This time, when he offered her his arm, she took it.
The sun sank in the west as Mia and her father proceeded down the castle corridors, a cavalcade of guards and servants keeping pace a short distance behind them. She wore a new pair of lambskin gloves for the occasion, milky white studded with black and red buttons. After the ceremony, she would be free of them forever. Small consolation for the price she had to pay.
She longed to tell her father what she’d overheard, to ask him what it all meant. She wanted desperately to believe he had done what he’d done for good reason. Perhaps he really was trying to protect her.
“Father,” she began, but the words died on her lips. Her whole life she had trusted him fully and implicitly, as only a child can do. But trust took a lifetime to build and only a few short weeks to destroy.
He was keeping secrets. Something her mother said came back to her: Secrets are just another way people lie to one another. Mia wanted her father to tell her everything, but she couldn’t trust a word he said.
They were almost at the Chapel when he did the most peculiar thing. He dropped her arm and pressed his hand into her back, firm and urgent. When he spoke, his words were gruff.
“Your mother loved you more than anything. Never have I seen such a heart. A love like that has power. Love is a lodestone, a force so powerful nothing can stop it, not even death. You, too, bear this love. Run to it, little rose. Run fast and free.”
She felt her soul lift its weary head, tilting toward this sun-drenched promise. The corridors were dark but she felt lighter. Perhaps her mother was there—in the air, in Mia’s reflection on the onyx stone. Perhaps she was not alone.
She was sure she saw her father work his mouth around forgive me when the wedding trumpets blew.
Chapter 10
Promise Me
MIA STOOD AT THE golden altar to marry her true love.
Only, it wasn’t true and it wasn’t love. The altar wasn’t even really golden, more of a tarnished bronze. She was drowning in oyster silk, and the air was redolent of rotting lilacs. The prince was an icicle with perfect curls.
“We have come here today,” Duke Tristan intoned, “by royal decree of Ronan, Son of Clan Killian, Uncontested King of Glas Ddir, to witness this most hallowed union . . .”
He wasn’t walloping candles this time, but he might as well have been. Mia felt every word shiver through her with a resounding crack.
Five hundred pairs of eyes bored into her back—servants, courtiers, dignitaries, and the ominous guards. In her periphery she glimpsed the Hunters, their hands resting on the grips of their swords and bows.
Overhead, a colossal pipe organ jutted out of the balcony like a skeleton with jagged bones. Statues of deities lined the walls, emaciated male figures in funereal robes presiding over mausoleums harboring the early kings of Clan Killian, now piles of sacred human dust. Beneath the vault of smirking angels, a giant ring of candles was suspended from the ceiling, dripping wax. The Royal Chapel was gargantuan and gloomy, a cathedral more befitting a funeral than a wedding.
“It is the obligation of all those present to honor this most perfect union,” said Tristan, “marking an alliance between two great houses . . .”
She snuck a glance over her shoulder to where her family sat in the balcony. Angie braved a smile, but her father’s face was drawn shut like a curtain. Why had he spoken of her mother? In the moment it had given her courage, but in hindsight it seemed almost cruel, taunting her with a lesson on love before she embarked on a loveless marriage.
The prince raked his fingers through his blond curls. He wouldn’t look at her. She thought of the honeyed warmth when he touched her in the library, compared to the icy stab of his words to the king and queen. She is dangerous. My blackmail bride.
“If any man has cause for objection,” Tristan said, “sound belief these two should not be wed, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”
Always the man, Mia thought darkly. Gods forbid a woman have cause for objection. Gods forbid a woman ever express a “sound belief.” Girls destined to be Huntresses were expected to waltz happily into marriages with boys they hardly knew. Magnificent princesses were forced to watch churlish little brothers inherit whole kingdoms when they themselves were far more qualified.
Mia had always harbored a hope that maybe someday, if the Hunters could eliminate magic, King Ronan would deem Glas Ddir safe. This was another reason she labored over her anatomy texts: surely there was some way to neutralize magic, to figure out how Gwyrach could control another person’s body, and put an end to it. Girls would no longer be monitored and confined, but free to live out their destinies.
It was a wild dream and a sweet one; it had pulsed through her every day of Huntress training. Why shouldn’t women get to craft the lives they wanted? Messy, complicated, vibrant lives full of adventure? That sort of freedom had always been her dream—not just for her, but for all Glasddirans.
Now that she had spent the last few weeks in close proximity to the king, she realized what a child she’d been. Ronan thrived on power and violence. He saw the Gwyrach as an assemblage of demon body parts to be dismantled and strung up—but he didn’t treat his human subjects much better. There would be no freedom for the women of the river kingdom. Mia would bury her dream in a shallow grave.
Quin fidgeted with the gold buttons of his bridegroom jacket. As usual, wintry squalls were rolling off him, prickling her skin. How was it possible that, only hours before, his touch had ignited her flesh? She closed her eyes to clear her head.
But it didn’t clear. A strange thing was happening. Her mind conjured a vision of a place she couldn’t quite see, all hues and textures, no distinct shapes. She closed her eyes and let the colors dance across her lids, vivid sea blues and igneous reds, alive with movement and vibration. She wanted to drink it down. Had she been to this place, or only dreamed it? She couldn’t grasp hold of any one image, but she heard music trilling at the edges, mingled with the rich, raucous laughter of girls.
What was this sumptuous delusion? She wanted to believe, to inhabit its colors and feel its truth in her bones. This was a place where she would never be forced into a marriage arranged by men, a place where she could roam free, owned by no one, loved by none. Only in a life without love could you ever be truly free.
Her eyes shot open, drunk on what the world could be. She meant to look past Quin, but she looked right at him.
He was looking back. His eyes were two sulfyr sticks, a scintillating green.
“No objections, then,” Tristan said.
Mia objected. A moment ago she’d been safely ensconced in her own fantasy world. Now she was stripped to the nubbins, raw and vulnerable and bare. She had no theories as to why her whole body popped and rattled, a whirl of feelings without logic, thoughts skittering, slamming, crashing into one another.
It was not a pleasant feeling.
“You will now speak your vows in unison,” said the duke. “Take one another’s hands and swear your sacred oath.”
Quin took her gloved hands in his. Did she imagine it, or were his fingers trembling? The rest of the Chapel flickered and dissolved in a cloud of smoke, leaving only them. The candles braided themselves into a tapestry of light.
“Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.
I give you my body, my spirit, my home.”
The words rolled effortlessly off her tongue. After weeks of not sparing her a second glance, Quin wouldn’t stop looking. She watched his chest rise and fall as he pressed his lips together. His gaze tore into her flesh and knit it back together, building a whole history of fire and frost and ashes beneath her skin.
“Come illness, suffering, e’en death,