Chapter Thirty-Nine Fairy-Tale Wedding
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Fairy-Tale Wedding
Since I would be traveling by ordinary means, rather than on the back of a dragon, I had to wait until the mountain passes were clear before making the trip to Skalla—which meant I could justify delaying long enough to attend the royal wedding in the spring.
Sam and I both wanted to see his sister married to her true love at last. In part because it would be the final proof that I wasn’t the one getting married to him.
The castle was still under repair, and the wedding procession through the courtyard occasionally had to detour around unstable, roped-off areas.
There was a brief downpour in the early afternoon, and everyone got damp, which made me feel somewhat smug.
They should have listened when I suggested a backup plan in case of rain.
The ceremony as a whole was elaborate, opulent, and astonishingly dull.
Jack appeared to have had no better luck requesting changes than I had.
She’d been shoved into a dress with a train that required most of the other hunters to trail behind her holding it off the ground.
It had a hem so tight she had to shuffle along, rather like the flightless black-and-white birds I’d sometimes found nesting on the plain of the trackless ice.
She would have tripped if so much as a single pebble hadn’t been cleared from the route, and suddenly I realized why the lion had been so certain peas on the floor would make an infallible woman detector.
I would have to explain it to him, for the new edition.
When the interminable preliminaries were done with and the couple exchanged vows, the crowd applauded and cheered—loudly in the case of the assembled soldiers and villagers, but the nobility exhibited something closer to restrained politeness.
I was pleased to see a few of the Yvettes and Yvonnes scattered about the crowd.
More and more of them had been venturing out of the women’s wing since Jack had begun consulting with them about their needs.
Rehousing and retraining had been offered to those who desired it.
And some had found themselves better suited to their new circumstances than they’d assumed; Eldest Yvette was already in popular demand as a storyteller.
The feast that followed the ceremony was as sumptuous as could be managed, considering the meager winter stores were at their lowest ebb.
Decorative pastries had been made with the scant remains of the flour, sugar, and dried fruits.
Thanks to the hunts, there was still venison, but the whole castle was thoroughly sick of venison by then.
The chefs had done their best to supplement the game meat with whatever vegetables could be foraged in the early spring.
Everyone was looking forward to the coming months, when more would be in season, and the eventual harvest that would presumably proceed unthreatened by horrible monsters.
Even Sir Alexandra, the hunter who could eat anything, was tired of dining on rubble and twigs.
Sam and I took full advantage of the limited variety on offer.
I was nibbling on the wing of a cake shaped something like a deformed gryphon when the king and queen detached themselves from a crowd of well- and ill-wishers and made their way over to us.
This required considerable maneuvering and more than a bit of shoving from the hunters wrangling her train.
“Congratulations on your marriage, Your Majesty,” I said. “And…Your Other Majesty.”
“Hi. How’s the cake?” Jack asked, eyeing the sculptured confection with skepticism.
“Awful,” I admitted. “It’s mostly fondant, and it’s got raisins in it. Still makes for a nice change. Want some?” I offered her a forkful.
She took it, chewed, made a face, and kept chewing.
“You look bonnie,” Sam told her.
Her face grew even sourer, and she mumbled something as she chewed that sounded vaguely like “Can’t walk” followed by a rude word.
“I understand you’ll be leaving us soon,” Gervase said. He made a gesture that took in both Sam and me.
“Yes,” Jack said, swallowing. “Since she was unable to steal my bridegroom, she’s stealing my brother instead.”
“Oh, hush,” Sam said. “You know I had to practically beg her to take me along. Days and days of ‘It’s not safe!’ and ‘My stepmother is an evil sorceress-queen!’ ”
“Well, she is,” I pointed out. Again. “You’ll be in terrible danger.”
“You, too. We’re going together,” Sam said firmly. “That’s what couples do.”
Small smiles lit on the faces of Jack and Gervase at that, and they twined their fingers together.
The hero and heroine, content in their happy ending.
Good for them. I could only hope the secondary characters in their story would do as well.
No one ever bothers to mention the fate of the helpful companions or the ex-fiancées.
“It’s about time, really,” Jack told Sam. “I’ve had quite enough of you following me around like a lost puppy. Go have a romance of your own.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” he answered, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. She released Gervase’s hand and embraced her brother tightly.
All things considered, maybe Sam had graduated out of helpful-companion status. He wasn’t one of Jack’s decoy duplicates anymore. And he was certainly my hero.
Speaking of the decoy duplicates, by this time the other hunters had abandoned Jack’s train and pushed through the crowd to the table, considerably impeded by their billowy bridesmaids’ dresses—in matching forest green, of course.
It wasn’t as surprising a sight as it might have been a few months earlier; several of them, although not all, had taken to wearing gowns or skirts when they weren’t out hunting.
I’d overheard a couple discussing how glad they were to be growing their hair out and how much of a relief it was to be perceived as women again.
To which another had replied that the chance to have short hair and put on a pair of breeches was the whole reason they’d been so eager to run off with Jack in the first place.
During the wedding procession, I’d noticed that one of the hunters—Jules?
—had already cut, resewn, and modified their bridesmaid’s dress until the bottom half had effectively been turned into a pair of wide trouser legs.
I wondered if I was seeing a new fashion in the making.
They all pressed in close to us, a cluster of uncannily similar faces bidding their goodbyes to Sam and me. The masks were long gone by then, but I still had trouble telling most of them apart. The duchess’s six siblings could have been the exact same person at slightly different ages.
“May the wind be ever at your back,” one of them said.
“Keep warm,” said another.
“I wish you a swift journey,” said a third, who might have been standing on a single leg; the swathes of green skirts made it difficult to tell.
The one in the trouser dress handed me a rose and then stepped aside to make way for one with tears streaming down her face.
“I was wrong about you,” she said. “This is so romantic.” She pressed a small, beautiful frog into my hands.
It was patterned like a harlequin with splotches of yellow, orange, red, blue, and green.
An overlapping chorus of farewells followed, which sometimes grew muffled as Sam insisted on hugging them all close, one after another. Just as that was quieting down, one of the hunters drew herself up, spat on the floor, and said, “Ah hawp ye twa eejits dinnae die oan th’ road.”
We left early the next morning, hungover but lighthearted.
The bridge to the shore remained broken, so we took a skiff across the bay to the town.
Travel to and fro had been a tremendous pain all winter, and more than one disgruntled engineer had asked whether it had been absolutely necessary for me to smash all the stone giants into powder rather than leave a few corpses around to use in rebuilding projects.
I apologized and said that next time, I would refrain from taking such rash action and let everybody get murdered instead. That usually shut them up.
The horses the king and queen had gifted us were waiting in the town—a piebald stallion for Sam and for me, Poma.
She’d been found cropping grass at the edge of the forest only a few days after I had turned into a lake.
I fussed over her greatly as soon as we were reunited, which she calmly ignored, although she seemed to bear me no ill will for placing her in dangerous straits on our previous outing.
Though we were caught in bad weather more often than not, this time without even a carriage to keep it off our heads, the journey was pleasant.
Partly because I’d had the foresight to bring along a bedroll stuffed with goose down, which meant I got a good deal more sleep than I usually did when I was traveling.
Not all of Angelique’s approaches to problem-solving had been terrible.
But mostly, it was a better trip because of Sam.
I didn’t mind getting drenched in a sudden storm quite so much if he was there to complain about it with me.
I began to enjoy seeing the sunrises and sunsets, the wildflowers and the clouds, the ancient oaks looking embarrassed by their tiny baby leaves, bright green and delicate as lace.
Sam was much better company than an entourage of animated teeth.
On perhaps our third night of travel, we took shelter beneath a willow tree, lying on the bedroll and listening to the patter of raindrops making their way from leaf to leaf in the forest. A stream burbled nearby, overfull with runoff snowmelt.
In another day or two, we’d be out of Tailliz altogether, leaving the trees behind and crossing the plains.
Making our way to the rolling hills that would slowly rise until they became the mountains of Skalla.
We’d lain in silence for some time before he asked, “Are you sure you want to go home?”
I propped myself up on my elbows but didn’t reply for a moment. A little way off, Poma and the stallion companionably chomped on a patch of dandelion greens, heedless of the rain.
“I’ll have to confront her sooner or later,” I said at last. “Might as well make it sooner.”
“Do you, though?” he asked, sitting upright and turning to face me. “What if we, I don’t know, went across the sea?”
“To Ecossia?”
“Farther if we have to. To unknown lands.”
East of the sun, I thought. West of the moon.
I shook my head and lay back against him, feeling his warmth.
“She came to me when I was a lake. When I was locked in the dungeon, too, I think. My sister found me in my dreams, and my stepmother is far craftier than Jonquil. I suppose there’s a chance we’d escape her notice if we made our way back to the mirrored hallways, but… I don’t much care for that idea.”
“No. Especially not if we’d have to curse ourselves into comas.”
“Dangerous to leave your body lying around like that,” I agreed. “You might wake up being kissed by some weirdo.”
“Ugh.” He tossed a pebble into the stream. We listened to the plunk. “If your stepmother did come to find you, maybe you could fight her off.”
“Me? I’m—”
“The mightiest sorceress I’ve ever seen.”
My first impulse was to argue, to deny it.
True, I’d defeated a sorceress of astonishing power no more than a few months ago, but there were a hundred reasons that didn’t make me a match for my stepmother.
I couldn’t imagine her being foolish enough to exhaust herself, for one thing.
And I’d had help fighting Angelique and her army.
The rest of my family. The king’s soldiers.
A dozen hunters with supernatural powers.
But I’d done it. I’d screamed until rocks shattered and trees cracked.
“Hm,” I said.
Sam stroked my hair, unconcerned that it was as wet as a dishrag.
“You know, you never did finish that story,” he said. “The one about you.”
“The story I told you had ended?”
“Aye. I’d like to hear the rest of it.”
I was silent for a long minute. There was only the sound of the rain.
And then I said, “All right.”