Dumped the Oathbreaker for His War God Uncle novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Second Garland

I heard him on the armory stair before I turned round.

He stopped in the doorway with a lamp, and saw what was in my hands, and set the lamp down very carefully on the shelf.

"I was looking for my clasp," I said.

"It's in my belt pouch. I was going to give it back to you to give back to me."

"That's ridiculous."

"I know."

I held up the garland.

The asphodel was brown at the edges and thin as paper, and it still kept its ring.

"When?"

"The first night," he said. "You'd gone up to bed. It was hanging on the peg by the door."

"You pressed it under your breastplate."

"It was the flattest thing I owned."

I almost laughed.

He came and sat on the bench by the chest, and looked at the garland and not at me.

"The first time," he said, "you laid one on him."

I went still.

"He wore it through the feast," Theron said. "Then he left it on a bench by the wine."

"In the morning a servant swept it up with the bones."

"And you watched her."

"I was at the door," he said. "I didn't stop her. It wasn't mine."

He touched one dry white flower with the side of his thumb.

"This one was," he said. "I wasn't letting anybody sweep it."

I put the garland back between its sheets of leather, flat, exactly where it had been.

Then I shut the lid of the chest and sat on it.

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow?"

"I wrote it on clay. I'm not waiting."

"The bride sleeps in the temple, the night before," he said. "Your priestess told me. She was very firm."

"Who made that rule?"

"Your mother, I'm told."

I slept in my mother's narrow bed that night, alone, and didn't sleep much.

In the morning there were people on every one of the sixty-one steps.

Priestesses in grey, the faithful in their best, four hundred men of the legion in clean black with fresh asphodel through their belts.

The dogs had collars of it.

The bigger one had already eaten half of his.

At the bottom step Ismene stood aside with her broom, in plain grey, with her black hand bare.

She didn't come up.

She didn't look away either.

My father walked me up.

He had to stop twice, at the twentieth step and the fortieth, and lean on my arm and breathe.

"I should have done this the first time," he said at the fortieth.

"There wasn't a first time, Father."

"There was a wrong one," he said. "I sat in the second row and looked at my shoes."

He straightened his old brown robe and kept climbing.

At the top, Eudora was crying already, loudly, into the captain's shoulder.

The west wind sat on the temple wall swinging her bare feet, and her fisherman stood under her looking nervous about the drop.

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