Chapter Eleven: Trapped

The wedding feast lasted four hours.

I know this because I counted.

Four hours of sitting at the head of an enormous banquet table beside a man who spoke approximately eleven words to me across the entire duration, all of them logistical.

Four hours of smiling at faces I didn’t know and eating food I couldn’t name and lifting a goblet of something dark and potent every time the table toasted, which was often, because apparently this culture expressed joy primarily through collective drinking.

Four hours of the claiming necklace warm at my throat and the ring warm on my finger and the specific, sustained alertness of someone performing a role in a play they had not been given the script for.

By the time the feast ended I was so tired I could kill for a bed.

Rita was waiting for me when the guards brought me back to what was supposedly the newlyweds’ chambers.

“Come,” she said simply, and began work on the buttons at the back of the wedding dress before I had fully crossed the threshold.

I let her. My arms were tired. My feet were catastrophically tired. My face was tired from four hours of performing composure and holding in a freakout of epic proportions. I was grateful that Rita was the kind of woman who didn’t require conversation while she worked.

The dress came away in careful pieces. When the last lace gave and I finally, finally pulled a full unrestricted breath into my lungs, the relief was so profound that I made an involuntary sound that was almost embarrassing.

Rita cooed sympathetically.

She lifted the nightgown — a soft, fine-fabric chemise, much more delicate than the plain one I’d been given this morning — and I raised my arms and let her settle it over my head like I was a child.

It fell to the floor in a pale whisper. Considerably nicer than anything I’d slept in in my previous life.

I noted this and then noted that I had apparently started mentally dividing my existence into previous life and this, and that was a whole thing I would examine later.

Rita moved to the dresser and began removing the pins from my hair, setting each one aside in a small dish.

“Ye’ll be leaving at first light,” she said carefully.

I looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“…I’ll be leaving,” I repeated.

“Aye. With the Alpha and his pack.” A pin. Another pin. “Back to his territory in the North.”

I sat with this information for a moment.

“Your trousseau’s been packed already. The maids finished this afternoon while ye were at the feast.” She said this without looking up from my hair, as though it were the most ordinary sequence of events imaginable.

Perhaps to her it was. I was the fish out of water.

I stared at my own reflection.

In approximately — I counted backwards from the dawn — six hours, I was going to leave this castle, which I had been in for less than one full day and which was the only landmark I had in this entire world, and travel to an unfamiliar northern territory with a pack of werewolves and a husband I had spoken to for a cumulative total of perhaps four minutes.

A perfunctory knock at the door. Then the Queen walked in.

She had changed from her ceremonial dress into something simpler. Her pale hair was still pinned, her back still perfectly straight. I had a feeling “relaxing” was a strange concept to her.

It was strange how she could look so much like my real mother, and yet nothing like her.

“Mother,” I greeted. Calling her something as soft as “mom” would be out of place, not just because of where I was, but because of who she was. Her aura didn’t evoke soft feelings.

Rita curtseyed and withdrew to the far end of the room, which in this context meant approximately twelve feet away.

The queen studied me strangely for a moment. I stilled myself from squirming.

“You did well today,” she said finally. “Except with the vows. What was that, were you trying to jest?”

I shook my head. “I…I was nervous.”

Something moved briefly across her face.

Then she clasped her hands in front of her and looked at a point slightly above my left shoulder, which told me we were approaching whatever she had actually come to say.

“You are a married woman now,” she began awkwardly.

I nodded slowly.

“And tonight—” She paused. Recalibrated. “That is to say, a marriage such as this one — a political union, yes, but also a union between a man and—”

Another pause. “What I mean to say is that your duties as a wife extend beyond the ceremonial.”

I kept my face entirely neutral when I finally realized that she was trying to give me The Talk.

I pressed my lips together very firmly to prevent something as catastrophic as a chuckle from escaping.

“I understand,” I said gravely.

“Good.” She seemed relieved to have the understanding established without further elaboration.

“Varul is—” She considered her next words with the expression of someone navigating a minefield in formal shoes. “He is not a tender man by reputation. But he is not—” A breath. “What I mean is, you need not be afraid of—”

“I’m not afraid,” I said gently.

She looked at me with an indecipherable expression.

“No,” she said, after a moment. “I don’t suppose you are.”

Then she nodded, once, with the finality of a woman who had completed a task she hadn’t particularly wanted to perform and was satisfied enough with the outcome.

“Take care,” she said. “I’ll see you before you leave in the morn.”

And then she was out.

I let out a breath I had been holding since she walked in.

Rita came over to finish loosening my hair. The freed curls spilled down my back and over my shoulders.

“There,” she said with a cheeriness that seemed forced. Then, like an afterthought, she reached down to squeeze my hand. I squeezed back.

“Ye’ll be fine, Yer Highness,” she said softly. “I saw the way he looked at ye today.”

I stared at her in askance.

“A man,” she said, “Doesna look at a woman the way he looked at ye and hurt her.” She sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

A brisk knock at the door stopped me from replying. We both knew who it was.

Rita moved quickly, collecting the last of her pins, smoothing the front of her apron, and crossing towards the door to open it.

Varul filled the frame. My heart did that weird thing it’d been doing all through the day when I was around him.

He was still in his wedding wear. His eyes moved from Rita to me across the room. Time seemed to slow down.

Rita curtseyed, slipped past him, and was gone.

Then the door closed with a final click, locking us in.