Chapter 2
They called it the Palace of Binding. A name far too poetic for a place so cold it could freeze marrow. It was built on the steep cliffs of northern Calveran, with tall, black towers, constantly covered with snow.
Her footsteps echoed too loudly, swallowed at once by the hush of the palace. Behind her, the two Silverwards kept their measured distance, their grey cloaks dragging behind them.
The veil dragged across her face like a second skin. Ivory lace, adorned with argent symbols of union, oath, obligation. A script of a new life.
The halls inside were lined in polished, onyx tiles that reflected the light. The frost had crept over the windows in curling shapes, like vines that had forgotten how to bloom. Evelyne for as long as she could remember found solace in the cold, but this one had forgotten mercy.
She walked at her father’s side, her hand resting in the crook of his arm.
Burgundy velvet was wrapped around his broad frame.
The Tresselyn crest—sword-point down in stone—was embroidered on his chest. His face was serious, as always, but today he wore the image a man who had secured something important and meant to keep it.
He walked very tall, with unruly red hair and a reddish tint to his fair skin.
She had been promised to Dasmon Dvorenic since she was five.
When they met, he had been ten, all elbows and solemnity, with the palest blond hair she’d ever seen and eyes like melted ice.
It had been her first diplomatic visit to Calveran, not so long after her mother’s death.
The journey had taken three months by ship and sleigh, and she remembered thinking the entire country looked as if it was frozen in time.
She was also frozen, in more ways than one.
After that he sent her books each year, always with a note tucked inside.
During a state dinner in Calveran, when she was pressing a hand to her stomach under the tablecloth, he’d slipped a sprig of silvery northern sage into her wine goblet. When she looked at him across the banquet table, brow raised, he simply nodded and said, “It’s for the pain.”
Dasmon had never been passionate, but there was a certain comfort in that. His love had been in remembering her preferences and silently passing her a warmer cloak.
He will make a good husband. He already was.
“Thalen would like it here,” her father said at last, glancing sideways.
The corner of her lips lifted.
Thalen, her ten-year-old half-brother, had been left behind. Kept safely tucked in Vellesmere with Ysara, his mother. It had been deemed too dangerous a journey for a child, especially one with an heir’s blood and a habit of running off to chase shadows in the rose orchard.
She missed him most of all today, on her wedding day. After this, she would stay in Calveran, far from the capital of Edrathen, with solely her maid for company. Thalen would grow up without her, and she would listen from a distance, a sister in name but a stranger in presence.
Evelyne gave a small nod. “He’d be elbow-deep in snow within an hour. Clever beyond what’s reasonable for ten. Smiles like an angel, bargains like a Zhareshan trader. His mother and the poor nursemaid haven’t a prayer between them.”
Her father hummed, but there was something else behind it.
“You should be married by now,” he murmured after a while. “With your own child to scold.”
She didn’t respond immediately. Her palms itched to smooth her gown.
I was supposed to be. Until my lungs tried to collapse and someone decided that made me a poor investment.
For a heartbeat, she imagined what waited in the chapel.
Rows of proud Calveran nobles with snow-colored silks and silver brooches.
Dasmon would wait at the altar, his thin mouth softened by the faintest smile.
His mother would cry, father would narrow his eyes, brothers would exchange jokes and sisters would giggle.
She felt nothing. Or rather, she made herself feel nothing. There had been excitement once, when she was still a girl tracing dreams in frost on the windowpane, imagining her wedding veil. But that version of her had faded with fever.
The sound of a wedding bell rolled over the halls.
The veil caught as she descended the stairs. Isildeth moved to adjust it with fumbling fingers, her brown eyes flickered to the windows. The moon was full, slowly vanishing into the morning.
She was a small woman. Slim and compact, with the quiet sturdiness of a worn but beloved book. Wrinkles lined her face, her gray hair was neatly coiled beneath a modest maid’s cap, and her grey, unadorned clothing marked her station.
“Your hands are shaking,” Evelyne observed under her breath. She held her white bouquet in one palm, helping release the fabric with the other.
“I’m old,” the maid replied gently. “Everything shakes.”
They reached the last hallway.
The chapel doors stood ahead. Double height, carved with the interlocking crests of Edrathen and Calveran. At the threshold, a small pool of wax had been carefully poured. An old tradition meant to seal luck into the home and keep ill omens from crossing its line.
She wondered, with no small amount of irony, if she’d burst into flames the moment she stepped over the threshold.
There were no guards posted outside, and Evelyne found that fitting.
Calveran, for all its wealth, had perpetually favored simplicity.
Even The Vaults, rumored to hold fortunes from every kingdom, were hidden so deep and sealed so tightly that only the ruling family knew the way in.
If there were sentries, they were posted within the chapel.
The iron hinges let out a deep, groaning creak as the Silverwards moved past them and pushed the chapel doors open.
She caught the scent of lilies as she moved inside.
The weight of her wedding dress brushed the marble.
Her heels clicked against the floor, the sound seemed deafening in the unnatural quiet. There were no murmurs.
Just bodies covered in blood.
At first, the guests looked merely still. Like statues. Lords and ladies sat frozen in their pews, as if the ceremony had simply paused.
But then she saw the eyes. Wide and glossy.
One noblewoman’s mouth was twisted in a silent scream, her hands clutched to her throat.
Another had collapsed sideways; blood was leaking from his ears in thin rivulets.
One of them had dragged himself a few feet before dying, a streak of maroon trailing behind him.
One of the guards inhaled sharply. The other reached instinctively for the hilt at his side.
No. No, this couldn’t be real.
Crimson coated the marble, dripped from the steps in slow, syrupy trails. Every guest from Dasmon’s noble mother to the lowest attending squire lay strewn like broken dolls.
She noticed his siblings. A ribbon. Blue satin, peeking from beneath the crushed weight of her mother’s arm. His sister. The youngest. Her favorite.
Her breath hitched. She couldn’t find the shape of a single thought.
And then she saw him. Dasmon lay alone, as if placed there deliberately.
Beneath the altar, at the base of the stone steps.
His head was tilted to the side, lips parted in a final breath that never came.
His ceremonial robes, once white and silver, were soaked through.
Scarlet blooming from a clean wound just below the ribs.
And carved into the flesh of his mouth, like a signature left behind: three vertical lines enclosed in a perfect circle.
Her ears were ringing. She didn’t realize she was moving until the red reached her toes.
The hem of her gown darkened as it kissed the blood pooling beneath the altar.
The fabric absorbed it greedily, staining with every step.
Her bouquet fell with a soft thud, scattering delicate blooms across the burgundy marble like bones from a broken spine.
Her father was saying something to the Silverwards, about stepping back, but the words slid past her, water over glass. She couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t hear anything but the dull thrum behind her ears, the faint squelch of crimson-soaked silk as she took one more step.
Evelyne dropped on her knees. Touched his palm.
It was too still. Too stiff. Her thumb brushed the back of his hand and met skin that was cold and clammy.Her stomach turned, her mouth filled with the bitter taste of iron.
She swallowed it back, barely.
She couldn’t look at his face. She couldn’t not look at his face.
His lips were parted. His blue irises stared at something beyond her. The mark carved into his mouth was slowly leaking, as if even death hadn’t finished with him yet.
Her throat made a sound she didn’t recognize—a half-sob, half-gasp, as if her lungs couldn’t decide whether to scream or drown.
A truth she didn’t want and couldn’t refuse.
Her gown from that night will be burned to erase the memory of blood.
But she will remember.