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Astar clapped him on the shoulder. “He can’t see the bride before the wedding, Queen Amelia has decreed and no one is inclined to risk her considerable wrath by defying her.” He reached over to tweak Stella’s nose, laughing when she batted his hand away. “So, either Nilly here must retire discreetly to her remote tower or you two can go to him.”
“Let’s go to Jak,” Gen decided. “It’s a blizzard out here and there’s no sense exhausting Nilly’s magic when we can go inside a nice, warm castle.”
Gen looped her arm through Stella’s as they went inside, squeezing in a light hug. “How are you holding up?”
Stella laughed at Gen’s confidential tone. “Do I look that bad?”
“No.” Gen gave her an assessing glance. “Isyn is right– you look radiant.”
“I’m happy,” Stella replied simply, realizing it was sublimely true.
“Well, you deserve to be,” Gen observed.
“And Jak deserves the just rewards of his patient seduction,” Rhy said over his shoulder, where he walked with Astar and Isyn.
Astar punched him on the arm. “That’s my sister you’re talking about.”
Rhy rubbed his arm and gave Astar a pained look. “One would think that you’d eventually get used to the idea that Jak is fuc—”
Astar cut him off with a grizzly roar, swinging a great arm, missing the target entirely as Rhy burst into raven form and nimbly dodged the blow. Lena and Zeph laughed, exchanging rueful glances.
“It’s so good to have everyone together again,” Stella sighed happily.
~ 10 ~
The short dayflew by. With the festivities commencing an hour before nightfall, that meant Ami had scheduled Stella to begin preparations shortly after lunch, which she ate in her rooms under the watchful gaze of all the important women in her life. Never mind that those women included three queens, a high queen, and the Empress of Dasnaria, they all—from the silver-haired and serene Empress Inga down to Prema, her youngest female relative—seemed to take undue interest in making sure she ate sufficiently.
“No bride ever eats enough on her wedding day,” Lena’s little sister, Bethany, announced with confidence beyond her years.
“How did you get to be such an authority?” Lena asked with gentle humor.
“I’ve been to weddings,” Bethany answered, then added impudently, “not yours, since you haven’thadone.”
“Bethany,” their mother, Dafne, said mildly, looking up from one of Stella’s books she’d plucked from a shelf, “today is for celebrating with joy.”
“I’m being joyful,” Bethany argued, twirling so her dress floated around her. “I just think that if Lena isn’t going to marry Prince Rhyian, then she should give him up for someone else to have a chance.”
“I am not giving up Rhy, so you can forget that,” Lena retorted.
“She couldn’t, even if she wanted to,” Andi put in quietly, shadow-magic coalescing around her, shimmering with silver edges. “My son will never want anyone else.”
Bethany pouted prettily. “Maybe he just hasn’t been tempted enough.”
“Whose childareyou?” Dafne asked, shaking her head.
Andi rolled her eyes, magic dispersing in her amusement. “Iwouldsay she’s Ami’s daughter, through and through, if I hadn’t been there when you birthed her.”
“Hey,” Stella’s eldest sister, Ilkay, said, “not all of us are shameless flirts like our mother.”
“A mother can’t expect all her children to follow in her footsteps, alas,” Ami said with mock sorrow, stroking Stella’s hair. “Eat more than that. You’ll be glad later when you’re drinking your one-thousandth toast of the evening.”
“Nilly isn’t a flirt, that’s for sure,” Jepp piped up from a chair she’d pulled near the wall so she could prop her booted feet on it at a steep angle. Unlike most of the women in the crowded chambers, Jepp wasn’t dolled up. She wore her usual battered fighting leathers and twirled a dagger between her fingers. With her keen dark gaze and jaunty attitude, Jepp made Stella feel almost as if Jak were with her. “All those years,” Jepp added, winking saucily at Stella, “Jak moaned and whined about how you didn’t even know he was alive, that your thoughts were always far away, and he didn’t stand a chance with you.”
“He said that?” Stella asked in surprise—not at the sentiment, which she was more than passingly familiar with, but that Jak had talked to his mother about her.
“I told him to give you time and that you’d eventually appreciate his unique qualities,” Jepp answered, nodding crisply.
Ursula strode over and knocked her one time scout’s booted feet from the wall. “When did you get so wise, especially when you are perpetually bad-mannered?”
