Chapter 24: Rest

Yui said yes before Brunhild had finished the question.

Then she said it three more times, to be sure, while the whole ward cheered and Greta blew her nose on a bandage.

They were married eleven days later in the fort chapel, the same stone room where Verrick had once told them what the Rite was.

The sergeant with half an ear had swept it.

Greta had hung it with pine branches from the hill, and the thirty nurses of the vanguard had polished every candlestick.

A hundred soldiers of the Shield packed the pews.

Three hundred more stood outside in the thaw with their caps in their hands, because the chapel could not hold them.

The Queen sat in the front row in her black dress.

Yui wore the white tunic, washed and pressed, and a grey wool skirt with a new hem.

Her hair was tied high with the white ribbon.

It had measured the black line on the worst morning of her life, and she thought it should be there for the best one.

She came up the aisle alone, because there was nobody to give her away.

Then Greta stepped out of the pews with her braid combed and her tabard brushed, limping, and held out an arm.

"Somebody has to," she said gruffly.

Yui took it, and Greta wept all the way to the altar and denied it afterward.

Brunhild waited there in her dress uniform, with her sword on her hip and her cropped hair neat.

She looked, Yui thought, like a woman who had slept eight hours a night for weeks.

There was colour in her face.

There were no black marks on her hands, none at all.

The pink ones on her wrists were the colour of the inside of a shell.

When Yui reached her, Brunhild looked down and spoke so softly that only Yui could hear.

"I am not afraid of anything. I am afraid I will cry."

"Then cry."

"The Shield is watching."

"They've seen you with a dagger at my throat and a cloth on your back. Cry."

She did.

She cried through the vows, which were short and plain.

Yui had written them in her square nurse's hand on a sheet of ward paper.

I will stay.

I will wash your back.

I will wake when you cannot sleep, and I will sleep when you cannot wake.

I will not carry you alone, and I will not let you carry anything alone.

Brunhild said hers in her dry voice, and every word went through the chapel.

When she slid the ring on, the bandage-pin ring, bent into a circle and polished until it shone, it fitted exactly.

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