Chapter Two #2
Criss-crossing arches divided the ceiling into richly frescoed sections.
If only I’d had leisurely weeks, and a ladder, and access to a good library to look up all the theological references I’d no doubt find in those works of art!
By the style and wear of the inlaid stone floor, which matched the window in colors and design, this chapel had to be at least four hundred years old, dating from the palace’s first construction.
Under other circumstances, I’d have been near tears with delight at the prospect of being married here.
Under these circumstances…two men stood at the altar in front of Ennolu’s tall golden figure: the Lord Chancellor and another older man in a high-ranking temple priest’s flowing embroidered robes, with their heads together and matching frowns showing through their matching gray beards.
But where was Lord Stefan? What would happen to me and to my sister if he simply didn’t show up?
The long walk here and the state of my nerves had me sweating all over. A fresh bout of moisture stuck my breeches to the backs of my thighs, dampened my stockings, and made me uncomfortably aware that if I lifted my arms, my jacket might not be thick or dark enough to hide it.
Truly, patchy sweat stains were the only ornament I lacked to make me the least desirable bridegroom in Calatria.
Ser Prendian went to greet the Lord Chancellor and the priest, bowing and standing respectfully a few feet away. I remained where I was, but their hushed voices carried perfectly well in the echoey chapel.
“…does not arrive soon,” the priest was muttering, “I’ll have no choice but to request you send word when both parties are ready to enter into this holy communion.”
“He will be here,” the Lord Chancellor hissed. “He’s aware of the time we set!”
The priest began to remonstrate, at least insofar as anyone probably ever remonstrated with the Lord Chancellor, but his urgent whispers faded into a low susurrus.
A tingling, itching sensation on the back of my neck had begun to take precedence over the prickle of perspiration.
All the hair on my body rose, my scalp going hot, my breath quickening and becoming painfully shallow.
It almost felt like my curse rearing its ugly head, only…my cycle had always been regular enough that I could plan out my potion doses months in advance, like the phases of the moon. This shouldn’t be happening for another four hours.
The air closed in, my shirt collar strangling me. I’d have thought the jacket would’ve been the garment to show that kind of malice.
And then I heard the footsteps: slow, measured, almost leisurely, but firm enough that they rang out in the hallway and carried into the chapel.
Several sets of footsteps had passed the chapel while I stood here waiting for other men to decide my fate. Only these ones sounded as if they mattered.
All of us turned at once to look at the chapel door as if we’d been on a multi-stranded string: Ser Prendian, as sour as ever, the priest with a sigh, and the Lord Chancellor with a bristling air of annoyance that boded ill for whoever came through the door.
And…I knew it was Lord Stefan. With every particle of my being, somehow, I knew.
This would be my first glimpse of my betrothed, the man who’d have the power to determine the whole course of my life from this moment forward.
Would he have the same dominating cruelty as his father?
A magnetic presence that would hold me spellbound?
The way I’d reacted to his approach suggested it, and the way my magic had gone all quivery and alert, like a hunting hawk with its hood about to be slipped off.
The footsteps slowed, the door that Ser Prendian had swung mostly closed behind us was flung open.
For a moment, I simply didn’t understand what I was seeing, the contrast between the intensity of my magic’s sparking reaction to him and…everything else about him…oh, holy Ennolu.
I’d been away from society for a long time, but even I could recognize the world’s most effete, foppish, and useless dandy when he stepped into a chapel to force me to marry him.
Tall. Very tall, enough that it must have required a whole bolt of that sky-blue taffeta to make his long, elaborately embroidered coat with its wide tails—and even tall enough to carry off the style.
Another half-bolt of gold satin had probably gone into his breeches to cover his incredibly long legs.
Except perhaps not, as they were skintight, making it clear that the legs were well-muscled and owed nothing to padding. He had broad shoulders. Glossy dark blond hair that framed his face elegantly, with matching stubble glinting on his firm jaw.
An air of wishing he were quite literally anywhere else in the world completed his ensemble.
He stopped just inside the doorway, propped one hand on his hip, and gave the chapel an insultingly slow survey from heavy-lidded dark eyes, much darker than I’d have expected from the color of his hair.
Striking. Everything about his appearance was striking, and all in ways that unsettled me for one reason or another. Not that I needed more reasons.
“Father,” he said, without any warmth at all. Not that I’d doubted it, but this confirmation of Lord Stefan’s identity made my heart sink even lower. “Your Eminence.” His gaze passed over Ser Prendian, whom he didn’t trouble to acknowledge.
I found myself holding my breath.
And then those eyes fell on me, and the air rushed out of my lungs so suddenly it left me with spots swimming in my vision.
For a long moment, he simply stared at me, expression so blank it couldn’t possibly be natural.
And then he reached down into the froth of lace that spilled from the front of his coat and pulled out a long-handled gold filigree quizzing glass that hung around his neck on a ribbon, flicking it up in front of one eye with a practiced motion.
That eye, oddly magnified, blinked at me through the lens. It held the same cold indifference as its fellow.
“Good gracious gods,” he drawled, looking me up and down through the glass, straight golden eyebrows climbing.
The tendons stood out in the back of his hand.
He was angry, probably. Very, very angry beneath his over-well-bred nonchalance.
“My dear sir, where on Ennolu’s usually bounteous Earth did you find such a…
person? Surely Ennolu could have been slightly more bountiful than this, if inclined. ”
Or you could have, you hateful old bastard, remained unsaid but clearly audible to all.
“Ennolu provides what is needed,” the priest put in, cracking the fraught, brittle silence. I hardly heard him over the ringing in my ears.
I’d tried to prepare myself for cruelty, threats, and domination.
Instead, it seemed Lord Stefan meant to destroy me through sheer humiliation.
A horrid thought struck me: As dreadful as it would be if he tormented me with my curse, forcing himself on me or denying me what I needed until I begged and crawled, or…
or what? Perhaps luckily, I didn’t have sufficient experience and imagination to go further.
But what if he really did refuse to bed me at all?
Locked me up alone with no relief for my curse?
They’d taken my potions away. My magic wouldn’t return unless he took me, and I’d have no defense, no way out. He could be a happy widower by morning.
Panic bubbled up, accompanied by a stomach-churning side dish of pure rage, and the combination took away my voice. My mouth opened. No sound came out except for a sort of gasping squeak.
Lord Stefan finally lowered the quizzing glass, but he raised his eyebrows even further.
“With all possible respect to you and to Him, Your Eminence,” he said, “in this case, I can’t help thinking that Ennolu’s perception of my needs and my own view on the matter differ a bit, what?”
Hadn’t I had almost precisely the same thought yesterday about Lord Stefan’s needs and his father’s perceptions of them? That would probably be the only thought Lord Stefan and I had in common.
“Enough of this nonsense!” The Lord Chancellor’s harsh voice burst through the chapel like the sound of breaking glass.
“Your needs have been fully met, as you can clearly see and as we have discussed at length, though it pleases you to pretend otherwise. Take your place at the altar. And you! Attend.”
“And you” clearly meant me, but my brain refused to translate that sharp command into an impetus that would move my limbs. I stood there frozen, ears ringing with the echoing tension of a room full of angry people.
Lord Stefan stepped forward, flushed along his cheekbones and with his lips compressed into a flat line, his movements so measured that they felt more aggressive than striking out and shouting would have been.
He walked right by me in a click of heels on tile and a rustle of heavy silk. Not even a pause to acknowledge me, not so much as a flicker of his eyes.
As if I didn’t even exist.
But the faint breeze of his passing brushed over my face…and a sudden, lancing pain like the touch of a hot poker shot down my spine, leaving me shuddering and with fresh sweat beading my temples.
My magic knew he existed, damn it all. And the latent frisson that had been building slowly toward the outbreak of my curse had burst into fruition as my magic sensed his nearness. As if it wanted him to be the one to soothe it.
And perhaps I had enough of a dramatic streak in me to consider weeping and wailing and protesting that I’d rather die, but the pragmatism instilled by years of monastery life brought me back down to earth.
No. I wouldn’t rather die. If it came to it, I’d climb on Lord Stefan’s cock and make the best of it.
And it would come to it. Soon, and growing sooner.
So I forced myself to take a step, legs stiff and my neck aching with tension. And then another, stumbling to stillness next to Lord Stefan in front of Ennolu’s altar and the impatient priest.
“Stefan, Remigius,” the priest said, with a broad and insincere smile.
I winced. Gods, couldn’t he have spared me that? Ennolu didn’t give a damn if I used a nickname in His presence.
Beside me, Lord Stefan stirred. “Surely you’re joking,” he muttered.
The priest’s smile widened and grew more pained. “You shall be united in the sight of the gods, by the laws of Calatria, and by your own, ah, love…”
The ceremony took only ten minutes. We sipped the sacramental wine, pressed Ennolu’s golden star to our hearts and lips, and joined hands.
Lord Stefan’s dwarfed mine, big and strong and with suspiciously rough calluses for a man who didn’t look like he’d ever done a day’s work in his life.
His touch jolted through me, all the way down to my toes and up to my tingling scalp. Heat bloomed in my abdomen.
He dropped my hand the moment the priest pronounced the final blessing, possibly because my sweaty palm disgusted him.
Or possibly because every detail of my person disgusted him.
“Your mother regrets her inability to attend the wedding, but we will both expect you to dinner,” the Lord Chancellor said. His smile gleamed through his thick gray beard, a much more genuine expression than the priest’s. He’d gotten what he wanted, the bastard. “You will attend—”
“My consort and I will dine with you in three days, as is proper after a wedding,” Lord Stefan cut in.
I blinked up at him through the throbbing pink haze that seemed to have descended over my vision.
His consort. That meant me. I’d married this man, and now we would…
we would…it hadn’t been real before. Oh, gods.
But at least he intended for me to be alive in three days, if he’d made dinner plans?
I could cling to that optimistic idea. “Thank my mother for her efforts, but regrettably they have been wasted on this occasion.”
His voice couldn’t have been colder and drier, and all of a sudden, his resemblance to his father leapt into sharp relief.
A sharp, angry protest from the Lord Chancellor, and his son’s icy rebuttal, and the priest’s soothing patter, all blended into a hum in my thickened hearing.
A big hand wrapped around my upper arm. I listed sideways, just as nauseated and off-balance as I’d been on board the ship that had brought me here to this stranger who now owned me.
“Come,” Lord Stefan said, and he half-steered, half-dragged me out of the chapel, holding me up effortlessly as my feet caught clumsily on the tiles.
Behind us, the Lord Chancellor called out yet again, but I only caught “ungrateful” and “unacceptable” before we were in the hall and his voice faded into the general background noise of the palace.
Lord Stefan opened a discreet side door and pulled me through.
His lips were pressed tight and his eyes blazing when I glanced up at him.
The rapidity of his walk and the intensity of his expression were entirely at odds with the languid fop who’d entered the chapel, and the contrast confused and frightened me. What game was this man playing?
We emerged into a kind of alley between the side of a building and a high brick wall with flowering trees overhanging it.
Bees hummed above me and birds chirped from the other side of the wall.
It didn’t seem real after the stuffy chapel full of angry men, and I blinked in the onslaught of sunlight.
A shiny black carriage stood waiting, a coachman on the box and a footman leaping to open the door.
I’d have given much to have simply disappeared into whatever pleasant palace garden lay beyond those bricks, donned my old cassock again, and tended the flowers.
Instead, my lordly husband nodded at his servant and hustled me into the carriage.
The door closed, shutting out the bees and the flowers and the breeze, and the carriage jolted into motion, carrying me off to whatever fate Lord Stefan chose to inflict upon me.
Temporarily. I’d find a way out of this, I would. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes against a wave of nausea.
Temporarily. I had to believe it.