24. THE WEDDINGFIRE AND MOON
Chapter twenty-four
THE WEDDING OR FIRE AND MOON
PORTIA
Her Royal Highness my my mate's grandma, Princess Suzanne of Poland has been planning this wedding for twenty years, and she tells me so on the first morning, over tea, without a flicker of apology.
I did not know. That is the thing I have to sit with while she pours.
Nobody told me. Leon did not know either, not properly, not until a week ago, because for thirty years she was a woman in a house in New York with a garden she was fond of, and the title sat in a drawer somewhere and nobody in that family ever bothered to take it out.
But the Polish court knows. I watched them find out. The morning she arrived, the entire household staff of a royal palace stopped moving at the same instant, and then bowed lower than they have ever bowed to me.
"I never stopped," she says now, as though she has not just walked through a hall of people folding in half.
"The week after the sea took him, when the whole house was drawn curtains and casseroles, I went into my study and opened a book and started a list. Flowers.
Music. Which cousins could be trusted near an open bar.
" She sets the pot down. "Everyone thought I had lost my mind.
My own husband thought it. Leon's Grandpa Connor sat in that doorway and wept and told me I was refusing to grieve. "
"Were you?"
"Of course I was." She looks at me over the rim of her cup, and her eyes are Leon's eyes, the deepest sea blue, level, older than they have any business being.
"But grief is a room, child, and I have never been able to sit in a room without redecorating it.
So I planned a wedding for a boy I was told was dead.
Every year. Revised as he would have grown.
" A dry smile. "Fourteen pages. Very out of date.
I am told he is famous now, which ruins the seating entirely. "
"Ma'am," I say, and stop, because I do not know what to call her.
"Suzanne," she says. "You are marrying my grandson. If you ma'am me I shall be very cross." A pause, precisely weighted. "Use it on the courtiers, though. They have earned it."
That is the first time I understand what she is.
She is not a grandmother who has been graciously permitted into a royal wedding.
She is a princess of the blood of Poland, born in the palace we are standing in, sister to the reigning king, and she has been that every single day of the thirty years she spent in a house in Westchester baking for a pack of American wolves.
A princess by birth does not lose her rank.
Not for marriage, not for distance, not for three decades of being called Suzie by a man who was an Alpha Wolf.
She has simply been declining to use it.
And she is using it now, for one week, for a boy, and the Polish court has no idea what has landed on it.
"My brother is coming," she says.
The dryness goes out of her all at once. Her hands fold in her lap, very still.
"He will need a chair, and a fire, and somewhere quiet to be wheeled to when it gets loud, and he will refuse all three.
" She looks at the window. "Twenty years he had that boy, Portia.
Twenty years I lit candles in a church in another country for a child who was eating breakfast in my brother's house.
" Her voice does not rise. That is the frightening part.
"I am a princess of this realm. Do you understand what that means?
Not a grieving relative. A princess of this realm.
If Ferdinand had sent me one word, one line, I could have come here and stood in that throne room and demanded my grandson back by right of blood, and there is not a court in Europe that could have refused me.
" Her chin comes up. "He knew that. That is precisely why he said nothing. "
The tea has gone cold between us.
"And I have decided," she says, "that I am going to be gracious about it.
For one day. In front of everyone. Because that is what he needs, and because I am the only person alive with the rank to give it to him and mean it.
" She stands, and smooths her skirt, and she is entirely composed.
"You will not mention it to Leon. He has enough fathers to reconcile. "
That is Suzanne. The whole of her, in one breath. A woman who will forgive a king in public and never once say so out loud.
She does the wedding the way a general takes a country, and the court lets her, because the court has no choice.
She overrules the Chamberlain twice on the first day.
She has the seating plan torn up and rebuilt.
When a minor Polish noble makes the mistake of explaining protocol to her, she listens with perfect courtesy and then says, "I was presented in this hall in 1961, my dear, I imagine I can still find the door," and the man does not recover for three days.
The hall is done in both houses at once.
Wolf banners in Keith's grays and greens, dragon lanterns in my father's ember and gold, and she has hung them not on opposite walls the way protocol demands but braided, twisted together down the whole length of the room, so you cannot look at one without the other.
When I ask her about it she says, "Well, that's the entire point of you, isn't it," and goes off to shout at a florist who happens to be a baron.
There are so many of them.
That is what I am not ready for, and nothing in nine years of diplomacy prepares me.
I have negotiated with courts. I have stood in rooms full of people who wanted me dead with my hands perfectly steady.
I have never walked into a house full of people who are simply, uncomplicatedly glad, and it undoes me by inches all week.
Connor finds me in the garden the night before and says nothing for a long time.
He is a big man gone soft with age, and he has Leon's hands, and he stands beside me looking at the dark the way old men do.
He married a princess of Poland and moved her to a mansion with a garden and never once, by any account I have heard, felt the need to mention it to anyone.
"I stopped looking," he says finally. "That is the thing I have to tell someone before tomorrow, and I cannot tell him, so I am telling you.
" His jaw works. "His mother, Katherine never stopped.
she had people in every port on that coast. Suzanne never stopped either, she just did it with lists instead of ships.
" He breathes out. "I stopped at four. months.
I sat down at my own kitchen table one night and said the words out loud, he's gone, and I never picked it back up. "
He looks at me.
"So when he walks into my house tomorrow and calls me grandfather, you will know what it costs me to hear it."
"He won't hold it against you."
"No," Connor says. "That is rather the problem."
Katherine is worse, because Katherine does not talk at all.
Leon's mother, Katherine, has been in the house three days and has barely left Leon's side, and she does not fuss over him, does not weep on him, does not demand a single thing of the son she buried and got back.
She simply stays within about six feet of him at all times, quietly, the way you keep a hand on a rail.
Once I come around a corner and find her standing in a doorway watching him laugh at something Kevin one of the triplets has said, and her face is doing something so private that I back away before she can see me.
She comes to me on the morning of the wedding. She takes both my hands. And she says the only full sentence she says to me all week.
"You brought him home," Katherine says. "Not the sea. Not the kings. You." Her grip tightens. "I will not forget it, and neither will this family, and if you are ever in trouble anywhere in this world, you will not be in it alone."
Then she fixes my veil, and goes, and I have to sit down for a minute.
The rest of them arrive like weather.
Leon's youngest sibling, Barbara, quiet and watchful and armed with a camera she never once puts down, who tells me she has been documenting this family for a decade "in case anyone else disappears.
" Hos brothers, Kevin, enormous and shy, who wept openly at the rehearsal and refuses to be embarrassed about it.
Kade and Kase, seventeen and identical, who have decided that having a dragon for a sister-in-law makes them the most interesting boys in New York and who ask me constantly to set things on fire.
I have set exactly one thing on fire. I regret it. Suzanne has not forgiven me.
Uncle Tobias, who runs the pack's money and who spends an entire evening explaining Leon's royalty structure to me with tremendous seriousness.
Aunt Rachel, who takes one look at my hands shaking before the ceremony, puts a glass in them and says, "Drink that.
Breathe. You're marrying the easy one. Wait until you meet his cousin. "
Angela-Rose, nineteen and dying of nerves at meeting me, whom I like immediately because of it.
And Tanner and Benedict, Leon's friends from the years before any of us, the two who knew him when he was a boy with a guitar and no country, who arrive rowdy and irreverent and who I understand within an hour are the only people alive who treat him as an ordinary man.
Benedict spends the entire rehearsal dinner threatening to reveal what Leon was like at nineteen.
Tanner Candace's fiance actually does it.
I laugh until I cannot breathe. Leon puts his face in his hands.
And at the head of the table, a princess of Poland watches the noise of it with an expression I will remember for the rest of my life.
They bring Ferb in before the doors open, so he does not have to be watched being carried.
He has a chair by the fire and a blanket over his knees and the worst view in the hall, and he has arranged it that way on purpose, because from that corner he can see the whole room without the whole room seeing him. Sixty years of reading rooms. He has not stopped just because he is dying.
I go to him. He takes my hand in both of his, and there is almost nothing left in the grip.
"You will want to know why I am here," he says, "and not resting, as four physicians have very sincerely advised."
"I assumed stubbornness."
"Partly." His eyes go past me, out across the braided banners, to where his Grandma is directing a baron with the flat certainty of a woman who was presented in this hall in 1961.
"She could have taken him from me, you know.
At any time. Any single day of those twenty years.
" His voice is very quiet. "One letter. That is all it would have needed.
A princess of the blood, of this house, standing in that throne room, asking for her grandson by right.
No court in Europe would have refused her, and I would not have had the standing to argue, and she would have been right. "
"Then why didn't she?"
"Because she did not know he was alive." He closes his eyes.
"Because I did not tell her. Do you understand what I did, dragon's daughter?
I did not lie to a grieving family. I lied to a princess of my own blood, in my own house, and I did it because I was afraid she would win.
" His hand tightens, faintly. "Today she is planning my son's wedding in the hall she was presented in, and she has not said one word to me about it, and she is not going to, and that is a mercy I have absolutely no right to. "
He opens his eyes.
"So I am going to sit in this corner and let her have it. Do not make it a scene." The old cunning flickers, one last time. "It is the only apology I am able to make."
My father comes down the aisle on Rhun's arm, because he still cannot walk it alone and because he asked for Rhun and not for a stick.
That is its own small war, and everyone in the hall knows it.
Rhun's face is stone the whole way, waiting for someone to object.
No one does. When they reach the front, my father grips his son's forearm and does not let go for a long moment, and it is not forgiveness.
I do not think there will ever be forgiveness, exactly.
It is something harder and more useful. A place at the table, given deliberately, in front of witnesses, by a man who has every right to withhold it.
The hatchling rides in on a cushion carried by Kade and Kase, who have been given this job because Suzanne understands teenage boys. It wakes halfway down the aisle and makes a noise like a kettle. The entire wolf side of the family flinches. The entire dragon side laughs.
And just like that, the two halves of the room stop being two halves.
Then I am walking. And Leon is at the end of it, and he is crying, openly, in front of a hundred people and at least four cameras, this man who fills stadiums.
He does not make a speech. He has stood in front of a hundred thousand people and made them feel like one thing, and here, in front of the only crowd that ever actually mattered, he says eleven words.
"I was a story someone else finished," he says. "You let me choose."
The bond sings the note it has been finding since a garden, and this time it does not resolve into anything, because it is already home.
Afterward, when the dancing has gone loud and Tanner has fallen into a hedge and Kevin is asleep in a chair with the hatchling curled on his chest, I find Suzanne alone at the edge of it, watching.
Her brother was wheeled off to the quiet room an hour ago. She checked. She thinks nobody saw her check.
"Fourteen pages," she says. "And it was nothing like any of them."
"Was it worse?"
The old woman is quiet a moment. Behind us the hall roars. Connor is dancing badly with Katherine. Keith is arguing with my father about something neither of them cares about. My brother stands against the wall being carefully, gratefully ignored by everyone in the room.
"It was louder," she says. "And there were dragons.
And my grandson came home." She takes my hand, and her grip is bird-boned and absolute.
"Now. Put your other hand there, girl. Yes.
There." She presses my palm flat to my own middle, where the second warmth burns steady and unafraid.
"Tell me what you need for the nursery, and I will start a new list tonight. "
Dearest Readers,
A princess of Poland, lighting candles in a New York church for a boy who was eating breakfast in her brother's palace. She could have taken him back with a single letter. She never sent one, because she never knew there was anyone left to ask for.
And now she has planned his wedding in the very hall where she was presented as a girl, and she has not said one word about the twenty years, and she is not going to.
Tell me honestly, loves. Is that forgiveness? Or is it something far more terrifying, and far more royal?
Turn the page, my darlings. The king has three months left, and there is one last thing he has to do.
Your author.