Queen Tackma planned the wedding. A letter had been written to Kirila’s parents—everyone had written a section of it, crowding the writing into precisely ruled-off boxes on the parchment—but it could not be sent unless a traveler on his way south should happen to pass through Talatour in the spring. The Queen had had to have the marriage settlement drawn up with the place for the dowry left bare until some future time, and she fussed about this, in a low-key manner, for nearly a week. Kirila refused to look guilty.
The wedding was held on the last of the scarlet and lemon days of late autumn. The cool air tingled under the warm sun; asters and goldenrod struggled for territorial supremacy alongside every path; and mushrooms grew on tall slender stalks in the grass, looking, Queen Tackma said with sentimental approval, like little wedding bells. None of this was apparent during the ceremony, however, because the chapel windows were kept tightly closed, to avoid ruffling the bridesmaids’ hair.
The procession rode from the chapel between two lines of Larek’s teammates, the Jade Jousters, fully armoured and with lances held rigidly upright. Three pages, borrowed from Wek’s father, marched first, blowing trumpets with banners hanging from them. One banner displayed the coat-of-arms of Talatour (the basting stitches were still in the hem), one the arms of Kiril, and one the team emblem worked in silver thread on green velvet. After the pages came Kirila and Larek, both dressed in white velvet, riding slowly between the lines of lances. Larek rode his magnificent black charger, but Kirila was still on the brown mare because it had turned out that the only other horses at Castle Talatour were Otwick’s hunter, which, he said, would only respond to his own touch on the reins because of a “deucedly hard mouth,” and two splay-footed work horses.
Otwick and Tackma, who had ducked out of a side door in the chapel immediately after the vows and galloped doublemounted back to the castle to be there first for the official welcome, received the bridal couple in the Great Hall. A dais had been constructed especially for the occasion; it took up half the floor space. After the official speeches, there was a picnic outside, with boar and deer and chicken and goose and pheasant, and a great cake in the shape of a shield decorated with crossed lances made of marzipan and tied with green-and-white ribbons.
There was dancing, and feasting, and much toasting in wine and ale, the latter followed by a loud sing-along in which the nobility and the manor serfs, who had been provided with their own picnic in honor of the occasion, all joined in together. Kirila floated through the day, beautiful in a low-cut white velvet gown with a long train that kept winding itself around her ankles like an affectionate serpent. Her red hair was caught up at each side in two braided loops tied with white satin ribbons. Tackma had loaned her the silver filigree crown, and under it her face had the same blurred brilliance, giving back the sunlight in a glittering cloud with no sharp edges. She smiled at everyone, and started little misty sentences she didn’t finish, and drank seven goblets of wine.
Only one moment stood out clearly. Toward late afternoon the knights had boisterously rigged up an impromptu joust, and Kirila sat on the ground with the other ladies, noisily cheering them on, oblivious of grass stains. As she turned to set her goblet on a convenient rock, a small red speck dropped out of the sky and perched on the rock first. Kirila hiccupped in surprise; she recognized it from Chessie’s descriptions as a wigyn. No more than two inches long, the wigyn had the fragile, finished perfection of the miniature. A tiny arching body the crimson of autumn maples ended in a tail pointed as a shard of diamond. Miniature fierce claws gripped the rock. The wigyn’s eyes, flecks of yellow light, gazed at her from above transparent, crimson-veined wings. But what had made Kirila gasp was that around its neck the wigyn wore an impossibly small collar, and worked on the collar in hair line tracings of gold was the ancient rune that represented a tent.
Kirila swung around, breathless and wide-eyed, to tell Chessie, and he was not there. She suddenly felt that someone had kicked her, and she looked in panic around the throngs of giggling ladies and mock-fighting knights, unable to think why it was that they were making all that braying noise, what it was that she was doing in this too-tight gown with yards of fabric tangled around her feet. Then she saw Larek coming toward her across the grass, someone else’s broken lance in his hand, and the panic fled.
“Larek, I just saw a wigyn...on that rock right over there...” The tiny dragon was gone.
“A wigyn? No, you couldn’t have—they’re extinct, and anyway—Kirila, did you see that last fall I gave Wek? The ground is muddy over there, see, and I knew the only way I could get enough speed was to—” As he talked, his his hand moved possessively over hers, the long brown fingers tracing the hollows of her palm and wrist. A slow liquid burning began to spread upward from her hand, and gradually she forgot the wigyn. The late afternoon sunlight slanted behind Larek and flared around his burnished cherrywood hair, and she saw his head as in a High Church painting, backed with a flat platter of gold.