“Queen Calia’s ring,” Quinn says as she takes my hand, her voice hushed. “You know, there was a time when I thought I’d be the one wearing that.” She purses her lips in disappointment, and then she bursts into laughter. “Can you imagine? Gods, I would have eaten him alive.”
“Thank you, Quinn. I so appreciate your support,” says Ronan.
“You know it’s true,” she says. “I wish I’d taken more of my clothes from the palace. Who knows what will be left by the time we get back? Although I suppose a royal wedding deserves a new outfit. And your dress! There’s a tailor with a shop near the palace market. She’s the best, but I don’t know if she does bridal—”
“That won’t be necessary. We’re getting married here.”
This earns me a reaction from Larus. “Here?”
“When?” asks Quinn. “We’re leaving in less than a month.”
“Next week,” I say, looking at Ronan, who nods to confirm. “We’ve already asked the priestess of Kerensa to perform the ceremony.”
“Are you insane?” Quinn sets down her shot glass with excessive force. “You can’t. You simply can’t. It’s a royal wedding. You have to go all out, or what’s the point?”
“Keep your voice down.” Ronan is disguised as Commander Cassius, a younger son of House Nauta that resembles Ronan aside from the larger nose and green eyes, but the effect is somewhat dampened if we keep referring to him as royalty. “It’s not a royal wedding; it’s our wedding. And this is what we want.” Ronan takes my hand and holds it above the table, daring Quinn to defy him.
“I think what Red here means to say is congratulations, and we’d be honored to attend.” Octavia shoots Quinn a deadly look, and to my utter shock, Quinn leans back in her chair.
“Tell me you at least found a dress somewhere in that castle,” says Quinn.
“Not exactly.” I haven’t really given much thought to what I would wear. “It’s just going to be a very small ceremony in the woods so that Ronan doesn’t have to disguise himself. Any old dress should do.”
“Any old dress?” says Quinn, clutching her chest. “Tave, she wants to kill me.”
“Your mother’s dress is in Kalla,” says Larus. “If Seth has found a way in, we could get it. If you wanted to wear it.”
It’s a nice thought, but my feelings about my mother have been conflicted for a long time, and reading her journals did nothing to help the matter. She sent me away time and time again, supposedly for my own protection, but she isolated me from my family during the only years I had with them. She kept me from Ronan, kept whatever fate or magic had chosen for us from happening. And she did terrible, terrible things in the name of justice. She died before most of the war had happened, but most of it was planned on her intelligence.
Adria told me she was kind and that her kindness had gotten her killed. But reading her journals, I don’t see how that can be true. Mother was many things, but kind wasn’t one of them. I don’t know what caused her to reach out to King Aurelian to give him a chance to save Ronan, but I doubt it was kindness.
I’ll always love her, but I can honor her memory with the ring of hers I still wear. I want my wedding to be for me, not her.
“There isn’t time to get it. The wedding is next week.”
“Next week!” Quinn throws her head back in anguish. “We’re missing training tomorrow. Someone in this town has to have something you can wear. And we’ll need someone to bake a cake, and flowers—”
“It’s spring. There are flowers everywhere. Quinn, relax. When we retake Faros, we can have a big wedding and go all out.For now, we just want our friends and family there. We’ll have a little party, and then we’ll get back to training.”
Ronan and I discussed this as a tactic to get Quinn to back off from overdoing it in advance. We don’t really intend to throw an expensive royal wedding as our first act after retaking a city that has been through hell, but she doesn’t need to know that.
She continues to object, but she’s interrupted by a pair of men pushing through the crowded room, heading right for us with a weapon in hand.
“There’s your bloody sickle,” says Seth, dropping a gleaming piece of curved silver roughly the size of his head on the table.
Holy fuck. They actually found it.
“It’s you,” says Ronan. “Sylvie, the sickle feels likeyou. Can you feel it?”
Ronan and I have spent time over the past few months learning how to wield each other’s magic. We can’t do everything the other can do, and nowhere near as reliably well, but after a lot of practice, I can heal most minor wounds and sense other people’s emotions when I concentrate on doing so. I don’t feel all the feelings all the time like Ronan does, and I have never been able to use light as a weapon the way he can, but it’s a start.
I reach out with my feelings, trying to sense the sickle, but it doesn’t feel much like anything to me. “I can’t sense it. You can sense the torch?”
“No,” says Ronan. “That’s a fair point. Maybe we can’t sense ourselves.”
“How did you find this?” I say, reaching for the sickle.
“Wait, Sylvie, remember—”
