Chapter 17
Seventeen
My Star
That was the nice part about a little bit of peace and quiet.
If there’s ever enough grain in storage and madmen off the streets, people can love each other.
They can take a deep breath and settle down for just long enough to not feel guilty for their smiles and former solitudes.
Let the days be gentle enough, and the people living through them might start to believe that it isn’t a trick.
They might allow themselves to believe in being happy.
Two people were so, so afraid, but they were happy.
For one day, the weight was allowed to fall from their shoulders so they could don finery instead of the baggage they started to carry at far too tender of an age.
For one day, it was their day, and they entered it feeling as young and foolish as when they were children catching fireflies after chivalry games in Provencal meadows.
Neither of them had anticipated making it to this day.
There were a hundred circumstances that could’ve left them dead or damned, but none of them had festered enough as they could have.
They made it, by some miracle, two strange people who really weren’t strange at all.
They were simply called some things so many times over that it started to feel like skin.
Lost people feel lost until they find someone else going down the same road.
This day felt perfect. It was the one they picked out when they realized planning the festivities would take less time than they anticipated.
Saint-Sauveur was all too willing to grant the cathedral at next appointment, even though the concession had, evidently, brought out a few grumbles of ‘the presence of confraternity anarchy’.
There were benefits to clubs being named after the patron saint resting inside; they had a tendency to have a run of the cathedral, and its weddings.
It was meant to be humble, even though Saint-Sauveur was nothing of the sort. The decor was supposed to be minimal, the service and reception brief, and the food far from fancy, but by the time the day came the following month, people needed more room to place their love.
Too many cooked, too many brought flowers and gifts, and families spent too much money on the best fabrics they could muster to adorn Dorotèa and Oste in matching outfits of sage green and gold.
They looked the part of the upper echelons of France, especially when more than expected trickled in from the Palais to offer praises and attend; a public servant was a public servant—even if he was a scandalous one.
The heavens granted them a tranquil day for it.
A few clouds dotted the sky, and despite the occasion falling during the hot season, the air was dry and merely warm.
A subtle breeze worked its way around the cathedral and the rest of the pastel-colored Bourg.
Their surroundings felt like one tremendous sigh of relief.
And so the bells spirited Dorotèa through the Cathedral to the spot her lover stood.
Her father led her with a firm grip, as though she might fly away, and her appearance suggested it.
The layers of her dress hung so lightly it practically floated off her, and her floral jewelry and flowers crowning her head suggested she was no mere girl at all, but some wood nymph come to partake in society before returning again to the wilds that made her.
When the light caught her hair, it was as though a match was struck. She was ethereal as much as she burned.
She stepped gingerly towards Oste. Oste, her beloved who did not die on that horrible day only a few blocks from this place.
He lived, and that had made all the difference in her life.
He lived, and they swore to continue to live and to love when vows were exchanged and she had the chance to look at him and see him again, all of him, his soul, his beauty, his glint in his eyes that always looked as cheerful as it did sad.
She saw him for who he was, and she loved that man.
She loved even the things that sometimes felt intolerable.
She loved that she could hardly stand him sometimes, because wanting to run into his arms regardless told her that they had all the hope they needed.
Their eyes bore into each other. Dorotèa flushed; he was so lovely she found it hard to simply stand there.
His dark locks of hair were, for once, exactly where his mother had carefully styled them, and his facial hair was short and neat.
There was a color to his cheeks she was delighted to see; it wasn’t always there when she’d gone to check on him, and he gleamed nearly as much as the gold earring he wore for the occasion.
She’d not noticed the tiny flecks of a similar hue in his dark green irises until then, and she found herself falling in love with him all over again.
She had thought she’d only wanted to spar with him.
She had thought…
“This is the part,” Oste whispered as he slid the ring down her finger, “where I repeat myself, ma chérie.”
“Oh?”
The deed complete, their foreheads touched. He slid his hand across to take hers and voiced a truth even after the vows had come and gone.
Oste quirked a smile. “I respect you, utterly.”
Dorotèa’s breath caught when she laughed. “And I believe in you.”
They kissed, then, and became a precious thing: together.
It stood that, although both made a habit of vying for attention now and again and didn’t mind an audience, this one was just a little too big.
There could very well have been a time some years ago when it would have been easier to stomach, but the troubles and riots made nervous even the most stalwart of souls.
Everything was better when it was just a little more quiet.
Dorotèa and Oste sat together beneath a lavender canopy.
It was too busy, yes, and the ceremony also had too much standing.
She couldn’t turn the worrying part of her mind off no matter how hard she tried.
Her own feet were sore from the new dress shoes her aunt picked out for her, but she was more concerned with watching Oste—beyond, that was, how unfairly handsome he looked.
She measured each step he took and how he angled his body in the chair.
It was possible that while he was standing, due to angling his body faintly towards the crowd to his left, his right shoulder had—
She promptly sneezed. Oste had taken a little flower from his own natural fertile embellishments—as his mother so sweetly called a flower crown—and tickled beneath her nose. Dorotèa huffed and rubbed where he’d harassed her, then scowled his way.
“Dorotèa Lézin,” he mused like a little boy who had just learned a dirty word.
“That is how names go, yes,” she answered primly. “You ought to feel very flattered. I happened to like my family name.”
He stroked her cheek with the same flower. “I like hearing you with mine.”
Dorotèa plucked a few flowers from her own crown and leaned across to start to weave them into his doublet’s buttons. “Possessive boy.”
“Your boy.”
Her entire body shivered. “You’re not allowed to say anything like that until the feasting is done.”
“I’m not making that promise. Oh—oh, here they come.”
Dorotèa craned her neck. Jeanne and Eflamm moved their way through the crowd, arms empty of gifts.
A pile had been forming at their table and the surrounding Saint-Sauveur floor, and, though they demanded nothing from their dearest friends, there in fact being nothing held by the two gave Dorotèa a sense of foreboding.
“Ahem,” Jeanne sounded out sarcastically. “Matrimony! Heaven’s blessings!”
“May your days be—” Eflamm started, but he fell silent and glanced at Jeanne. “I don’t remember. What did you want me to…?”
“I don’t actually remember the rest, either,” she whispered. “I underestimated the wine.”
Oste blinked. “You’re the one who sourced the wine.”
“You stop that, Ostie. I was so… I drank much too quickly, which was actually your fault.”
“Was it?”
Dorotèa nodded. “Certainly sounds like his fault.”
Oste glared at her.
“I was so proud of both of you. Just so… so… happy,” Jeanne sniffled. “Over the winter, I didn’t think… never would’ve thought this could’ve… oh, dear, oh, forgive me.”
“You’re a better husband than a corpse, Lézinig,” said Eflamm with an assertive nod.
“Thank you. That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Dorotèa tilted her head. “I hear some husbands behave like corpses.”
“It’s true,” Jeanne agreed.
Oste squinted. “You know, I’m starting to—”
“Your gifts!” Jeanne exclaimed, then inhaled and quieted. “…are not here. You’ll find them at the, ah… second location.”
“They were hard to transport,” Eflamm agreed.
“Don’t give them hints!” Jeanne hissed.
Oste pinched the bridge of his nose. “Considering I had to help arrange the transport, I already have an idea of—”
“You don’t have every idea!” Jeanne interrupted. “There are surprises!”
“With you two?” Oste’s eyes widened. “Oh, of that I have no doubt.”
“That’s not fair, that you know what—” Dorotèa began, but she cut herself off with a gasp. “No! I know something you don’t know.”
“Mmh,” Oste answered in a low rumble. “We’re starting off with keeping secrets from each other.”
“You can’t make sounds like that either.”
“What sounds?”
“When you… you know what I… you know, that one that is very much so like a man.”
Oste tilted his head at Eflamm. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
He shrugged. “Mmh.”
Jeanne covered her mouth and giggled. She gave Eflamm’s arm a little tug, then gestured off to the side. “We’ll get out of your hair for now, but rest assured, we’ll see you off. Have to give enough time for the doting ladies, tch. Thought Tildy would fly off into the sun.”