Chapter Nine: The Wedding Night
Tonight I marry the prince.
Tonight I’m supposed to kill him.
They bury Tam at dawn.
Not really. Nobody gets buried at the bottom of the sea. The servants wrap him in grey cloth and carry him to the edge of the city, where the seabed drops away into the dark, and they let him go. I stand on the ledge and watch him sink until the dark takes him, the way it took Ada, the way it took all of them.
Nobody from the court comes. Caius wants to. I told him not to. His mother is watching him too closely, and this is mine to do.
I don’t cry. I haven’t since the throne hall. It’s as if something inside me has gone quiet and stayed quiet, the way it does when I’m about to kill someone.
I say his name, once, out loud, so the sea knows who it took.
Then I go back to the palace to get married.
The queen’s handmaids dress me.
There are six of them, silent and silver-haired, and they move around me like fish around a reef. They wash me in warm water that smells of salt and flowers. They brush my hair until it shines and pin it up with combs of mother-of-pearl. They paint my lips a soft dark red, the colour of the inside of a shell.
The gown is white. Of course it’s white. It’s made of something lighter than silk, layer on layer of it, so that when I move it drifts and billows around me like sea foam. The sleeves are long and close and fastened at the wrist with tiny pearl buttons. The neckline leaves the blue scar on my throat bare, and the handmaids have dusted it with something that glitters, as if it’s a jewel instead of a wound.
When they’re done, one of them holds up a mirror.
The girl in it is beautiful. She looks like she belongs here.
She looks like every face in the Hall of Brides.
I wait until they’ve gone to fetch the veil. Then I lift my skirts, all those drifting layers, and strap Hanne’s knife high on my thigh with a strip of ribbon torn from my petticoat.
The queen gave me a knife for my wedding night. It would be rude not to bring it.
The ceremony is held in the throne hall, where Tam died yesterday.
Someone has swept the white sand away. The black marble floor is scattered with pale petals, drifting gently in the water. Every lantern in the hall is lit. The galleries are so full the courtiers are pressed shoulder to shoulder, and they’re all wearing silver, every one of them, so the whole hall glitters like the surface of the sea at noon.
I walk up the aisle alone. There’s no one to give me away. No father. No mother. No Tam.
Caius is waiting at the foot of the coral stair.
He’s in white too. It makes his hair look like moonlight and his eyes look like ice. When he sees me, something happens to his face, a kind of stillness, as if he’s forgotten, just for a moment, that we’re standing in the middle of a trap.
I stop beside him. He doesn’t take my hand. Not yet.
“You look,” he says quietly, and doesn’t finish.
“Like one of the mosaics,” I say.
“Like yourself.”
At the top of the stair, the queen rises from her throne.
She’s glowing. There’s no other word for it. The silver light I saw under her skin yesterday hasn’t faded. If anything it’s brighter. She looks young and radiant and terrible, like a statue of a goddess come to life. She’s dressed in deep midnight blue, and the crown on her brow shaped like a breaking wave has been set with new pearls, nine of them, in a line across the front.
Nine. I count them twice.
“Before my son takes his bride,” she says, her bell-voice filling the hall, “I have a gift for her.”
She lifts one hand.
From a doorway at the side of the hall, the man in grey steps out. Thane. And walking in front of him, pale and thin and blinking at the lights, a blue breath-shell fresh and raw on his throat, is a boy of twelve with hair that sticks up in every direction.
The floor tilts under me.
Pip.
He sees me. His whole face breaks open. He starts to run toward me and Thane catches his collar and holds him back, gently, the way you’d hold a puppy, and my brother twists in his grip and shouts my name across the hall.
“Wren!“
The court murmurs. Wren? The name ripples through the galleries. The bride’s real name, shouted out by a shore boy in the middle of her wedding. Some of them laugh.
I take a step toward him. Caius’s hand closes around my wrist. Not hard. Just enough.
“Don’t,” he breathes. “That’s what she wants.”
The queen comes down the stairs. She moves slowly, gracefully, her gown trailing behind her. She stops beside me and bends her head, as if she’s going to kiss my cheek. As if she’s a mother welcoming her new daughter.
What she does instead is whisper.
“He’s been so brave,” she murmurs. “Thane brought him down last night. I thought you’d want him close. For afterward.” Her breath is cool against my ear. “Tonight, you do what you came to do, and at dawn he goes home. Free. With his two hundred crowns.”
She straightens. She smiles at me with every one of her perfect teeth.
“Or you don’t,” she says, very softly. “And the sea has room for a tenth.”
I don’t hear the ceremony.
I know it happens. I know Oriel stands on the stair and reads from a book as old as the city. I know Caius takes my hand, finally, and holds it through all of it, his fingers wrapped tight around mine. I know I say words when I’m told to say them, and that he says them too, and that the court sighs and applauds when it’s over.
I don’t hear any of it. The whole time, I’m looking at Pip.
He’s standing very straight beside Thane. He’s trying to be brave. I can see him doing it, the way he used to when he was little and he’d scraped his knee and didn’t want me to see him cry. His eyes are fixed on me, and they’re full of questions, and I can’t answer a single one.
You said you’d come back.
At the end of it, Caius lifts my veil. He leans down and kisses me, very lightly, on the mouth, in front of the whole court. His lips are cool and gentle and I hardly feel them.
Then they take us to the bridal chamber.
It’s the room from the Mirror Pools.
I knew it would be, somehow. Round and white. Silk hangings like sea foam. A wide bed with curtains. Lanterns glowing low and gold. Everything soft.
The doors close behind us. I hear a lock turn on the outside.
Caius stands in the middle of the room, in his white wedding clothes, and looks at me. He doesn’t come any closer. He’s waiting to see what I’ll do.
I walk to the window. There’s a round pane of glass, and beyond it the lights of the city spill out into the dark, blue and gold and violet. Somewhere out there, in one of those lit windows, Thane is holding my brother.
“She’ll kill him,” I say. “If I don’t.”
“Yes,” says Caius.
“And if I do, she’ll kill me anyway. In the throne hall. In front of everyone. And then drown the shore.”
“Yes.”
“But Pip might live.” My voice is steady. It’s so steady it frightens me. “She said he’d go home. She lies, but she might not lie about that. What’s one boy to her? She might let him go, just to prove she can.”
Caius doesn’t say anything.
I turn around.
I lift my skirts and pull Hanne’s knife from the ribbon on my thigh. It’s warm from my skin. The old wooden handle fits my palm like it was made for it.
Caius watches me do it. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. He doesn’t call for guards. He just stands there, in the middle of the soft white room, and when I cross the floor to him he doesn’t step back.
I put the blade against his throat.
Right there, in the gap above his collar, where I marked it on the first night. Where I’ve been marking it every night since, lying awake in the Tithe House, counting the ways.
He tips his head back a little. Giving me room.
“Do it,” he says.
My hand doesn’t shake.
That’s the thing that scares me most. It doesn’t shake at all. I could do it. Right now. The same way I did it to Sable. Quick and clean, and then it’s over, and Pip goes home, maybe, and I go to the throne hall and the court gets its story.
“I mean it,” Caius says quietly. His throat moves against the blade. “I’ve had more than a hundred years, Wren. He’s had twelve. If this is the only way he lives—”
“Shut up.”
“—then do it. I won’t stop you. I don’t want to stop you.”
“Shut up.“
He does.
We stand there. The lanterns hum. Outside the window, the lights of Veyl glimmer on and on.
I think about the Mirror Pools. About standing over him in this room, in this exact spot, with this exact feeling. I knew you would. Everyone does, in the end.
I think about Tam, pushing the crown back down on my head. Let me have one brave thing.
I think about my brother, standing in the throne hall, trying so hard not to cry.
And I think about the queen, glowing, with nine new pearls in her crown. We don’t keep promises to the dead.
She was never going to let Pip go. She was never going to let anyone go. Not Hanne. Not Tam. Not any of the faces in the Hall of Brides. That’s not who she is. She takes. That’s all she’s ever done. For nine hundred years, she’s taken and taken, and everyone she’s taken from has done exactly what she needed them to.
I’m so tired of doing what she needs.
I take the knife away from his throat.
Caius lets out a breath, very slowly.
“Give me your hand,” I say.
He holds it out. His left hand. The one she broke.
I take it, turn it palm up, and draw the knife across it, one short, shallow line. He doesn’t flinch. A thin ribbon of red unspools into the water.
Then I do the same to my own.
“You told me the door only opens for the vow,” I say. “The old one. The one written in the laws nobody reads anymore. It isn’t the one Oriel said in the throne hall, is it?”
His eyes widen, just a little. “No.”
“Then tell me the words.”
He tells me.
They’re not long. They’re in a language older than Veylish, something with hard edges and deep rolling vowels, like the sound of the sea against rock. He says each line, and I repeat it, and our palms are pressed together between us, blood mixing in the water in a slow red cloud.
I don’t understand most of it. I understand enough.
What is mine is yours. What I carry, you carry. Where you go down, I go down.
By salt and by silver. By blood and by breath. Until the sea gives back what it has taken.
When I say the last word, something happens.
It starts in my hand. A warmth, spreading up from the cut on my palm, into my wrist, my arm, my chest. The same warmth is in him. I can feel it. I can feel him: his heartbeat, fast and steady; his fear, his hope, his exhaustion, all of it, pressing against the inside of my ribs like a second pulse.
He’s staring at me. He feels it too.
And then the floor begins to glow.
A line of cold green light, thin as a thread, traces itself across the white stone at our feet. It runs in a circle around us, then another, then a spiral curling in on itself, like the seal on my contract, like the pin in Maren’s hair. The stone inside the spiral goes dark and clear as glass, and underneath it, far, far below, I can see a stair.
It goes down into the dark. Down and down and down, under the palace, under the city, under everything.
“The Deep Throne,” Caius breathes.
The glass beneath our feet dissolves.
And behind us, the doors of the bridal chamber burst open. Light and noise pour in. Guards, shouting. The man in grey. And at the front of them all, blazing silver, her face twisted into something that isn’t beautiful at all, the queen.
“No!” she screams.
But the vow is spoken, and the door is open, and we’re already falling.
See next: Chapter Ten: The Drowning