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“Oh yay!” Ami interrupted, clapping her hands and bouncing on her toes like a girl.
“If,” Stella repeated meaningfully, “Her Majesty, Harlan, and Kral are notified of this incoming delegation from Dasnaria andifthey all agree to it.”
“Notifying Essla? Fine. It is her realm, after all,” Ami agreed with a pretty scowl, “and Harlan, I suppose, since he’s her consort and probably has opinions, but Kral? Why does Jepp’s Dasnarian lover get veto power?”
“Because he’s the father of the groom,” Stella replied patiently. “If no one else comes to this wedding, I want you and Ash there, and also Kral and Jepp. Everyone else belongs to concentric circles of decreasing relevance.”
Ami sniffed. “You can hardly call your aunties Andi and Essla irrelevant.”
“The only two people whohaveto be at this wedding are Jak and me,” Stella replied emphatically. “Everyone else is extra. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it,” Ami conceded, then held out a preemptory hand. “Now, come help with the revised seating chart. I think if we knock down a few walls, we can expand the feast hall enough to seat everyone.”
“We’re telling Empress Inga she can’t bring two-hundred people,” Stella corrected.
“We’ll discuss that,” Ami replied airily.
As Stella obediently went with her mother, casting him a forlorn look over her shoulder, Jak resolved to find a way to rescue her in an hour or so.
Or, perhaps, he might follow through on the abduction and elopement plan and save them all considerable trouble. Three more months cooling their heels at Castle Windroven. He fervently hoped Stella and he could survive it with their eventual marriage intact.
~ 2 ~
To the surpriseof no one at all, least of all Stella, her royal auntie Essla wasnothappy. The letter Her Majesty High Queen Ursula sent in response to her baby sister’s admittedly breezy missive about the additional wedding guests fairly rang with outrage. Ami read it aloud to the three of them after a private supper in the queen’s chambers, with dramatic flair and passably good mimicry of Ursula’s crisp tones, exaggerated ever so slightly for satiric effect. Like Ash and Jak, apparently, Stella found herself not at all amused, and entirely at a loss for what to say.
“Pfft.” Ami tossed the letter onto the table between them. “She takes everything far too seriously.”
“It’s a strange world,” Ash commented into the fraught silence between the four of them, his scarred voice grating like broken glass, “where I find myself defending my heart-sister, as everyone at this table knows we don’t share great affection for each other, but I have to come down on Ursula’s side here. As high queen, she’s facing an invasion of the ruling family of an empire that tried to conquer us more than once.”
“That’s ancient history,” Ami argued.
“I don’t think the people who fought in those battles would agree,” Jak put in judiciously, stroking his short beard. He probably longed to pull a blade to fidget with, but he was trying to break the habit, especially when dining with royalty, so Stella had suggested he try replacing the habit with something else.
She’d had to do the same in order to stop sucking on the two little fingers of her left hand, a bit of self-soothing that hadlingered from her girlhood for far too long. Old habits died hard, however, and apparently never completely, for even now those fingers tingled, twitching to fit into the corner of her lower lip. A product of being around her mother way too much.
At the beginning of the summer and freshly returned from their harrowing adventures, Stella had embraced being back at her childhood home of Castle Windroven. Spending time with her family and younger siblings had been more than appealing. Staying in one place for a few months—knowing it was just until the autumn Feast of Glorianna—had made rational and emotional sense. And yes, maybe she’d wanted to be coddled by her mother just a little bit.
Now she deeply regretted the impulse, and the ensuing decision to delay the wedding until midwinter. Their original wedding date had come and gone, and though the fall weather held warm and clear, the winter with its bruising storms loomed. She and Jak should have been off on sailing adventures and starting their new life together already, instead of him restlessly kicking his heels and habits in Avonlidgh, clearly out of his element. And her beautiful, charming, vivacious mother had turned into a monster worse than any that had once lurked in the warrens of the defunct volcano beneath the castle. She heaved out a heavy sigh and Jak met her gaze across the table, his dark eyes knowing, sparkling with a hint of mischief.
“So,” she asked her mother, “are you going to do it?”
“Cancel the wedding?” Ami asked incredulously. “No! Essla can kiss my perfect ass.”
Ash snorted out a hoarse laugh. “Darling, I might point out that this is more than interference from a bossy big sister; this is an order from the high queen, to you, a queen subject to her rule.”
She thrust out her lip mulishly. “Not when it’s a family matter.”
“You kind of lost that high ground when you invited foreign royalty with whom we have tenuous diplomatic status,” Stella pointed out, trying to be calm. Why was it that being gentle and compassionate came effortlessly to her with everyone but her own mother?
“I just wanted Jak’s family to feel included,” Ami protested. She patted Jak on the shoulder, giving him a fond smile.
Stella laid her hands flat on the table. “You wanted to stir up trouble and now you’ve got it.”
Ash slid her an appreciative grimace from his uncanny green eyes, so bright and clear in his burn-scarred face.
“Auntie Essla also makes an excellent point that, especially in midwinter, the Dasnarians wouldn’t be able to sail around the Crane Isthmus, much less land on the coast of Avonlidgh,” Stella continued relentlessly. “They’d have to land in Annfwn and travel through that way. That means you’d have Andi and Rayfe up in arms, too. There’s no way they want the Dasnarians getting an intimate look at the tropical bounty of Annfwn.”
“I can handle both of my sisters,” Ami retorted. “And Rayfe, too. He doesn’t scare me.”
