35. Khiann
KHIANN
T here was the dark, and there was the voice.
He did not know how long there had been only those two things, because time was a thread he could not hold.
There was warm dark, deep and shoreless, and there was the voice that came and went like a distant sun.
When it was with him, the dark took shape, wrapping around him.
When it was gone, there was nothing surrounding him, nothing holding him close.
He did not know who the voice belonged to. He did not even know who he was. He only knew that he turned toward it and that when it spoke, the darkness felt warm and soothing.
The voice was speaking now, telling a story. A world was beginning to emerge as it spoke, assembling around him out of the words.
A city. Streets of sun-washed stone, packed on both sides with people, all of them cheering, all of them craning toward the wide avenue.
Garlands hung between the houses. Petals drifted down from the rooftops where children leaned out too far and were hauled back by laughing mothers.
Somewhere ahead, music, drums and pipes and voices raised in a song the whole crowd seemed to know, a song about love triumphant, about a princess who had chosen her truelove mate over the one she had been promised to.
He stood among the crowd, a specter without a body or a face. No one saw him, and that was how it needed to be, because he was there to watch.
The voice was weaving him into the story, showing him the words in vivid colors.
Two processions. Not one, as tradition demanded, but two, arriving from opposite ends of the city, and everyone who could attend had come out to see the truelove mates meet.
The first carriage came up the avenue trailing dancers and singers and acrobats, and in it sat a young male in the finest of garments, tall and broad-shouldered, chestnut-haired, waving at the crowds with the radiant smile of a happy man.
He was young and handsome, and the fine clothes he was wearing were a costume he was afraid of creasing.
And then the second carriage turned into the avenue, and he forgot the groom entirely because the bride was the most beautiful female in the world. He did not know where the image came from because the storyteller had not said that. He just knew.
She was small, and she radiated light.
How could so much light come out of something so small?
She sat beneath a headdress taller than seemed wise, in a gown that caught the sunlight, and her hair beneath the golden headdress was the color of flames.
She was laughing, waving at the crowd and blowing kisses off her fingertips, and the crowd was roaring her name, and the sound of it rolled up the avenue like the sea.
Princess Annani, daughter of Nai and Ahn, on the day of her joining.
Annani .
The name went through him like a struck bell, but he did not know why. It meant nothing to him. He had never heard it before. And yet it did not stop ringing.
The two carriages drew toward the palace gates from their opposite roads, timed to arrive together, and he turned his attention back to the groom, right at the exact moment when the young male could no longer bear the distance from his bride.
The groom rose from his seat while his carriage still moved, and he leaped clean across the gap between the two carriages, and landed in the bride's.
He swept the glowing princess up into his arms, and her headdress tipped, and the whole city screamed its delight.
His heart leaped with the groom's.
It leaped as though it were his own body crossing that gap, his own arms the beautiful princess came into, and he stood in the crowd, astonished and ashamed of craving another man's bride with a longing so enormous it had no beginning and no end.
He did not know her, had never seen her before, this tiny radiant female, and everything in him strained toward her like a tide toward the moon.
That groom was the luckiest male who had ever lived, and he knew it.
It felt, absurdly, like something that belonged to him, like a coin found in his own pocket, and he could not understand how that could be.
The voice kept telling the tale, moving to the palace now.
The gates closed behind the carriages that stopped in a courtyard of invited guests in splendid dress.
The groom refused to put his bride down even though he was meant to walk inside beside her, hand in hand.
That was the protocol, but he did not care and carried her up the steps against her laughing protests, and one of the distinguished ladies in the crowd wiped happy tears from her eyes.
Applause broke out, chasing them through the great gallery, the bride waving over her groom's shoulder and sending kisses through the air while a stately woman at the far end frowned at the blatant disregard for protocol and propriety.
It was the bride's mother, and she did not approve, but she was the only one who didn't.
A grand hall. Six chairs upon a dais, tall as thrones, and the groom set his bride into one of the middle ones as though he was setting down spun glass. The bride's mother and father took the seats at her side. The groom's mother and father took the seats at his, and both couples were grinning.
Then came the greetings. A line of guests longer than a river, admitted one at a time, up two steps and down two steps, congratulations without end, all of it very grand and very proper and very, very long, and beneath the hem of her shining gown the bride tapped her feet against the floor until her mother's glance stilled them, and he, standing invisible in the crowd, felt laughter rise in his chest like bubbles of happiness, fond and familiar, as if he had watched those little feet lose patience a hundred times before.
He had not.
It was time for the pledges, and everyone in the hall hushed.
The bride and groom rose and faced one another, and even the towering headdress could not bring the top of her near his chin, and the groom looked down at her with an expression the watcher felt on his own face, felt from the inside, the tenderness of it, the disbelief that she was his.
"My love, my life, my everything," the bride said. "Against all odds, and despite many obstacles, the Fates have brought us together, and I will forever be grateful for this most precious of gifts."
The bride spoke, and the voice telling the story spoke with her, and they were the same words in the same rhythm, the story and its telling folded into one.
"This ring, made from an unbreakable alloy, symbolizes the strength of our unbreakable bond. In front of all these witnesses, I, Annani, daughter of Nai and Ahn, pronounce you as mine, Khiann, son of Yaeni and Navohn, and I pledge myself to you for eternity and beyond."
Khiann. That was the groom's name.
It meant no more to him than the bride's name had. They were two beautiful-sounding names belonging to two beautiful strangers, and yet the second name resonated somewhere beneath his ribs with a strange, hollow thump, like a knock on the door of an abandoned house.
The groom had prepared his own beautiful words. He had labored over them for a whole moon, but when the moment came, he stood before his bride with a heart so full that he forgot them.
And he, watching from the crowd, felt heat climb his neck. Felt the embarrassment as his own, and his lips moved half a breath ahead of the groom's, saying words he could not have known.
"My love, my life, my everything," the groom said a heartbeat later, giving her own pledge back to her, and the hall sighed with delight.
"In front of all these witnesses, I, Khiann, son of Yaeni and Navohn, pronounce you as mine, Annani, daughter of Nai and Ahn, and I pledge myself to you for eternity and beyond. "
He stood among the cheering guests, his lips still parted around words that were not his and did not know why his heart wanted to leap out of his chest.
And then the voice paused, drawing a breath, taking a small rest, and the world it had been building began to fade.
The gold leached out of the hall, the guests paled to mist, and the music unraveled thread by thread.
Then the groom faded along with the thrones and the petals, until all that was left was the bride, radiant skin and flaming hair, a beacon of light in a graying world.
He reached for her with his ghostly hand, straining after that guttering flame, but he was insubstantial, a shape in the dark, and then the flame went out and the dark returned.
But it was not the same dark. It had direction now, and it was up.
The flame-haired bride was still printed on the darkness behind his ghostly eyes, and he needed to find her again.
He was not drifting anymore. He was climbing.