Falling for the Sultan Who Ordered My Death novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Wedding

He didn't say yes.

He laughed, with his face turned up into the lemon leaves.

"What?" I said.

"I was going to ask you tomorrow. Properly. Not like that."

"Not like what?"

"Come and see."

He took me by the hand into the shop and up the narrow back stair, the one that used to end at a burned ceiling.

It didn't end there anymore.

There was a door at the top, new and a little crooked.

Behind it was a room I'd never seen.

Fresh plaster. A floor of new boards that still smelled of cedar.

A window over the yard, so the lemon tree filled it.

A wide low bed with one leg slightly shorter than the others, so it sat on a folded rag.

"Twelve nights," he said. "Laleh held the lamp. The captain did the roof. I did the bed."

"I can tell."

"It's level if you sit in the middle."

I walked into the middle of the room and turned around in it.

"You built a room on my house without asking me."

"I was going to ask you if you wanted it," he said. "Tomorrow. Before the other question."

"Tamir."

"Yes," he said. "That's the answer to yours. Yes. Obviously yes."

We married at the next full moon, under the lemon tree.

The whole Street of Dyers came.

So did the court ladies, in their best silk, picking their way down the street past the indigo troughs.

So did the salt-mother, who had stayed for it and said so to everyone.

So did half the lower city, who stood in the street outside the yard wall and climbed it to see.

The oldest scribe stood under the tree to say the words.

He had stone dust in the creases of his hands.

"Finished the carving at dawn," he told me. "It's crooked at the end. I ran out of wall."

Sahar walked me out from the shop.

She had sewn three petals into the hem of my dress in red thread, very badly, and wept the whole length of the yard.

Tamir stood under the tree in plain white linen.

There was no seal on his chest.

He'd hung it on a low branch of the lemon tree by its cord, where everyone could see it swinging.

"Not today," he'd said to Laleh, when she asked.

The scribe said the old words.

They are short in Qaresh. Two names, and a cup of water from the nearest fountain.

The custom is that the bride drinks first, to show the groom it's safe.

Laleh handed me the plain clay cup.

I lifted it.

Tamir put his hand over the top of it.

"No," he said, and the yard went quiet.

He took the cup out of my hands and drank first, a long swallow, in front of everybody.

Then he held it out to me.

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