Page 73 of To Touch A Silent Fury (The Bride of Eavenfold #1)

Halfway into the room, keeping my steps in the painfully slow rhythm started by the two men on either side of me, something stirred.

I clenched my hands around the flowers as I felt him. He was still asleep, but he was waking up, or he was less out of it. And he was close. Very close.

Hanin ?

I scanned the room, missing the rhythm and stepping twice to catch up when I found him.

Curled on a ruby-red pillow with golden tassels to the right of the altar, on a curving plinth only a few feet from the priest, my dragon slept.

Chained to the wall, a gold-plated collar hanging loosely around his neck.

They had chained my dragon.

I wanted nothing more than to run to him, but I knew I couldn’t.

Instead, I kept my body as rigid as the trunk, my arms the branches, my steps as light as air. Every last scrap of wisdom I had ever been taught, every shred of patience I had, bled from me as I walked those final steps up to the low dais.

When I reached it, I remembered Daffinia’s instructions. Stand on the left of the priest.

My Hanin, lying in chains on a cushion bedecked with the Sightlands’ royal crest, was on the right. I was expected to stand across from him, and wait as my brute of a husband stood beside him and claimed him as my dowry?

I paused at the bottom of the stairs as my blood heated; my mouth pursing as I held back a snarl. Then I mounted the steps, slowly, elegantly. And stood on the right of the priest, one hand falling from my bouquet to touch Hanin’s back .

The relief shuddered through me, and I met the priest’s questioning look with such ferocity he all but shrunk. He shut his mouth before he made the error of telling me to move, and I felt some of my rage melt as my fingers stroked down Hanin’s speckled and bumpy spine.

He was unharmed. He would be groggy when he woke up, and very hungry, but there was no sign of mistreatment. I had just looked back to the door when the fanfare started once more.

As a final act of rebellion, before the beads were ripped from my face and my life signed away, I looked away from the doors. I would not stare at Banrillen, I would not give him the satisfaction of my interest in his entrance.

I stared instead at the cracks in the marble at my feet, inlaid with golden paint.

It was a nice symbol, to suggest that broken things may be made prettier than before, fixed and shining anew.

But all the nobles I had met were not made more handsome by their breaking.

They were just broken, as I might soon be.

The fanfare ended, and several members of the congregation gasped so loudly I was certain it was faked. The steps falling on the runner thundered around a near silent room.

“Introducing the groom,” a weaselly voice announced from near the door. “Prince Langnathin, second son of King Braxthorn and general of his armies.”

My head whipped as my heart lurched.

What?

A green shirt ruffled into a black jacket, perfectly tailored.

Gold fell from the lapel and the pocket of his black trousers.

He did not limp, but his body twisted ever so as he walked, slumping to the right as he shielded some awful pain.

It was his side, it must be. My gaze trailed to his face, my shock like ice in my limbs.

He wore his mask as he strode down the central aisle, his pace markedly faster than my own.

His red eyes, though, were only for me. They did not leave me once, not as the audience began to mutter, not as the ice thawed in me and I finally comprehended the words.

General. Not the Crown Prince. Not heir.

Just the second son once more.

Lang reached the stairs, and some element of his mask cracked, knowing his face was, for this short moment, only between me and the priest. He climbed the first step.

I saw the pain he had so carefully hidden now ripple at the edge of his mouth.

Pain he would let me see, pain he trusted me to not exploit.

Any facet of animosity I had left for him crumbled then, and I let my hand drop from Hanindred as I descended the steps to him. I offered him my hand, and the audience behind us hushed once more.

Lang stared at me, and I didn’t need his touch to know that feeling I had so rarely experienced and coveted so much. There was something profound in acceptance. He had risked so much to come here. I saw what it had cost him, and I would never rebuke him for the consequences he had suffered for me.

He took my hand, and I felt his weight shift as he allowed me to help him. Resolve, pride, anger, and desire swelled through our touch.

“General?” I pulled him up the second step, knowing his hearing was keen enough to discern my whisper. “What have you done?”

He squeezed my hand. “I ruined your Fate once. It seemed a fitting punishment to ruin my own.”

My body felt as if it had been plunged into the Ramelon River in Domin. Something heavy and ill, a guilt I never thought I would bear, pulled at my stomach. “You stepped down as Crown Prince? ”

He glanced at me as we mounted the final step. “It was the only way.”

Lang did not grimace, and yet I felt the flicker of his own uncertainty, quickly overshadowed by his righteousness. It was clear to me that he had done what he felt was right, and more than that… he could live with no other outcome.

At the top of the stairs, Lang naturally moved to the left, allowing me to stand back next to Hanin. This small kindness was a knife to my gut as our hands fell apart, and I lost my connection to him.

He leaned over to speak to the priest. I was so preoccupied with my barrelling change of Fate I hardly thought to listen.

I was about to marry Langnathin. The victor of the Laithcart Games stood before me, ready and willing to marry me, and he was about to discover I had been omitting a key fact.

This was the precipice of getting everything I had ever wanted for five years.

The edge of claiming my power, my destiny, my threaded Fate sealed in my blood.

Yet I was entirely terrified, because the man I had hoped to fool, to win through the might of a dragon, had somehow become something else.

Something dear and fragile, something I was about to shatter when he discovered I was never Broken.

Lang stepped back before me, and gave me a smile. The priest cleared his throat as the guards closed the doors. A final fanfare of gleaming golden trumpets played, and my heart thudded so loudly in my chest it may as well have been the accompanying percussion.

My groom leaned over to me, and even with Plonius’ careful tending, I could see a swollen cut on his right cheek and the hint of bruising around his left eye. His nose looked crooked.

He licked his lower lip and shook his head faintly. “You look…”

“So do you. ”

I watched his throat bob as he murmured under the clanging noise of the trumpet. “Tani— This wasn’t how I wanted this to happen. I don’t deserve you, but I promise I will protect you.”

“Lang.” My throat tightened, and I fought the urge to cry. He had meant every word, and I knew he would hate me once this was over. “I’m so sorry.”

His eyes tensed. “What happened yesterday was not your fault.”

I grimaced. “That’s not—”

The fanfare ended abruptly, and before we could say another word, the priest spoke. “May Edrin watch over these two bonded souls.”

Lang leant back, giving me a confused smile as the priest started to read the marriage rites. I tried to smile back, but it wobbled.

I had always intended to snub the Marriage path, so I had skimmed any learnings of couplings and marriages. As the only woman, I wanted to give them no reason to think of me as a simpering lady who only cared to get a husband. I knew the bare bones, and the closing rite.

The priest spoke solemnly of Edrin, and how as he watches over us now, we must also look out for each other, likening our marriage to watching over a precious flock. I assumed from his phrasing it was Lang’s role to watch over me, and mine to watch over our bouncing infants.

By my blood, children. Someday Lang would expect me to bear his heirs. Knowing my bond with Hanin, and the fear I had for him every day, I could not imagine having the same fear, or even an amplified one, for my own flesh.

The reality continued to strike me, repeatedly, as the entire event swarmed around me. None of it felt real. I didn’t feel real. How could I be standing here, only feet away from Langnathin, only minutes away from completing my Fate ?

After some archaic words on the sanctity of this new bond, the priest held out the knife. This part, I knew about, and I was relieved to see how modest the knife was. The long-handled red object bore a small sharp pointed edge only the length of the last joint of my thumb, and barely wider.

Lang took the knife and shakily raised it to my face. My breath quickened and the beads at my face quivered. He gave me a reassuring look, not realising my fear had nothing to do with the knife itself, nor its wielder, but of his reaction when this all ended.

Simply, with no flair nor pomp, he lifted the thread from the bridge of my nose and sliced through it.

The beads scattered onto the floor, rolling and bouncing down the marble stairs and finding themselves under skirts and scattered into the crevices beneath the wooden benches.

Already some of the more eager congregation reached to claim a bead, a token of their attendance they might thread into their own furniture or tapestries at home.

Lang said the words, as he pressed the knife edge into the centre of his palm. “I see you.”

He had already seen me without the beads countless times, and yet the words sank deep under my skin. He reached for my hand, and I offered it, dazed. Lang pressed the knife into my palm, quickly, then pulled it away.

Dots of blood became a swelling line, and all I could see was the red smearing our palms and the red of his endearing expression. This was it.

My head pounded, and darkness touched the edge of my vision as the nerves of the moment rendered me weak.

“With this, you become one blood and seal your everlasting bond. Five points meet five points.” The priest gestured to us, and even knowing the final moves, I hesitated.

Lang raised his hand, and with my blood thick in my ears, I raised mine to meet it.

Our fingertips touched, five points meeting five points, as our dripping blood fell from our wrists.

Lang’s emotions nearly made me sob as he studied me with an adoration I had rarely felt. “I’m in love with you.”

“Forgive me.” My mouth quivered.

Then I pressed my palm forwards to meet his. Our warm blood met as the priest said the final words.

“Your bond is sealed,” he announced. “May your lives encompass many spans to come.”

A stabbing sensation pricked at my hand, and then my whole body was on fire. I burnt with it and gasped out as the heat clawed through every vein in my body. My back arched. I fell to my knees and pulled my eyes shut as I bit my tongue to keep from screaming.

The Brothers had said nothing of this. Nothing of the searing pain branding my entire being. Arms tried pulling me up, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t hear the words filtering around me. There was nothing but the hot pain.

And then it was gone, and in its place something cold, something flooding through me like the feeling of cool metal against skin.

I gasped as my body convulsed, and then stilled.

The feeling was gone. I could not say if it had been seconds or minutes.

Only that I blinked, and the first thing I saw, heard, smelt, felt, and tasted was Lang, hovering over me.

His face was so close that his breath and mine may as well have been one.

I could read him, the same as ever, as he stared at some point above my eyes, and then picked up a lock of my hair.

Moon-white hair.