Page 10 of The Summer War
They rode down early the next morning, and even as they came, the mist was rolling back from a shining bridge of living wood, vines full of leaves and opening into flowers.
Celia couldn’t help but put her head out of the carriage window to watch it stretching out for the bank.
Even though nothing about the town had changed, Celia was glad she’d seen it from a distance, the day before, to recognize the lie: all the disrepair she’d seen was hard to notice with the warm fragrant summer breeze coming down the road, and flowers blooming on either side.
Father encamped their men in a solid block just north of the tourney grounds, near a stand of trees he’d marked out the evening before, which he knew were real; he put a small company of two dozen men hidden there, with three fast horses apiece, and had them lay a ring of salt around their camp.
“If something goes wrong, we’ll go straight there, and run for the mountains,” he said.
But Celia was sure that nothing was going to go wrong with that much warning.
“Don’t use sorcery until you have to,” he added.
“It’s a blunt instrument. If you have to use it against them at all, likely the only sensible thing you can do is kill them.
” It was a warning she didn’t need, and which wasn’t comforting when sorcery was the only power she had to defend herself.
A royal messenger arrived while they were still putting up tents, and told Father that the wedding would be held that very evening before the opening feast began.
He pointed out a small beautiful grove that Celia hadn’t noticed before, on the riverbank near the palace: a stand of golden-barked trees hung with swaths of green silk and white flowering vines.
There was an enormous white pavilion up on the other side of it, full of feasting tables, with servants already bustling around them to lay down the trenchers and dress them with flowers.
“Prince Gorthan sends his greetings and best wishes, Your Grace, and thanks you for the honor of entrusting him with your daughter. He will come to you at sunset, to escort her ladyship to the wedding grove, where she and the prince will pledge their troth,” the messenger said.
He wasn’t lying, and more than that, he seemed sincerely excited, and eyed her with the avid curiosity of a man who thought he was looking at his future queen.
At least he thought the wedding was going to happen.
After he left, with many bows and smiles in her direction, she said to Father, “Maybe it’s you they’re going to murder,” which would have made some sense, if the king didn’t realize that the summerlings were going to break the peace.
Once she was married to Gorthan, he could get rid of Father, and have a young sorceress completely in his power.
Father put on his armor, and kept all his men on high alert, but no one attacked them.
As the sun was going down, a company detached itself from the royal camp and came towards their own, but it was only an honor guard of two dozen knights in full plate, with cloaks of royal blue, and in their midst a tall man, not quite young anymore, with a serious face and a trimmed brown beard, in beautifully engraved steel armor and a cloak of purple, who was soon bowing over her hand: Gorthan.
“Your Highness,” she said, making her curtsy, and then lifted her eyes and looked him anxiously in the face.
He looked down at her soberly, without any false pretense at enthusiasm, and said, “I’m glad to meet you, my lady.
Let us go to the wedding-grove,” and held his hand out for hers.
She looked at Father; he just gave a small jerk of his chin: go on.
She put her hand into Gorthan’s. It was hard in a familiar way, like Father’s and like Argent’s: a swordsman’s hand, with calluses from drill.
The royal guard closed ranks around them, and her own honor guard of ten men fell in at their heels, Father and his own guard behind them, and they walked together towards the beautiful grove, trailing a small army of soldiers and mutual distrust behind them.
Celia was still uneasy, but she couldn’t help but think how silly it was to be married this way.
She looked over at Gorthan, and when he looked back at her she said, trying to share the joke, “We should have brought a drummer, to keep the time,” and he darted a look back at the marching pack of men and gave a small involuntary snort of laughter.
For a moment his face had good humor in it, a sparkle.
He quenched it back to seriousness a moment later, but she felt a little burst of hope.
Surely someone who could laugh at himself a little bit couldn’t be so terrible to be married to.
They came to the grove, and a pale and nervous priest was waiting by the front of it.
He said to her anxiously, “My lady, I ask you to aver that you come here with your family’s consent and of your own free will to be married to the prince, as your king has commanded, and go hence with him to his home,” darting a look at Gorthan, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d do if she said no.
“I do aver it,” Celia said, and Gorthan heaved a deep breath and led her past the priest and into the grove.
They had to lift aside a curtain of the flowering vines to go inside, and a delicate wafting of perfume came off them that tugged up a fragment of memory of something she’d never known, just barely familiar in some strange way and already slipping away.
She tried to catch it, and for a moment in her mind’s eye she had a bright and vivid glimpse of her sitting room back in Castle Todholme, with a woman she didn’t know sitting inside it, working on a band of embroidery, and Celia caught the faint scent of her skin.
Her eyes were prickling with tears, a sensation beautiful and painful at the same time.
Then Gorthan’s hand was drawing her forward through the trees, and another curtain of flowering vines brought another scrap of memory: sitting crying with her knee bloodied in the garden and her nurse fluttering anxious, and then Argent bending down to her, smiling, picking her up.
He was saying something to her, but the words were lost, and didn’t matter; her head was nestling down on his shoulder, and his arms were strong around her, safe.
She had to put her hand out to stop a vine coming into her face, and suddenly she was swallowing laughter instead: sitting in the tower herself with Roric, telling him another one of the silly account-stories she made up for him, each one a ridiculous summer battle, only this one was all the best parts out of all the stories, somehow woven up together into the funniest story she’d never told, and Roric had stopped doing any of the actual figuring for laughter, and she was giggling with him even as she went on telling it.
She couldn’t see her way, or any path through the trees and vines; she almost couldn’t see Gorthan ahead of her at the length of her arm and his.
She kept following him, feeling a little like she was in a dream, and more of one with every step, until suddenly she was alongside him and he was lifting aside a final curtain of vines to let them into a clearing that seemed bigger than the entire grove had been, and all around on every side nothing but solid walls of trees.
And in the middle of the grove waiting for them stood a man, only it wasn’t a man at all. It was a summerling.
Celia had never seen a summerling before, except in pictures, and pictures weren’t anything like.
He was tall and impossibly beautiful, like a statue someone had worked on for a long time, his skin a burnished deep bronze and his long hair going from the same bronze at the roots to palest white-gold at the ends, and wrapped with spiraling bands of gold.
His eyes were brilliant green and painted with a darker green all around.
He wore a suit of golden armor with a green cape that wasn’t made of cloth but of leaves, and instead of a helm he wore a crown.
He fit so well into the grove that it didn’t seem like a surprise to see him at first, and Celia only slowly turned her head to look at Gorthan.
He was looking straight on at the summerling, in a way that was somehow deliberately avoiding looking at her, and he said, “Hail, Elithyon. This is Celia, descended of Selina and of Sherdan the Betrayer, and she has come of her own free will to be married to you, as my father promised, when next a sorceress was born in his line.”
“No, I haven’t,” Celia said. “I came to be married to you. ”
But it was like speaking in a dream, trying to tell the other dream-people in it that something was wrong; neither Gorthan nor Elithyon paid any attention to her, and she couldn’t seem to even try to pull her hand away.
Even as she spoke, she was walking along with Gorthan towards the Summer Prince, and then she was in front of him, and she just watched him taking her hand from Gorthan as easily as if she’d given it to him.
“ No, ” she said again, protesting.