“You ever were the luckiest of us,” Kral commented, signing his name with a flourish. “Landing in honey, after all your protests to the contrary.”
I grunted in non-reply, hoping he’d drop the subject. No such luck because Kral’s grin sharpened knowingly, fully his namesake the shark, scenting blood in the water. My blood.
He leaned in, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and switching to Dasnarian. “Tell me, rabbit—you had this planned all along. All that Elskastholrr nonsense. It was all part of an elaborate scheme to get you to this point, wasn’t it?”
“Of course.” I spread my hands at the spare chapel of Danu, lavishly heaped with summer blossoms and dripping with garlands, the air sweet as honey. “I intuited decades ago that Dasnaria would go to war with an obscure coalition of kingdoms where an eight-year-old princess would end up as High Queen. I figured back then that if I studied the art of Skablykyrr, I could work my way into her confidence and one day manipulate her into marrying me as part of an alliance to fend off conquest.”
“Exceedingly clever,” Kral agreed, clapping me hard enough on the back that I had to brace myself. Then he sobered. “It might not work.”
“No.” I scanned the small assembly, everyone in their finery, awaiting only Ursula’s arrival. Kaedrin prayed quietly at Danu’s altar, ready to perform the ceremony. She hadn’t explained her abrupt reappearance, except to say that Danu had guided her to us because she’d been needed. The empire required only a contract, and Kral and I had drafted one—to his infinite amusement, as it bore only superficial resemblance to a traditional Dasnarian marriage contract—but Ursula and I would be wed by a priestess of the goddess of warriors as befit us both. “It likely won’t satisfy Hestar, but Ursula is determined and I cannot refuse her.”
Kral lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “You wouldn’t be a Konyngrr if you’d stand back and allow another to take your woman, no matter the stakes. It is, after all, a grand Dasnarian tradition to make exceptionally foolhardy political choices for the sake of love. It seems your Ursula will fit right into the family. And this will surprise Hestar, so that makes it even better.”
“Will you be willing to lie and say the wedding—and this contract—predate his offer?”
Kral showed a smile full of white teeth. “Oh, baby brother, I will savor every moment of defying and lying to Hestar. That fucker.”
I laughed, the amusement full-hearted, and I clapped him on the back, satisfied to see him lurch forward before he caught himself. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told him, surprising myself that I meant it.
“I am, too.” He sounded subdued, uncharacteristically so, and met my gaze. “I want to offer apology, for what I did to you and Jenna.”
My heart caught, as it always did at the sound of her name, even though it had been said aloud so many times today that it should have lost its potency. It seemed Kral and I stood together again at that inn, Jenna a white ghost between us, all of us so painfully young.
“I forgive you.” As I spoke the formal words, something seemed to let go inside me. “None of us are who we were then. All joking aside, none of us could have foreseen where we’d end up. Certainly not here, like this.”
“True,” he mused thoughtfully. “We cannot retrace those footsteps…and yet, I wish I could make amends with Jenna. I can’t give her back what was stolen, but I wish her happy and would do whatever she asked of me. I owe her that.”
“Jenna?”
We both turned to see Kaedrin standing there, a quizzical look on her face. The silver-haired warrior woman looked between the two of us. “I apologize for interrupting and eavesdropping. I don’t understand Dasnarian, but I heard a name I know and wondered. I knew a young woman, long ago, named Jenna. Not a common name in the Thirteen Kingdoms, but she was also Dasnarian.”
This pivotal day hadn’t finished with me, apparently, holding yet one more shock to turn my blood to water. I stared at the priestess, unable to summon thought. Fortunately, Kral had no such issues. “Where did you know her?”
“She trained for a while at the Temple of Danu in Ehas,” Kaedrin said. “My sister priestess brought her there—Kaja, who was Jepp’s mother.” She gestured toward Jepp, who stood conversing with Marskal, both of them smart-looking in the formal uniform of the Hawks.
“Ehas?” I repeated, able to grasp at least that nugget of information. Surely Jenna hadn’t been in Ehas all this time. And at the Temple of Danu. It didn’t bear considering.
“Yes.” Kaedrin returned her gaze to me, her face clear and unlined, despite her age. “It had to be, oh, more than twenty years ago, but I remember Jenna. So lovely, so determined to learn to be a warrior of Danu.”
Now Kral gaped along with me. “She became a warrior of Danu?” I asked, trying to imagine it.
Kaedrin smiled, enjoying our bemusement. “Indeed. She was a dancer—I don’t know if you knew that—and many dances have their roots in martial forms. Kaja taught her to use knives instead of jewels within the forms she knew and I helped fill in the holes.”
At last I could move. “Kaedrin,” I said, and her eyes widened at the urgency in my tone, “is she still in Ehas?”
She looked rueful, shaking her head. “No. She only stayed a short time. She was running from something, which I suspect you know, so she changed her appearance and her name.”
Disappointment, a sodden and familiar weight, returned to fill the spaces lightened by hope. “No wonder I could never find her,” I commented.
Kral’s hand fell heavy on my shoulder, and he looked at me with shared feeling. “It was too much to hope,” he said, “that we might recover her after so long.”
Kaedrin watched us, a canniness in her gaze. “I know where she went,” she offered.
Slowly, afraid of shattering the fragile possibility, we both turned to look at the priestess, cautious, Kral’s hand still on my shoulder. Neither of us seemed able to ask the most important question.
“At least, I sent her news of Kaja’s passing, and I have reason to believe she received it,” Kaedrin added that last enigmatically. “Do you swear before Danu that you mean her no harm?”
I went down on one knee without a thought. To my surprise, Kral joined me in the same movement. In one voice, we swore it together.
Kaedrin smiled with a soft radiance unusual for a follower of the sharp-eyed goddess. “I think Kaja would be pleased. She always promised to continue her service as Danu’s handmaiden, to help us along as she saw fit. I shall give you the information, Harlan, as a wedding gift. And her new name: Ivariel.”
Ivariel. I took it in, a name I could use like a balm to heal those old wounds, so recently purged.
Kaedrin’s eyes lifted to the chapel entrance. “Time to begin,” she said.
I rose to my feet and turned, absorbing the final stunning blow of the day—this one a punch of glory. Ursula stood framed in the chapel doorway, a vision of bright light and surpassing loveliness.
She wore a gown I’d never seen—a spectacular work of art, made entirely of finely worked metal feathers, all in shades of bronze, copper, and gold. The high collar rose to frame her long throat, a ruff of the metallic feathers radiating out from a deep bloodred at their base that matched her hair and picked up the gleam of Salena’s rubies in her necklace and at her ears. From there the gown flowed in gleaming layers, sweeping down into a long, trailing skirt. Zynda, also dressed in a coppery gown, finished arranging Ursula’s train and, giving her a kiss and whispering something that made her cousin smile, slipped aside for me.
I moved forward to this stunning woman who’d somehow become mine. She wore her crown and a regal smile, though a hint of uncertainty ghosted in her gray eyes.
“No sword?” I asked.
She smiled a little. “I thought I owed you that. I can come to you without weapons and trust that I’ll always be safe. Tonight I’m a woman first. With you, always the woman first.”
Always she knew how to outmaneuver me, taking my breath away with a few words. “I haven’t seen this gown before,” I commented.
“No, you haven’t, because I hid it away,” she replied, almost shyly. “Just in case.”
“You’ve always been an excellent strategist,” I conceded.
“Do you like it?” She asked, hesitant with the question.
“You are more beautiful in this moment than I have ever seen you,” I told her gravely. “Ursula, my Essla, will you marry me and be my wife?”
The uncertainty fled, and she smiled in truth, all woman and not the queen. “Yes. Yes, I will, if you’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” I told her and offered her my arm.
She didn’t take it right away. “I know I pushed you into this.”
I laughed, took her hand and placed it firmly on my forearm. “Oh, my little hawk, you should know by now that you can’t push me into doing anything I don’t want to do.”
With a wry smile, she huffed out a laugh. “I do know that.” She narrowed her eyes. “No wedding bracelets, though, Dasnarian.”
“No one could chain you, my Hawk.”
Her answering smile faded as she studied me. “Why do you look so strange? Something has upset you.”
She saw through me so well. “Kaedrin knows where my sister is. Her name is Ivariel now.”
Ursula’s eyes widened in shock. “I sense Danu’s hand in this,” she murmured.
“I believe that may be so.”
“We’ll look for her,” Ursula said. “Whatever you need.”
“Thank you, love.” I turned her to face Danu’s altar and we walked toward it, side by side, partners in this, as in all things.
Kneeling before Danu, we bowed our heads to Her clear-eyed justice and wisdom, listening as Her priestess bound us together in law and spirit as we’d long been in our hearts.
Though we had the shortest of nights to celebrate together, I fully intended to savor every sweet moment of it.