Renick
The cathedral is dressed in crimson.
Not the soft, virginal white of every other royal wedding I’ve heard tell of.
Crimson—Aldric’s color, the color he draped his bride in at the feast, the color of the banners and the roses and the long carpet that runs the length of the nave to the altar where he stands waiting like a wolf, his maw ready to bare teeth.
The whole court has crammed itself into the pews, perfumed and jeweled and buzzing with excitement for the spectacle.
I stand at the back, where a fool belongs, crushed against a stone pillar in my motley with my dead bells on my hat.
I made sure they were silent. I bound them in cloth this morning with shaking hands, because I couldn’t bear the thought of them jingling while the only woman I’ve ever loved is marched to slaughter in front of me.
The organ begins.
And she appears at the end of the aisle.
Hells.
She’s adorned in crimson, too. A gown the color of fresh blood, the bodice cut low and laced tight, binding her in it.
Her dark hair is swept up beneath a crown that isn’t the small silver one she wears in her chambers—this one is heavy, gold, dripping with rubies that look like wounds against her pale throat.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and the most terrible as she walks down that aisle like a woman walking to the gallows.
Her spine is straight. Her chin is high. Her face is a mask of porcelain calm.
But I know her. Have spent weeks learning the language of her stillness, and I can read what no one else in this cathedral can.
She’s screaming behind that calm.
She doesn’t look for me, and I don’t know if that pains me more than if she did.
I keep my face a mask just in case, knowing the moment our eyes collide it will crack me in half, and there will be no hiding the misery, the utter heartbreak on my features.
Ever disciplined, her gaze stays fixed ahead, on the altar, on Aldric, on the future she’s been sold into. But once—just once—as she passes the pillar where I stand, her eyes flick my way. The barest waver. A flicker of dark to meet mine.
And in that single stolen glance, I shatter.
She looks away before my torment bleeds into her, but I still see her.
The girl behind the crown. The one who laughed at a fool who fell on his face for her. The one who let me press sugar to her tongue beneath the moon. The one who knelt with me on the floor of a dead queen’s library and let me worship her like a goddess.
She passes me, and I’m left gripping the pillar so hard my fingers ache, my heart being drawn out of my chest one slow, vicious beat at a time.
The ceremony might as well be a torture devised in some lower realm of the hells.
The priest drones on as I stand at the back and I make myself watch, because to look away would be a cowardice I can’t afford.
Aldric speaks his vows in that smooth, carrying voice, and the court is enraptured by their king, over how beautiful he is, how noble, how generous to have lifted a poor princess from her crumbling dominion.
Every word out of his mouth is a lie dressed in crimson silk, and every word lands in me like a blade.
To have and to hold, he vows…
And I think of his hands on her wrists, the bruises blooming purple he put there.
To cherish and protect. I think of the bite on her breast, the teeth marks broken into her skin.
Until death—
And it’s the weight of the glass shard in my hand, the sharp edge cutting into my palm, how close I came.
When it’s Sera’s turn to give her vows, I nearly walk out. Not knowing if I’m strong enough to hear her make those vows to him just days after I swore mine to her.
But her voice, when it comes, is steady. It holds me anchored. Low and careful, every word weighed, the voice I’ve come to love, saying words I’d give my life to have her say to me.
Yet she vows herself to him. Her body, her soul. She speaks them clearly, without a tremor, the perfect bride, and only I can see the way her hands are clasped white-knuckled to his.
When the priest pronounces them wed, when Aldric lifts the crimson veil and takes her face in his ringed hands, for just a fraction of a second, Sera’s gaze shifts to find me.
My heart slams against my ribs, and I’m unable to hide the pain, her face blurring as the tears crest my lash line. Her mouth parts. A tear falls.
Then he’s pulling her face toward him. Aldric slants his mouth over hers, claiming her with a long, slow kiss that sends a river of anguish and fury rushing my bloodstream.
I’m out of the cathedral before it ends, hearing the court erupt into applause in my wake.
The organ swells and it’s over.
But for me, this torture has only begun.
As I storm from the ceremony, I taste her on my lips, the memory of her. Let me give you something that isn’t his, I breathe through the rage and the grief and the helplessness until I’m clear of the cheering court.
She is the Queen of Kravenholt.
She belongs to him now, in the eyes of gods and men.
And I am still the fool at the back of the room, with ridiculous bells and a flayed-open heart, who swore on his sister’s grave that he would not interfere.
By the time the wedding feast arrives, I’m a pit of self-loathing and malice.
I didn’t think anything could be worse than watching her give herself to him, but Aldric is a creature of appetites. Chief among them is cruelty, and tonight he’s drunk on triumph and wine in equal measure.
The great hall blazes with a thousand candles. The court gorges itself. Aldric sits at the head of the high table with his new queen at his right hand, and Seravyn sits there in her blood-red gown, pale as a ghost, her smile carved on and brittle.
Every so often he leans over and says something to her, his mouth at her ear, and I watch her endure it, watch her nod, watch her lift her goblet when he commands a toast.
Amid the celebration, I’m made to perform.
Of course I am. It’s my only function, my purpose, the reason I’m permitted in this hall at all. And tonight, with his bride won and his rival cowed, Aldric has decided to dig the proverbial knife deep.
“Jest,” he bellows, halfway through the feast, his face flushed with wine. And I loathe him even more for using Sera’s nickname. “Come. Entertain your king and queen.”
As this is my station, I can’t deny my king. I swore an oath that I wouldn’t interfere, that I’d play my part and trust my princess—now, my queen. So I bow and I caper, and the court laughs, and Aldric laughs loudest of all.
“Dance,” he commands.
I dance. Badly. The way I danced for no one but Kammy, except now it’s for a hall full of jeweled vultures and the man who put bruises on the woman I love. They howl with laughter. I let them.
Something cruel and devious carves his features, and then he commands, “Now beg.” Aldric’s eyes glitter, cold and hard. "On your knees, fool. Beg your queen for a scrap from her plate.”
The hall roars.
And I look at her.
Seravyn’s face has gone rigid. Her dark eyes find mine, and in them I see a flash of something—horror, fury, a plea not to let him do this to me.
But I see something else, too. I see what he’s doing.
He’s not just humiliating me. He’s punishing her by doing so.
He’s forcing her to watch the man who made her smile reduced to a begging dog, putting me in my place, reminding her of exactly how far beneath her I am.
He wants her to see me debased. He wants to kill whatever it is he suspects lives between us by grinding it into the floor.
So I kneel, crawl to the high table on my hands and knees, bells noisy, and I look up at Seravyn with my whole heart in my eyes.
I let the court laugh themselves sick. Because I would crawl across every hall in every kingdom, a bed of fucking thorns, just for her.
Because my pride is a small price, and I’d pay it a thousand times over to spare her even one moment of his vile attention turned on her.
“Please, Your Majesty,” I say, and I make my voice light, a jester’s whine, keeping it funny so the court keeps laughing. “A scrap for a starving fool?”
Her hands are trembling as she takes a small piece of bread from her plate. I watch her fingers shake as she leans down to offer it to me, and for one breath we are close enough that I can smell the garden on her skin beneath the perfume she’s been drowned in.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes, quiet enough only I can hear. “I’m sorry, Ren.”
“I’m not,” I murmur back, taking the bread from her fingers, letting my eyes hold hers. “I will always serve what’s mine. Even grovel for it, my queen.”
Her breath catches.
“Mine,” I say again, softer than a prayer.
Then Aldric’s hand comes down on her shoulder, long fingers curling around her neck, and the moment shatters. He guides her mouth to his, forcing me to watch the kiss, and the roar of my blood drowns out the cheering court.
I get to my feet, spitting the bread from between my teeth, a hot blade of rage carving through my insides.
As the night wears on, dread coils tighter in my gut with every passing minute, knowing what comes at the end of this feast.
I know that when the candles burn low and the wine runs out, the king will rise, and he will take his new queen by the hand and lead her from this hall to the bedchamber—to consummate his marriage.
And I know, down in the roiling pit of my stomach, what he will do to Sera in that room. In that bed.
I drive a hand through my hair, drag it down my face. I’m a man driven mad by the ticking down of the clock, unable to bear the vile images torturing my mind.
The tawdry images of Aldric in the war room surface, unbidden. The visual of him degrading that woman on her knees. Knowing he’ll do the same filthy, vile things to Sera soon.
I try to scrape it from my mind, but it taunts me, the unsolicited heat it sparks low, stirring an unwanted ache in my groin—and no matter how disgusted I am with myself for it, I can’t temper the shameful arousal it evokes. This dark and depraved fire kindled, unable to snuff it out.
These agonizing thoughts are a living thing clawing at the inside of my chest. I stand at the edge of the hall and watch the candles gutter lower and lower, and I feel the night running down like sand through my fingers.
Gods, how do I stop this.
Seven fucking hells, I gave her my word, I swore to her and yet—
I watch Aldric’s hand creep up her thigh beneath the table. I watch him lean in and whisper into her ear. I watch him press a lingering kiss to her temple, his fingers digging into her leg, possessive, claiming, a man savoring what he’s about to take.
And the vow I swore in the library claws its way back up my throat, tasting of ash. If Aldric forces himself on you, there is no power in any realm that will stop me.
By force or by the law that calls it his right—what’s the difference? She’ll endure it the way she endures everything he does, silent and still, and I’ll be in my quarters two corridors away losing my mind, knowing—
The candles on the table gutter out, my tolerance with them.
Gods help me, I can’t be here.
The feast has descended into drunken chaos. Lords slumped over tables, women dancing barefoot in the spilled wine, the minstrels playing for a court too far gone to listen. No one is watching the shadows at the edge of the hall.
And then—there, through the press of bodies—I see her rise.
Seravyn excuses herself from the high table. Some murmured word to Aldric, a gesture toward the corridor, winning a moment of freedom. He waves her off, too deep in his cup to follow. She slips down from the dais and moves along the edge of the hall, her crimson gown bleeding into the shadows.
I don’t make the decision to follow her. There is only my body moving, the way it moved toward the river, the way it moved toward her from the first instant she smiled at me in the throne room.
Half-hidden in shadow, I wait in the darkness of the corridor until she comes into sight, then capture her wrist. Regret targets my chest at her wince, and I quickly wrap an arm around her waist—
Pulling her out of the light, into the dark.