The following morning I allowed the council to convene without me and followed the dictates of a spirit lorn with longing for home. How long had it been since I had been home? Home, with nothing more pressing drawing me on? I couldn’t remember the way the light had fallen inside my modest student flat. I missed my father and mother. I ached for the way winter’s clear light edged the buildings with a gleam almost angelic, as if they had been painted on the surface of the world by divine hand.

I wanted to go back to Evertrue, so I began packing, not just for myself, but for Ivy and Kelu and Amhric as well. They were doing the necessary work building on yesterday’s grand gesture. They could do without me… or so I believed, until Emily peeked into the palatial rooms Iset had assigned us.

“Master?” she said. “Everyone’s wondering where you are.”

“I’m packing,” I said. “You may tell them I’m going home.” I paused, then added, “To be married.”

Emily’s ears sagged. “We’re leaving?”

“I am,” I said. “I hope you’ll come with me. And see if the local genets would like to accompany us, as I am supposing they will not want to be parted from the Fount, and I am not marrying without him as witness.”

“All right!” And with that vanished, leaving me to the peace of the morning as I set out clothes more appropriate to the climate on the mainland and began folding the Archipelago gossamers.

I’d been expecting Emily to return with more questions, possibly with one other person to demand further explanation. I had not been expecting the entire council to descend on me, and fortunate it was that the doors in Kemses’s manor were wide enough to accommodate them as they poured through.

“We’re going home?” Ivy said.

“We’re getting married,” I said to her. “So I certainly hope we are, since I am not planning to be wed here. And as I’d like you to be present—”

She laughed and threatened me with a pillow, to the shocked astonishment of the local humans, who could not understand our words and were left to puzzle out our bantering tones.

“I think we should get married in the cathedral in Evertrue,” I continued. And added, hastily, “If that sits well with you. We could choose a more humble locale if you prefer otherwise?”

“Oh no,” she answered, amused, with a rather dangerous twinkle in her eye. “I rather like the thought of a high royal wedding between two allied states being performed in the Church’s foremost cathedral, witnessed by thousands!”

I paused.

Chester passed his hand over his mouth to disguise the smile, or try. “Didn’t think that through, did you.”

“I suppose it’s unavoidable,” I said.

“You suppose correctly. And it will be a wondrous political move.”

“And completely unexpected,” Kelu said.

“I doubt that!” I replied.

“Not by you,” Chester said for her. “By the government of Troth. We didn’t mention anything about you and Ivy, so unless Kemses has said something in our absence, your decision to show up and be wedded by the Vessel in the capital of Troth—to a human native to Troth!—is going to be quite the coup for us. You’ll be lucky if the First Minister doesn’t burst into song for sheer glee.”

“God save us.” I sighed, then chuckled. “Well, let them make hay of it if they will.”

“What are you saying?” Ikaros interrupted finally.

“The prince of elves is going home to marry his fiancée, the lady Ivy,” Chester replied in the Gift.

In the silence that resulted I resumed packing, and I ignored the babble that erupted afterwards until Chester calmed them down enough to take turns speaking.

“You mean to tell us,” Davor said, “that you are going to marry a human, sir?”

“I have loved Ivy since I met her.” I glanced at Ivy and smiled for her, and only her, and her answering smile softened everything, made the glow of the sunlight more poignant, made everything worthwhile. Turning back to Davor, I said, “So yes. Since she has honored me by accepting my proposal.”

“A human marry an elf!” Diantha exclaimed, as scandalized as any gossipmonger.

“An elf giving Door magics to a human, and then marrying one?” Ikaros murmured.

“An elven prince marrying at all,” Tchanu said. “I thought your comment earlier a hypothetical, my prince. Isn’t royalty forbidden a blood-flag?”

Iset nodded once, rolling her lip between her teeth. “It’s true. The elven prince and king are not supposed to marry.”

“The elven prince and king are not supposed to set up a dynasty by having children,” Amhric said. “There will be no elven child as a result of this union.”

“Perhaps all elven princes should marry human women.” Basilia grinned. “A token of friendship between races, forever.”

“I won’t speak for future princes, as I am not planning to die anytime soon. But I am going home, so I can marry.”

“They should come,” Ivy put in. She grinned at the foreigners and opened her arms. In horrendously accented Gift, she said, “You come!”

“Splendid idea!” I said. “Particularly since I’m not planning on leaving Chester behind. The wedding party needs participants. Why don’t you come along?”

“The Archipelago needs us here,” Diantha said.

“The Archipelago won’t explode without us,” Ikaros said. When she turned on him, he said, “God, Diantha! To see a human civilization that was born free! Don’t you want to? How could you not?”

“We must bring all the genets,” I added to Amhric. “And I do mean all of them. Or at least, as many as want to come.”

Standing alongside him, Marzipan said, “We’ll all want to come.”

So our plan to leave was delayed rather more than I liked, but in the end a sizeable entourage chose to accompany us through the Door, and if my wedding was destined to become a political affair I thought I might as well wring every advantage from it I could possibly. Using it to cement the ties between the new elven nation on the continent and Troth, and Serala and the new elven nation? Why not? We had done harder things.

We left the Archipelago in the care of the lieutenants the human leaders had designated, and this I judged would work given that the bulk of the elven residents remaining were either joining us at Vigil or staying beneath Erevar’s shield, where the population was more likely to protect them. It was not the most comfortable of détentes but it was surprisingly stable given how recently the islands had been wracked with violence.

The settling of our foreign dignitaries into temporary quarters at Vigil, and the plans for them to accompany us south to Evertrue, I delegated, and I practiced this useful skill on as many of the details as possible. My sole decision involved the disposition of Almond.

Almond’s body had been tenderly disposed on an altar erected in the hall where she’d died. Someone had sealed the ugly wound and washed her fur, and whatever magics prevented her decay left her smelling as sweet as she had in life; she was even a little warm to the touch, and smiling in repose, as if she might roll over and wake and reach for me. The sight of her body in that vast hall, on a draped plinth with all honors accorded her, but so small and so alone….

“We can’t just… leave her like that,” Kelu said to me, subdued. She and the Pearls had gone with me to see to her, and the four of us now stood before the body like postulants to a saint.

“No,” I said. “I thought we would bring her with us to Evertrue. She loved the Cathedral.”

“You want to bury her there?”

I couldn’t tell if Kelu was angry or uncertain; in her, wisest course was to assume the former as the latter could swiftly transform into it. So I said, “I… don’t think so. I think she’d want to be where we are. And we can’t bury her. The thought would horrify her, that she might become a revenant in some far distant future.”

“So we burn her,” Kelu said. “And the ashes go… where? Into the city here? Smeared on your head? Do we eat them?”

“What do you suggest?” I asked.

Her tail sank. Folding her arms, she shook her head. It was Emily who said, “I think she wouldn’t like it if we… we belabored it too much. She’s gone. Making a fuss about the body… it’s not like we can keep it anyway.”

Serendipity nodded. “We should burn it so the demons can never use it, if demons can use genets. But keeping the ashes, it seems… I don’t know.”

“Macabre?” I said.

“Yes.” Serendipity nodded.

“And we certainly shouldn’t eat them,” Emily added, eyeing Kelu with ears splayed.

Kelu said nothing, but flipped her ears back and wrinkled her nose in what might have become a growl had she not been so subdued. Looking away, she said finally, “But you’re right about the Cathedral. She would have liked that. Do the Church people burn the dead in ceremony?”

“They do.”

“Then we should get them to do it. Fires lit by elves… they’ve only been lit for horrible things.” Kelu’s shoulders squared. “A pure fire, with people singing or whatever you humans do. She’d like that.”

“She’d blush and tell us she wasn’t worthy of it,” Serendipity opined.

“She was wrong,” I said, and went to make arrangements.

At Ivy’s suggestion I sent Chester, Emily, and the drake ahead—“You do not want to drop a royal wedding on the Vessel of the Church last minute, Morgan,”—so while I was sorry to bid them farewell they went on ahead and left us to make our way on land. Truthfully I was not sad at the prospect; while it grieved me to accompany Almond’s cortege, it also felt right to honor her with a procession that also included all the people who wished to see a royal wedding. Almond would have liked that: that she did not go to her burial surrounded in mourners. How she would have loved to see the wedding! But perhaps she would, and from a better vantage than any of us.

We needed the journey. It served as a transition out of folklore and into ordinary time. Riding the roads we had used to enter legend eased us back into the world we’d left… and if the one we returned to was one of higher adventure and increased responsibility, still it was one we could grow old in. Like the immortality that had bound the elves, such enchantments cannot linger, or they use us up for anything else.

Evertrue was awaiting us very nearly in its entirety. As we rode toward the gate we’d used for our clandestine exit months ago, we were greeted by a crowd that burgeoned from the city to throng the road. Someone had hung banners over the city walls in Troth’s wine purple and silver, and God help us, but there was a unit of the First Minister’s own guard awaiting us in parade dress on chargers caparisoned in armor made traditional by the winning of the war for independence. They were accompanied by a marching band, which on espying us turned their backs and played a trumpet fanfare before beginning their journey back into the city.

Fortunately, someone permitted this perfect display of pageantry to be interrupted by a lone rider, so Chester, Emily clinging behind him on the saddle, was able to draw abreast of us and explain himself. “You didn’t honestly expect to escape this without a parade,” he said with a grin.

“I most certainly did, given that I didn’t expect a parade at all!”

“You and Amhric are visiting heads of state, here to wed a native woman, my dear,” he said, amused. “Just be glad it’s autumn and they had fewer flowers.”

“Fewer what?” I said, and then the people on the battlements began to rain petals on our heads.

“Flowers!” Serendipity exclaimed in delight, brushing one off her shoulder so she could capture it.

“Flowers!” I said.

“Just wait until you see what they’ve done with poor Du Roi and Douglas,” said Chester.

I would have liked to protest the entire affair, save that Ivy’s eyes were shining as she rode alongside me, and the genets were so obviously gleeful, and the elves who’d elected to come from Vigil to witness my wedding had fought for these people and deserved their accolades. The elves and humans and genets who’d come from the Archipelago didn’t, but they were impressed—by the level of civilization implied by the spectacle, by the sheer numbers of people who’d turned out to welcome us home, and by the martial might that fell in alongside as we rode. We were to be accompanied all the way to the seat of Evertrue, not just by Troth’s best, but by the Church’s as well, and banners hove into the sky alongside us, snapping in the clear late autumn wind. And arriving to that palatial seat, where on the marble steps were arrayed the entirety of the parliament in their sartorial splendor, the heads of the armed forces, the Vessel and her retinue, and the First Minister himself….

Eyre was there with the robed heads of Leigh University, with Carrington at his side. And I spotted Guy and Radburn among the dignitaries, looking uncomfortable in their finest dress. It was possible to suppress my mirth only because I knew I could tease them about it later.