffed and polished to a dull shine. Isla was grateful for her slippers, the soles of which were made from sueded hide and had good traction. The soles of Rowena’s square-heeled shoes had been carved from wood, and clacked on the stone. Somewhere, there was music playing, but Isla heard nothing above the rushing of blood inside her own head. Whatever musicians had been found could have been playing her favorite tune, and she wouldn’t have recognized it.
Her eyes were fixed on Tristan’s.
He waited for her, unmoving. Still. The wash of color over him gave his waxy-pale form the semblance of life. He hated the sun, but had grown to tolerate it. He would have preferred to be married at night, but he wanted her to have one normal thing in her life. One thing, of which her friends would be envious. One thing, which would make her feel—for the first and the last time—like just another girl.
She knew this as she knew so much else, not even acknowledging the thought as alien because it felt so much like her own.
At some point, this pressing weight had begun to feel less like an intrusion—less like a pressing weight—and more like a friend. A comforting presence. A part of her. She couldn’t have said when, precisely, the transition began to occur because it had been so gradual.
But she wasn’t frightened, now.
She was ready.
Her eyes held his, her green to his black.
The pews were packed; everyone wanted to see his grace get married. That it was for the third time seemed to hamper no one’s enthusiasm. If anything, there was far more curiosity than there might be otherwise: about who this unknown girl was who, if rumors could be believed, had captured her lord’s heart. All eyes were on her, taking in her features, her figure, her demeanor, her dress. Whispered comments passed behind raised hands.
Judging from the expressions of the whisperers, they were approving. Being the center of attention was strange, the sensations it caused within her entirely unwanted. Isla, however much she had or had not changed over the past few months and since the previous night, still felt most comfortable when she was invisible.
She felt exposed. But she was going to Tristan. Joining him. Marrying him. Finally.
He was in black, from head to toe. The color became him. But here, secure within his own domain, he’d given up any pretense of being just another man. His jacket was cut from wool and leather, which had been quilted. The leather cut diagonally across his chest, sweeping up behind his head into a stiff collar that framed his features. It fit well through the chest, flaring out just below the waist to hit below his knee. His cuffs were leather as well, and flared slightly. All of the buckles were oxidized black.
His breeches were long and straight-legged. His boots, like everything else he wore, had been made by a true craftsman. He wore no ornament, and needed none. His guests were all dripping in jewels and finery; even the earl was so overdressed as to look ridiculous. But Tristan outshone them all, commanding the room by sheer virtue of his presence.
On him, any ornament would have been superfluous.
He stood slightly to the left of the altar. A woman stood beside him, garbed from head to toe in robes of forest green. The priestess. Isla had heard that here, in the North, the highest ranking officiants were women. An idea that Isla had scarcely dared credit, it seemed so foreign.
And yet here this woman was and Tristan clearly respected her. Isla couldn’t have explained how she knew that; she just did. His interest wasn’t that of a man in a woman but, rather, that of one intelligent mind for another. She was tall, almost as tall as Tristan, and spare. Her skin was smooth, only the faintest tracery of lines around her eyes showing the signs of her age. An age made obvious by the penetrating look in her eyes. This, indeed, was an old soul. Her hair was black, as black as Isla’s, save for a single white streak. She wore it unbound and it poured down around her shoulders in a perfectly straight curtain. Although she wore no signifier of her station, her bearing marked her as a high priestess. Isla knew the term, because Eir had explained it to her.
A high priestess: a keeper of the spiritual welfare of her people.
She looked hard, and cold, as cold as a blizzard in the depths of winter, but not unkind.
Asher stood beside Tristan, his shoulders straight and his hands clasped in front of him, painfully serious—or trying to be. Catching his eye, Isla flashed him a smile. His face lit up in response. She was thrilled to see that he was thrilled. She noted too that his place was one usually reserved for a child of marriage or perhaps a highly favored natural child.
Whatever Asher was to her lover, he was more than a simple page.
He, like Tristan, was dressed entirely in black; although no sword hung at his side. His hair had been freshly cut, and he looked to have been scrubbed mightily by whichever servitor had his charge. He was too old for a nursemaid, being now into his eighth winter, but rare was the little boy who bathed on his own. Especially not so thoroughly.
Isla reached the dais.
Behind the high priestess was the altar; and on the altar were three objects: a cord, a chalice, and a loaf of bread. The cord appeared to have been woven from silk, and was more of a rope. It was the rich, vibrant red of blood. The chalice, she saw, wasn’t a chalice at all but a cup fashioned from a human skull. It, like the one in Tristan’s private sitting room, had been richly carved. The loaf of bread was small, having evidently been baked for this purpose. Isla wondered what it all symbolized; despite Eir’s brief tutelage, she still knew almost nothing about the northern religion.
Tristan stepped down, so that he was facing her. For a long moment, everything else was forgotten. Here they were: together, at last. And then the earl, at her side, grunted. His expression of discontent at being kept waiting broke the spell. Isla smiled again, this time a smaller and more secret smile meant for Tristan alone.
He turned to the ear
l, expectant. The earl nodded stiffly and then, releasing Isla’s hand from his elbow, passed it to her lord’s. The traditional words, at least in the Highlands, would have been something to the effect of wishing a blessing on the couple. Instead, the earl grunted again.
“She’s yours, now,” he said, a little too loudly. His voice carried, in the cavernous expanse. His breath stank: of thin, sour wine and, beneath that, rot. “Do with her what you will. I want no part of her.”
Tristan didn’t respond but instead returned his gaze to Isla, his eyes searching hers. Something unspoken passed between them and she nodded. She was ready.
The earl forgotten, they turned together toward the altar. Tristan helped her to take the step, his arm solicitous about her waist. The earl stood where they’d left him for an almost embarrassingly long moment, his expression hesitant as he wondered what to do. And then Apple stood up from her place in the front pew and guided him down to it.
Replacing Isla’s train on the ground, Rowena too returned to her pew. Evidently, she’d decided that her part in this drama was done. Tradition dictated that she remain at Isla’s side throughout the ceremony, a living symbol of the support and friendship that the bride carried forward with her into her new life. Just as well, Isla mused briefly, that she’d at least foregone that farce.
Rowena didn’t matter now. None of them mattered now. All that mattered was her new life, with the man she’d chosen. The man who now stood across from her on the dais, his hands clasping hers. She felt small and insignificant before him, painfully aware of not merely his greater power but his sheer physical strength. He dominated her easily, in every way that a person could be dominated. That he was gentle was a choice. A choice he made deliberately, because he wanted her to feel safe.
And, knowing that, she did feel safe.
The high priestess raised her arms over her head and, in one sweeping gesture, described a circle around them. A tingling sense of expectation filled the air. Reaching into her robes, she produced a sword. Holding it in front of her, blade pointed down, she began to walk that same circle.
