Chapter 23 #2
Dan and I separated. Unable to locate Renn, I ended up walking through town with Seln, deciding instead to offer our services to better compensate the unexpecting villagers.
We healed a few colds, a broken foot, and an earache before I noticed Renn crossing the small town square, wearing a military uniform and nothing else that might denote his rank.
Still, I spied an older woman who appeared to recognize him and bowed from far off.
Renn was headed toward me. Nervous excitement spun from our link.
“Go on without me. I’ll try to catch up,” I told Seln, who nodded and hurried on her way, weaving between wandering soldiers and villagers. When Renn approached, he grasped my hand. “I’ve found a place for us.”
He guided me across the square, heading northwest.
“Are you so eager to sleep on an actual bed, or is it something else?” I asked. The sun had passed its zenith; it would be the dinner hour soon. “Or perhaps a meal not half burned over a cookfire.”
He smiled. “Something far better, if you’re still up for it.”
I watched him, a dimple in his cheek as we took stone stairs up a short hill and wound past a modest barn and gazebo shrine to a simple house brimming with carefully cultivated flowers.
They lined the path and filled boxes hanging from windows, shutters pinned open.
An older man and woman stood waiting for us, thin and darker-skinned, she with a thick mane of silver hair, he with a half-bald pate and a multicolored cincture braided around his waist.
My step slowed. “A priest.”
Renn paused. Shifted to look at me, face-to-face. “We agreed that if I found a priest . . .”
My heart grew light and rapid in my chest. That we would get married. The words danced across my tongue.
This . . . Was this really happening? Was he sincere? But of course he was—I could feel it between us. Hope, sincerity, affection.
“You’re nervous,” he whispered, uncaring that the couple had their eyes on us.
I swallowed. “Of course I’m nervous. I . . .”
I didn’t need to explain again my terrible deficiencies regarding matrimony.
His gloved fingertips caressed the side of my face. “We don’t have to do it now. Nym . . . you deserve a real wedding, a proper affair. A dinner and a honeymoon. After we take Rove—”
“Tonight, then?” The words came out breathy. Hope blossomed in my center, and I focused on it, trying to ignore old fears. Trying not to imagine a life where history repeated itself and Renn never bound his hand with mine.
The corner of his lips ticked up. I couldn’t help but reciprocate the bright joy pouring from him. Still clasping my hand, he brought me up to meet the priest and his wife.
“Mr. and Mrs. Swiftmore,” he explained, gesturing to them in turn. “They’ve agreed to house us and perform the—”
“Wait.” I squeezed Renn’s hand. “Swiftmore? Are you—?”
A clamoring of falling firewood sounded from the side of the house. The young woman carrying it went wide eyed and wide mouthed at the sight of us.
Tears filled my vision. “Lonnie?”
“Nym Tallowax!” She shrieked and bolted toward me, completely heedless of her king standing there. She threw her arms around me and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. I squeezed her back.
“You’re alive!” I cried.
“You’re alive,” she sobbed in return.
I knew Renn washed up with freezing cold water, because even while submerged in a tub of warm, my skin pebbled.
The nerves wrapping songs around my heart came from both of us.
“I never would have guessed.” Lonnie plunked down on her narrow bed in her narrow room, evening colors of mauve and salmon dancing across her latticework window. “I mean, I suppose you did spend a lot of time with him—”
I scrubbed dirt out from beneath my nails, half-soaked curls of hair floating on top of the water.
“Believe me, it had not been my intention.” Sitting up, I looked at her, past the half-finished plate of dinner her mother had so kindly brought me.
Half a plate was all my nerve-riddled stomach could handle. “Do you think it’s . . . odd?”
“Odd?”
I lowered my eyes. “Me being what I am, he being what he is.”
“I think it’s wonderful.” She laughed, picked herself off the mattress, and came to kneel by the bathtub, reminding me of the late nights we used to spend washing and talking at Rove Castle.
“I think everything is changing, Nym. First the edict legalizing craftlock, now one of the people on the throne.”
Throne. I sank into the water and stared through the ceiling. “I . . . try not to think too hard on that part.”
“It’s the same as managing a house full of children. The house is just a lot bigger, and there are a lot more children.” She grinned. “And now my father will marry you! It’s a fairy tale, really.”
“In a time of war,” I whispered.
“Even better,” she countered. “Heaven forbid we have something to celebrate.”
She moved to stand, but I reached out of the tub and grasped her hand, my index finger brushing the violet braided bracelet on her wrist. “You haven’t told me about you, yet. I saw you in the castle . . . How did you escape?”
She lowered herself back down, somberness schooling her features. “I remember you, Nym. I know what you did for me.”
I withdrew my hand, chest tightening.
“After you healed me, I hid. They were everywhere. Everywhere.” She shuddered.
“I hid with the linens. Buried myself under them. Almost three days I just lay there, listening for them. I knew I’d die of thirst if I didn’t move.
I thought, I’ll sneak down the hallway to somewhere with water.
Surely one of the bedrooms still has water in it.
But when I snuck out, the way to the servants’ stairs was clear, so I ran for it.
” She chewed on the inside of her lip, remembering.
“There were a few dragons around. I swear one saw me, but they didn’t seem interested in me.
They were looking for someone. His Majesty, I assume.
I ran and met up with another refugee family and traveled with them to Trest. Or near enough.
I covered the rest on my own. I’ve been here ever since. ”
Flashes of the attack on Rove wriggled into my mind. “It was a terrifying night,” I relented.
“It was. And you? You left with the king?”
My skin pebbled again, this time with the memory of Speth, of crouching in the snow before Adoel Nicosia seized me by the hair and dragged me to Sesta, stealing away five months of my life.
The hollowness Ursa left behind yawned. “I caught up with him,” I answered truthfully. “I’ve marched with him.”
“Healed him, too. I didn’t think it was possible.” Reaching behind the tub, she grabbed a jar of soap for my hair. “Like I said, a fairy tale.”
Memories of Vin and Ford, the past men in my life, shivered down my neck. “I hope so.”
Lonnie helped me wash. When she revealed a small vial of hair oil, I tried to stop her. “You’ll use up the entire thing on this mane. Save it.”
But she had none of it. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
I dried off, pulled on a clean shift, and together Lonnie and I carefully worked the oil through my mountain of curls, twisting each one, carefully splaying them to dry.
She dabbed some rosewater on my neck and décolleté, then stole away to another room, coming back with an armful of bluish-silver satin.
Walking over, beaming, she held the dress up in front of her. “Would you wear this? I know you haven’t been able to plan much for tonight.”
Standing, I ran my hand over the gown. It was an unassuming affair, something likely to be mocked at a palace function, but for a common woman it was elegant, simply cut and sewn, with a crimped waist panel, wide neck, and billowing sleeves gathered at the wrists.
“This is lovely,” I murmured. “Did you make this?”
“It was my sister-in-law’s.” She smiled again, but sadness dipped her brow. “She married my brother in it but died in childbirth less than a year later.”
I whipped my hand back like I’d been burned. “Lonnie, you never told me. I’m so sorry.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Just like you never told me about His Majesty?”
The responding flush started in my chest and licked heat up the sides of my neck.
Yet she forgave me instantly. “Try it on. I think it will fit.”
“But, Lonnie, your sister—”
“Truly, Nym.” Dropping the gown over one arm, she embraced me with the other. “My mother and I both would be so honored for you to wear it. I can’t think of a more deserving soul.”
Blinking tears from my eyes, I nodded, and Lonnie helped me step into it. It was the finest thing I’d worn since Rove fell. Lonnie did up the laces in the back; it fit well enough, though hugged me a bit too tightly in the bust.
I touched my chest as Lonnie surveyed her work. “I don’t think there’s enough seam allowance to let it out.”
She snorted. “I think it looks better that way.” She grabbed the top of the waist panel and tugged it down. “A pleasant emphasis.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I suppose it is.” As I adjusted the fabric as well as I could, a sudden horror struck me, so much so that Renn’s echoing concern pushed through the link.
“Lonnie, I don’t have a pendant for him.
” The necklaces were given during the marriage ceremony, measured and clipped so the pendant hung right over the heart.
“That’s fine,” she assured me. “My father’s a priest, remember? He has a few.”
I wrung my fingers together. “The pendant is supposed to be meaningful.” Vin’s I’d made out of an ivory key of his grandmother’s broken piano. Ford’s had been rose quartz I’d found shortly after Ursa died, cut and polished until it shined. I’d sold both years ago.
“It will be meaningful.” She retwisted one of my curls. “It will be coming from you.”
I slouched, feeling at a loss. “I suppose. But Renn . . . he is the love of my life. For me to give him something not—”
My eyes passed over my travel bag, and my heart surged.
“Nym?” she asked.