The Alpha Postponed Our Wedding, So I Married Another novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Gate Again

They came down through the pass on the morning of the wedding.

I was on the wall above the gate with Prue when the first of them crested the ridge.

A line of wolves first, black and gray and brown, running down through the snow.

Then people behind them, on foot and on shaggy mountain ponies.

Then carts. Then more carts.

"How many did he invite?" said Prue.

"He said the whole valley."

"I thought that was a figure of speech."

"So did I."

It was every valley.

Old women in sheepskin. Children on their fathers' shoulders. A man carrying a fiddle in a sack and a goat on a rope.

The first Eastmarch wolves to come down the pass in peace in twelve years.

Down on the moor, the old shepherd stood in front of the gate in his sheepskin coat with his arms wide open.

People kept stopping to embrace him.

He was crying and pretending he wasn't.

The ten had worked for three days.

They'd set trestle tables end to end in the courtyard, and then kept going, out through the great gate and onto the moor.

Both leaves of the gate stood open.

The table ran straight through the arch, inside and outside, one long table with no end that anyone could see.

"So nobody's on the wrong side of it," said the tall clerk, when I asked.

She had tied pine sprigs to every leg herself.

My grandmother wore six red ribbons in her hair.

"I told you I'd come back when there was somebody up here worth arguing with," she said, when I looked at them.

The shepherd was waiting for her at the end of the table with his hand out.

At noon, Prue braided my hair.

She did it slowly and properly and wouldn't let me see until the end.

Heather at the temples. A red ribbon woven through the braid.

The midnight-blue dress with the silver wolf tracks.

"There," she said, and her voice went funny. "Now you look married. Again. Properly this time."

"I was properly married the first time."

"Not with your hair like that, you weren't."

The princess married us in the arch of the open gate, at the exact spot where she'd bound our hands two months before.

The same red cord.

The same wind.

On one side of us, the whole of Highmoor. On the other side, the whole of Eastmarch.

Nobody was outside the bars this time. There weren't any bars.

I said the first vow, and he answered it.

I said the second, and he answered it.

Then the princess looked at me.

"There's no third vow," she said quietly. "You may make one."

I hadn't planned it.

I said it in both tongues, so nobody on either side of the gate could say they'd misheard.

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