Chapter Thirty-Nine
Kai
His bride wore a gown of brittle white, trimmed with pearls the colour of bone. She was death and devastation wrapped in ceremonial lace, drifting down the aisle on a tide of crackling ice. Behind her, the love of his life held the long train of her dress and fought not to meet his eye.
The throne room had been reimagined as an imitation of the temple Kai had never set foot in.
The staggering blades of the ceiling had been drawn back in neat, glimmering rows, longer where he and the shivering High Priestess stood, as though either of them needed any reminder of what would happen if they denied their part in this.
They knew. They all knew; the onlookers, too.
They were the Court who had been terrorised for months, the prisoners who had watched their countryfolk’s blood spilt in frost patterns across this very floor.
They had been filed into pews of ice, each row adorned with a bouquet of baby’s breath smothered in frost, while their occupants’ shuddering breaths rose in white, inconstant swirls.
A captive audience, in every sense. Not one of them dared look around as Avette moved down the aisle, a pale-blue spill of carpet cleaving the room like a chasm through the Laune.
They were frozen, all of them, much like the lifeless figures of the queen’s many victims that stood in the shadows beyond the dais and watched on with eternally horrified faces.
Despite his every assertion that he could do this, that it would mean nothing, Kai couldn’t deny the tension webbing through his muscles and winding them tight when Avette reached his side.
It was surreal as only a nightmare could be, more maddening by far than his time beneath the ice.
To stand here, bound by a faith he did not follow, facing a woman he did not want, while his very own heart looked on with her warm eyes glassy and pained.
Avette turned to hand off her snowcapped bouquet and paused a moment, lingering on Adeline where she stood in her periwinkle gown, all frills and pearls and gooseflesh. When Avette met his eye again, her smile was a knife to his chest.
“How sweet,” she whispered. “Dear Lina is quite overcome with happiness, my heart.”
He didn’t answer; didn’t look at Adeline, no matter how his eyes ached in their sockets.
“In the name of the Goddess,” the Priestess intoned above them, “and her every blessed Daughter.”
“In their name,” came the reply from the onlookers, faint enough to be plain that only a few had found their voices.
“Beloved son and daughter,” the Priestess went on. “You have come together in the presence of the the Goddess to state your eternal intention. Your Royal Majesty Avette Beira, have you come here to enter into marriage freely, joyfully, and without coercion?”
“I have,” said Avette, lashes fluttering.
Kai did not think he imagined the new tension on the Priestess’s face as her eyes flicked to his; knowing, as she did, that he could only lie before her Goddess, or damn them all to more unpredictable cruelties.
“And have you, King Kai Cumhaill, come here to enter into marriage freely, joyfully, and without coercion?”
Her swallow was thick and audible. Avette smiled, daring him to answer honestly.
Blue light slipped over the gleam of her teeth and caught the sheen of the pearl that now hung alongside her beaming pendant.
He dragged in the longest breath he could manage, wondering briefly if that flicker of her power would be enough for Imogen to release him, conduct him.
Peripherally, he caught the slight shake of her head.
It seemed not.
“Yes,” said Kai.
And though he was aware of Adeline’s subtle swipe of her fallen tears, it was not despair that kindled the waning fire in his chest. It was hope.
Avette’s split-second call on her power had been meant to intimidate him, to keep him in line.
But what if he were to fall out of line?
How much power might she Wield to keep him from derailing her spectacle, her perfect fairytale ending for the Sorceress and the Drowned Prince?
His mind whirred over the drone of the sermon.
He could see few opportunities to bait her, short of causing an entirely new spectacle.
An option, he supposed. He could do something outlandish; interrupt the long reading of rites with the ragged scream already trapped in his lungs.
Feign a desperate swipe for her necklace of proxy pearl and blessed water.
Lunge at her in full view of their witnesses.
But Kai was all too aware of the Queen’s Gard standing just feet from Adeline and the others; aware of the hungry way Doran watched her, leaning on his unsheathed sword, eyes narrowed with the same sharp gleam as his blade.
He was waiting for her disruption. If the disruption came from Kai instead, he knew the Captain would not differentiate; would likely relish the excuse to carry out his punishment on Adeline.
Would Ger move swiftly enough to intercept?
He didn’t know; the gard’s blade was not even drawn, though his hand twitched nervously around its handle.
He wasn’t ready, none of them were.
Mareda was watching Lady Imogen with her golden brow tight; Imogen was plainly focusing her every ounce of energy into remaining upright, fingers so tight around the queen’s bouquet that the stems had begun to bow around her knuckles.
He would need to wait. He would need to get as close to their agreed moment as possible, but perhaps, if he was clever, he would not need to see it all the way through to the seventh vow. Perhaps he could still give Adeline that much. It would matter, he knew.
It would matter, if they made it through this.
The minutes fell like grains of sand, the slowest trickle with no end in sight.
The Priestess droned, sweat beading at her greying temples despite the enduring chill.
Oblivious to her discomfort and her every word, Avette simply preened and posed.
She tilted toward the pews and tossed back her long hair, unslicked for once and adorned with yet more pearls that shimmered as she moved this way and that, performing grace and beauty for an audience who saw only a monster.
She didn’t notice—or, equally likely, did not care.
She had everything she wanted. The power her father had always held out of her grasp, a place in Eisalaan’s history, the veneration of thousands.
What difference did it make if their awe was edged with fear?
Kai was sorry to say that their fear worked in his favour too.
The tension before her masked the anxious energy roiling behind her.
Imogen, clinging tight to Mareda’s hand for balance.
Adeline, visibly poised, with her eyes fixed to the floor to keep from giving herself away.
Gerard’s hand tapping that same nervous rhythm on his hilt, over and over.
Kai did not know how much longer he could hold out; didn’t know how much longer there was.
Merrow weddings were shorter, brighter, more song than sermon.
There was no discernible pattern or pace to the order of the passages read, but behind Avette, the bridal party’s manner began to tighten bit by bit.
Mareda had released Imogen’s hand and was carefully adjusting the fall of her skirt—beneath which, he knew, she had strapped a dagger to her thigh.
“And now,” said the High Priestess. “I invite you all to bear witness to the seven divine vows.”
Kai’s gills tensed, a reflexive bid for the oxygen his tight lungs could not draw. In his periphery, Imogen was visibly steeling her spine against the unyielding call of that all-consuming power, fighting to remain alert and ready.
“In the name of the Goddess,” said the Priestess, “you solemnly vow to nurture your bond from now until death parts you.”
Kai’s every fibre locked in place as Avette stepped in, the cruel curve of her lips flashing like a blade’s edge before they pressed to his own.
His gills ached with his withheld breath, stomach roiling in protest. She drew back, and he could not help but rake in that missing breath with an audible gasp.
One vow.
“In the name of Daughter Lasra, you solemnly vow to kindle one another’s passions for many years to come.”
He held his breath through the next kiss, cringing when it lingered.
Avette pulled back with a smile like a scythe. Beyond her, Gerard stood stock still, his hand no longer playing at his hilt but curled readily around it.
Two vows.
“In the name of Daughter Tala, you solemnly vow to ground one another through life’s many trials.”
She kissed him again.
Three vows.
Adeline had set her jaw and drawn her shoulders back, a hardy gleam in her eyes he knew from their tussles in the training room, so long ago now.
Focus, determination, and something he hadn’t recognised until now.
Something she had finally named for him as she begged him to remain hers, and only hers.
He looked at her, openly, over his bride’s shoulder.
Brazen enough to stir a rustling from the pews.
To set a flash of blue in Avette’s black eyes and stir the air around her hair.
Still not enough, it seemed, for Imogen to act.
But he was closer. She would not stand for public humiliation when this, all of this, had been orchestrated to polish her all-important image.
The Saviour of Eisalaan, risen and triumphant.
The Sorceress, returned from a cursed eternity to claim her fairytale ending with her one true love.
Kai met her eye and willed her, for just a moment, to see him.
To really see him. The man she had tricked, humiliated, and imprisoned, handled like a careless child with too many toys.
But Kai was not her toy; not hers to break.
He let her see that in the shift of his expression when he looked at her.
Her lip curled, nostrils flaring with the weight of her own breath.
“In the name of Daughter Isa, you solemnly vow to let your past wash away with the tide.”
Avette moved toward him, and Kai knew with a bone-deep certainty that this was it.
Only the fourth vow of seven, still time to think and gather himself—but he would not.
Because this was the one vow for which he would not pretend.
History may have forgotten the truth of their past, but that truth had kept him company through centuries in the dark.
He would not vow, before any deity, to forget it all now.
Avette laid a hand on his shoulder, craning up to meet him. He flattened a hand beneath her elbow to guide her, let her reach for him until her frosty breath prickled his lips—and turned his head at the last moment to speak in her ear.
“There is no forgetting for you and I, Avette.” She stiffened. Her skin buzzed beneath his palm, magic stirring within her like the hum of a thousand angry wasps. “There is no washing it away.”
He pulled back to meet her eye, and found a glowing blue glare in place of the dead, black eyes he’d once known so well.
“There is no tide,” he said, no longer bothering to lower his voice. “Because you froze it.”
Kai had once known Avette’s expressions rather well.
There’d been joy, desire, genuine warmth when she looked at him.
There’d been something sharp that he’d never had the words for, a possessiveness he now understood for calculation.
And then there had been only impenetrable cold, and the flare of anger that preceded her wrath.
It was that cold that beheld him now. In the weeks that had passed, he had learned that that look preceded a stirring of the Mother’s warped and muted call.
A crackling of cruel ice racing to do Avette’s bidding.
He didn’t hear that crackling as she reached for her pendant.
He heard only the flooding roar of the missing tides as he reached for her throat.