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CALISTAMARRIEDKINGORIONOFIDYLLAin the Grand Cathedral with the whole of the kingdom watching.
The people poured into the cathedral itself. They lined the streets, though it was a blustery day, which everyone said felt appropriately Christmassy, with the holiday decorations lighting up the trees and every house in the land bright with celebratory candles.
Inside, she took Orion’s hands. She gazed into his eyes and she said her vows.
Then she kissed him in front of the world and made it real.
And when he led her out of the cathedral again, she was a queen.
His queen.
Together, they sat in a carriage open to the elements, and though it was not warm, neither one of them felt the chill. The carriage led them up a winding road toward the palace, lined all the way with Christmas lights and cheering subjects.
And at the final ball of the Idyllian holiday season, always traditionally held in the palace, they celebrated their wedding—and more than that, their miraculous love for each other, where everyone could see it.
Feel it. Wonder at it, if they liked—or wonder why her parents weren’t at the ceremony, which would no doubt be in all the papers the next day.
Calista found she couldn’t care less. Melody was safe.
Her parents were the past.
Orion was the future.
This time, when Orion led her out onto the dance floor, he didn’t pretend to be stern and austere. He smiled down at her in her Cinderella dress, until she thought that surely every person in the whole of the kingdom of Idylla could see that he was besotted.
But then, so was she, and she didn’t care who saw it.
“My queen,” he said formally, as he swept her into his arms. “Your Royal Highness.”
“My love,” she said in reply.
And they danced.
They danced and they danced, and they celebrated the love they’d almost lost, before finding it at the very last moment.
They danced. They celebrated. The king made a speech, and outside the crowds cheered them by name.
Most of what Calista would remember of this night was him. Her beautiful Orion, his eyes gleaming gold, as they claimed each other at last.
And when the clock struck midnight, it really was Christmas, at last.
Her king and her love—her husband—dispensed with tradition and tedious royal decorum. He swept her up into his arms to the delight of the crowd, and then he carried her up the grand staircase, heading for the family wing of the palace.
He didn’t put her down when he’d climbed the stairs. Nor did turn toward her suite.
Instead, he carried her into the sprawling King’s Suite.
“I have already moved your things,” he told her sternly. “And I will tell you now, Calista, that I have no intention of maintaining separate lives. Or rooms. Or anything of the sort.”
“Perish the thought, my liege,” she said, smiling, with her head on his shoulder.
“It is clear to me that I am going to require access to my queen,” he said, as he strode into a chamber with a bed raised high on a dais, with four posters soaring high, as befitted a king.
“You have all the access you like,” she assured him. “As long as I can access the king in turn.”
He laid her down on the bed, came down with her, and for a moment, they both smiled so wide, so bright, it was as if they created their own full moon there between them. To watch the one outside that hung there, for them, lighting up the sea.
“Merry Christmas, my love,” Orion said.
