Chapter Nine: The Wedding Ceremony

The next few hours went by with chaos, corsetry, and the gradual psychological dismantling of a Brooklyn art student.

After the maid's announcement, Rita and Conny descended on me with the focused, slightly terrifying energy of a pit crew at a Formula One race, except instead of changing tyres they were lacing me into approximately seventeen layers of the most beautiful and structurally oppressive clothing I had ever encountered in my life.

The wedding dress was — okay. I'll give them this. The wedding dress was extraordinary. Ivory silk that pooled at the floor like something liquid, with intricate silver embroidery along the bodice that caught the candlelight and threw it back in pieces. The sleeves were long and fitted, the neckline modest by modern standards but apparently quite daring by medieval-regency ones, because Rita had made a small sound of consternation when she saw it and Conny had fanned herself.

The corset underneath it, however, was a hate crime.

"I can't breathe," I informed Rita, at the precise moment she finished cinching the final lace.

"Ye don't need ta breathe," she'd replied, with the serenity of a woman who had been saying this for twenty years. "Ye need ta stand straight."

"Those are not the same thing, Rita."

"They are today, yer highness."

Then came the hair — braided and coiled and pinned into something elaborate that I couldn't fully see but could feel in the structural weight of it. Then the face, which Conny had addressed with powders and pigments and a small brush while making soft sounds of concentration that reminded me, painfully, of Eva. Then the shoes, which fit perfectly and were the one mercy of the entire operation.

When I'd finally stood in front of the full-length mirror, I had gone very quiet.

The girl looking back at me didn't look like an art student from Brooklyn who was surviving on scholarship money and leftover takeout. She looked like someone who belonged in this world. Someone who had always belonged in it.

The silver wolf pendant rested at her throat, catching the light, and the overall effect was so convincing that for one profoundly disorienting moment, I'd almost believed it myself.

"Well," I had said, to my own reflection, to no one in particular.

"Aye," Conny had agreed, from behind me, and sniffled.

*

Now I was standing at a ceremonial altar in a hall so large it had its own weather system, in front of what appeared to be the entire combined population of the kingdom and the Northern Pack, about to get married to a man I had known existed for approximately six hours.

And the vows were in a different language.

It was close enough to English that I could catch the edges of words — shapes of meaning floating past me just out of reach — but not close enough to actually understand what was being said. Like hearing a familiar song played in the wrong key.

The officiating elder, a small ancient man with an aggressively ceremonial beard and the slow, sonorous delivery of someone who had been doing this for fifty years and intended to make that apparent, was intoning something long and grave that the congregation was following with the attentive solemnity of people who knew exactly what was being said.

I did not know what was being said.

I was going to have to improvise my own wedding vows in a language I did not speak, in front of several hundred people, next to a man who I had not let myself look at since I took my place at the altar. That had been a conscious decision made on the stairs when I heard my own heartbeat do something irregular in anticipation and decided that tactical avoidance was the mature response.

But then he gave me a brief, perfunctory sideways glance as the elder began, and the decision had become significantly harder to maintain, and by the third minute of the ceremony, I had mostly abandoned it.

I swivelled my head to the side so I could get a good look at his side profile. If he was disturbed or concerned by my attention, he didn’t show it. He stared ahead, the perfect picture of indifference.

Holy—

Up close was a different category of experience entirely.

From the window he had been striking in the way of something seen at a distance — the overall impression of height and darkness and composure. Up close he was all of that and then the details.

A jaw carved from what appeared to be personal grievance with softness in all its forms. His hair was loose and just touched his shoulders, and several pieces had fallen forward. My hands itched to touch them, to feel if they were as soft as they looked.

The scar was a pale slash above his left eyebrow, old enough to have silvered, the kind of mark that a lesser face might have been diminished by. My eyes trailed down the powerful column of his throat, the broadness of his shoulders, down down to his dark breeches and black boots.

He towered over me, and my head stopped at a point just above his bicep. As a girl who had been known for most of her life as "the leggy blonde", that was saying something.

He was hot. And I said this as an art student who had spent three years studying proportion and form. His was exceptional.

The rings on his fingers caught the light filtering in through the high windows whenever he moved. Up close, they were heavier than they'd looked from the window, more deliberate. Signet-style on the forefinger. Flat-banded on the middle. Something older and more worn on the ring finger. A man's history in metal. I found myself itching to know more about him.

He smelled like woodsmoke and pine and something underneath both that I didn't have a word for. Something that sat at the back of the throat like the first cold breath of winter. Clean and dark and quietly dangerous.

I became aware that I had been staring and redirected my eyes to the elder with great dignity.

The elder was looking at me.

Oh, shit.

It was my turn to say something.