49

   Rielle

“I wish it to be known that I protest this union with everything I am. I wish it to be known that I will do everything within my power to fracture it. For what remains of her life—and I pray that this will be brief and pass swiftly—Lady Rielle will regret the day she restored me to this world. She will regret every smile and kiss she used to seduce my son beyond reason. She will regret every word she has uttered and every step she has taken, and only then, when she lies inconsolable with sorrow at my feet, either dead or dying—only then will I rest.”

—Journal of Genoveve Courverie, October 27, Year 999 of the Second Age

For days, Rielle watched dully from her rooms as visitors streamed into the city from all over the world, preparing for a wedding she desperately wished not to attend.

Unfortunately, the wedding was her own.

And if she refused Audric now, after agreeing to marry him, it would break his heart. It would humiliate House Courverie and perhaps lead to even more resentment and uncertainty than already existed throughout the realm. And the truth was, she did want to marry him. She wanted to declare to the world—to herself, and to Corien most of all—that she was Audric’s, and he was hers. Nothing had the power to separate them; she wanted that known.

More than anything, she wanted to convince herself that, yes, she could serve for the rest of her life as not only Sun Queen to Celdaria, but as queen to Audric. She had the strength to do it. She would be able to curb her doubts and swallow her protests and stay the course of this life she had been thrust into.

And that seemed to her an odd reason to go through with marrying someone, no matter how much love was involved.

But here she was, on the morning of her wedding, standing on a small platform in her sitting room as her maids and Ludivine’s tailors fitted her one last time into what would, she was convinced, go down in history as the most gorgeous gown to have ever been created.

She stared at her reflection in the mirror, drawing comfort from the sight of herself in this elaborate, glittering cloud of a dress. The bodice was dark-gold brocade, shimmering with delicate swirled lines of beadwork. The tiny sleeves perched on the edge of her shoulders, leaving her arms bare. Diaphanous layers of gold, white, and plum chiffon trailed down her arms and far past her fingers to the floor, each piece scattered through with a tapestry of embroidery—white starbursts, plum-colored roses, vines and leaves in Courverie green. Much of the dress was backless, with draped lengths of delicate chains crossing her bare skin—a cool, shifting net of gold. The skirts were a voluminous explosion of silk and lace and chiffon, in the colors of both the Sun Queen and House Courverie.

Ludivine watched her, bright-eyed, in a simple gown of rose velvet cinched at the waist with a slender belt fashioned of golden birds.

“Is it trite and expected,” she asked, “to tell you how beautiful you are?”

Rielle attempted a smile. “Perhaps, but not unappreciated.”

Even to her own ears, her reply seemed strained. It had been nearly a month since Corien had conjured that awful vision of the girl on the mountain—the girl who called herself Eliana and claimed to be her daughter.

It had been nearly three weeks since Rielle had discovered she was with child.

And during those three weeks, she had barely spoken to Ludivine. Since her vision from the empirium, Rielle had not been able to shake the truth of the angels’ banishment from her mind, and she didn’t care to speak to Ludivine about it—not about the fact of the banishment itself, and not that Ludivine had kept the reality of it from Rielle, and Audric, for years. Occasionally, Ludivine would dare to broach the subject, gently reaching out to Rielle’s mind with a tendril of thought that felt something like an apology.

But Rielle wasn’t ready to talk about the saints’ great deception and face the terrifying doubts she now possessed—about Ludivine’s true loyalty, and what thoughts of revenge might reside deep in her heart. Ludivine had lied about what she truly was. She had chosen not to tell Rielle the truth about the Deep. Whenever Rielle looked at her friend, there now twisted a niggle of doubt in her heart that she couldn’t ignore.

And then, of course, there was the wedding to distract her.

It had been a whirlwind of preparations for the wedding itself, the days of feasting afterward, the official church documents the Archon drew up with the help of his secretaries that would bind Rielle and Audric together as king and queen. Fittings with the tailors and meetings for hours every day with the Magisterial Council and the Archon, with the cooks and the decorators. Even with Queen Genoveve.

But Rielle’s hopes that Genoveve’s opinion toward her would have warmed over the last several weeks since resurrecting her were quickly dashed. Whenever they met, the queen simply stared at her across their tea table, refusing to speak. The old shadows had returned to the delicate skin under her eyes. Her nightmares kept her from more than a few hours of sleep a week. They also, she claimed, robbed her of all appetite.

Rielle didn’t doubt that the woman was suffering. She had heard proof of that from Corien. But even with Ludivine helping to soothe her troubled mind, the queen refused to treat Rielle with anything but disdain.

She would not have been surprised if the queen were depriving herself of sleep and food simply out of spite.

And as the castle whirled itself silly with the mundanities of logistics, the city grew and grew.

Word of the wedding spread quickly, and the city soon clogged with visitors. Tent cities sprang up in the Flats, under the bridges, along the shores of the lake. Celebrations raged day and night—as did protests decrying the wedding as the end of peace and the beginning of war.

Factions of resurrectionists from other cities, wild-eyed and beaming, flitted through the city in their white-and-gold robes like birds in mating season, praising Rielle as their one and only salvation. They launched themselves at the protesters that gathered at the castle gates, waving their crimson-spattered brass suns. Minor scuffles broke out every few minutes; deadlier fights ending in injury and death erupted every day. The city guard was stretched thin for several harrowing days, until Merovec arrived from the north with his own soldiers, ready to help where needed.

But even this was a matter of contention, for many in the capital remembered all too well that it had been soldiers of House Sauvillier who had slaughtered their brothers and mothers and neighbors on the day of Rielle’s fire trial. Among those uncertain citizens, there were a radical few who continued to challenge the presence of anything related to House Sauvillier in their city. Not even Merovec, with his popularity and his flashing smile, could convince them. They cared nothing for the rumors speculating that those soldiers had been under angelic influence. That knowledge merely served to heighten their hysteria. House Sauvillier was tainted; House Sauvillier was vulnerable to angelic attack.

It was a time of chaos in Âme de la Terre. The perfect time for a wedding, Tal had remarked dryly.