“Mountains break and move,” Cael said. “Jitra is eternal.”
My husband’s eyebrows lifted, looking at me. I opened my mouth to start speaking the words, but he spoke before I did.
“Come,” he repeated. “Meet your husband.”
He pulled me along the bridge as my heart stopped. Meet him? Hadn’t I just …
But no. It couldn’t be.
The one with the broken nose brought me to the apex of the Teorainn and easily stepped around his brother. Behind him, as Cael did for me. His brother’s witness, and not my husband.
I couldn’t help but shake. They had done it all wrong—it was my husband who was supposed to remove the covering, who was supposed to have that magic moment of unveiling. No one else. Not a brother. Not a charlatan!
How could he have not known this error? My mother had schooled me for weeks on every moment of what would happen at this ceremony—had no one told the same things to him?
My true husband really was the handsome one I had first seen, first wished for, his green eyes bright and captivating, staring at me like he was waiting for something.
He squeezed my hand, and I realized I was supposed to speak. “We’ve come to the ends of the earth so that we may journey back together,” I said, so soft it was little more than a whisper. “Here I leave the maiden, the daughter, the child. Here I become a wife, one part with my husband.”
I saw his lips move, saying a version of the same, but I couldn’t hear him over the river water and the violent rush of blood in my ears. Wrong. It was all wrong.
I turned to Cael, and he handed me the bunch of flowers in his hand. I tore off the heads, filling my hands with multilayered blooms, and turned back to my husband. Husband.
My husband held out his hand, and I put some of the blooms into it. He looked at me, and we spoke the final words together, words my cousins made me practice late into the night until I knew them by heart.
“Today we release our former selves like flowers unto the wind. Today we become one.”
I opened my hand and he did the same, letting the flower petals drop a little before they caught the wind and swirled up, a few coming back toward us and the rest flying out into the air.
Then his hands were on my waist and he pulled me closer. I turned back to him and sucked in a gasp. He paused for a moment, and his warm breath ran over my lips before he pressed forward, kissing me. His lips were dry, and I stood still, wondering if I was meant to do something else. He let me go all at once, and despite Cael’s words earlier, I did feel alone.
No one in my family told the Tri King that his brother had made a grave blunder, but it was all I could think of. We were taken to the great hall of Jitra, and the raucous celebration that usually followed a wedding was delayed as my father and husband sat at a long table, and the families were introduced. My father shook hands with my husband’s brother, and he bowed his head respectfully, saying his name—“Galen.” Galen straightened and swept his arm behind his sister, saying her name—“Danae.” They stood stiffly as all my siblings save Rian were introduced to them, and my husband watched, his chin raised, staring at them coolly.
Then the families parted like water, the desert to one side, the Trifectate to the other.
“My siblings and I are the Three-Faced God incarnate, the Holy Rulers of the Bone Lands and the vastness of the Trifectate, and we have taken your daughter as one of our own,” my husband said. He looked at me, standing with my siblings behind the table, and his eyes held mine for a moment in a way that made me smile and stand straighter. I had done it—I had said the words, and this was my reward. Peace. “And I will care for her as family should. And in so doing, I pledge to lay down my arms and leave the desert unmolested.”
“We promise to do the same,” my father said. “We will keep our borders and leave the Bone Lands free from any retaliation from our people, and we will welcome the Bone Lands into the desert. We will be at peace.”
“Peace,” my husband echoed, and he raised his cup to me as documents were brought forth. They drank from a shared cup and signed the papers, and then my husband quit the table, coming to me. Great feast tables were brought out, the remnants of the treaty signing removed, and music played. His hands slipped over my waist and everything else was forgotten, my heart stuttering with nerves. “Come with me?” he asked.
I smiled brightly at him and nodded.
The sky was dark and had taken all the heat of the day with it, and as soon as we stepped outside, I shivered.
“You’re cold,” he realized. “Take my jacket.” He started unbuttoning what I’d thought was a shirt. It never occurred to me in all the time I’d seen Trifectate men that they might have more clothes under the black. He put it around my shoulders, and it was warm from his body.
“You must have been so warm today,” I said, pulling it around me.
He shrugged. “I’m certainly not used to desert heat.” He tugged the jacket straighter on me, then let his hands settle on my waist. It was the closest I’d ever been to a boy not my brother. I knew I was staring at him. He was … beautiful. He had a wide jaw, a sharp, short nose, and black hair that fell rakishly over his forehead.
His handsome face almost made up for his brother removing the veil. Almost.
I reached up and smoothed his hair back, and he smiled. His thumbs stroked my waist, but it felt oddly ticklish.
“Are you pleased by this match?” he asked. “By our marriage?”
“Of course,” I said quickly.
“Are you pleased by me?”
I met his eyes. They were direct, forceful, like staring into the sun. “I think so,” I said.
He nodded. “Your happiness is important to me.”
“It is?”
His hand touched my cheek, stroking it gently and nudging my chin down. His thumb touched my lower lip, and then his mouth followed it. I waited, patiently, to feel the things my cousins spoke of—heat, and electricity such as a summer storm had never seen.
But they never came.
But they would. He was handsome, and we were married now—it was simply a matter of getting used to each other.
He pulled back. “I am yours,” he said. “Entirely.”
I smiled at him because I knew this was supposed to please me, but I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I was devoted and committed to this marriage, and him, and the cause they both represented, but was that the same thing as being his? I didn’t know.
“Do you know what’s strange?” he asked, touching my cheek again. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Shalia,” I said, stunned. He had never asked? Never once, in all of this?
But then, I hadn’t asked for his name either. This marriage had never been about us.
“And I’m Calix,” he told me. He smiled. “I’m sorry to have kissed you without knowing your name, Shalia.”