The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 35 of 40

Chapter 35: The Wedding

We were married on the twentieth of August, on the rocks beside the mill on the falls.

Agnes chose the day. She said the cake wouldn't keep past it.

The whole valley came.

Then the river came.

Carts started up the river road a week early.

They were full of people who had never seen Frostgate and wanted to see the mill that ended the Writ.

The woman in brown velvet came with her thirty sacks, and her husband, and a wedding present of a goose that bit the sergeant.

My father came up from Greyford with the smith's wife and half the lane.

The free packs came down the pass with drums.

The queen mother came in a plain cart with one maid.

She sat on a bench by the race with my daughter in her lap, and didn't let anybody else have her for two hours.

Agnes cleaned the blue banner gown.

It had been soaked in a storm and dried by a fire and ridden four hundred miles.

It still had a scorch at the hem where I'd stood too near the hearth at the lodge.

"I can fix that," Agnes said.

"Leave it," I said. "I like where it's been."

She left it.

Davy carried the twins down the path from the keep in a basket.

It was a new basket, lined with a fleece. He'd woven the handle himself out of willow and it was crooked.

He walked very slowly, with his tongue between his teeth, while two hundred people watched him.

My son yelled the whole way down.

My daughter looked at the crowd.

Davy set the basket on the flat rock by the wheel, where everybody could see.

He stood guard over it with his hand on his knife.

The sergeant cried before anything had even started.

There was no priest. We didn't want one.

In the north, Agnes said, people married the old way, the same way a pack was made.

In the open, by their own choice, with everyone looking.

Corvin stood on the rocks in his good black coat, with the wheel turning behind him and spray in his hair.

I walked down to him on my father's arm.

My father handed me over at the bottom of the path.

Then he stopped.

"No," he said. "That's not right. I'm not giving her. She's coming."

He let go of my arm and stepped back.

I walked the last ten steps on my own.

Corvin held out his hand, palm up, the way he had in the gallery.

I put mine in it.

"Clemency Millward," he said. "Nobody gave you to me. Nobody ever could. I asked, and you said yes, and I'll spend my life finding out why."

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