Swapped Bride: Awakening of the True Princess novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Her Sister's Veil
Marit remembers dying in a bitter marriage and takes Odile's place as the Wildlands bride; Casimir spots her at the border.
Marit Orsolen woke up inside her own funeral.
At least that was how it felt, standing on a footstool in the dress room with three seamstresses pinning her hem.
She remembered the fever.
She remembered lying in a cold bed in Aldermere, thirty-one years old, while her husband stood at the door and did not call the physician.
Casimir had watched her die.
He had watched the way a man watches a fire he lit himself.
Then the pins pricked her ankle, and she was twenty again, with a wedding gown on and the whole eleven years still ahead of her.
"Hold still, Highness," a seamstress said.
Marit held still.
Her heart was going so hard that the lace on her chest trembled.
Eleven years of Casimir's locked doors, of his smile at dinner and his hand on her arm in the hall.
Eleven years of being told she was lucky.
She knew one more thing, and it was worse.
Three days from now her little sister would ride north to marry the king of the Wildlands, and within a year Odile would be dead.
Poisoned in a stranger's hall.
Her father had wept at the funeral in front of every lord in the kingdom.
Then he had marched an army over the border for revenge.
Marit had spent that war sealed in Casimir's house, which was already a prison.
The door opened behind her.
"There you are," Casimir said.
She did not turn.
She could see him in the long mirror, slim and handsome, his black coat buttoned to the throat.
He looked at her the way he always had, like a purchase he was pleased with.
"Our wedding is in the spring," he said. "Your father signed the contract this morning."
"Did he?"
"You are very pale, my love."
He crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder.
Every inch of her skin wanted to leave her body.
"I am just tired," she said.
"Then rest. The treaty bride leaves in three days, and the whole court will want to see you smile at the send-off."
The seamstresses were smiling at the floor.
Casimir leaned down and kissed her hair.
When he left, she stepped off the footstool, took the pins out of her hem with her bare hands and went to find her sister.
Odile was in the east garden, sitting on the edge of a dry fountain with her slippers in her lap.
She was eighteen, small and round-cheeked, and she had been crying so long that her nose was raw.
"I don't want to go," Odile said. "Father says the Wildlands king drinks from his enemies' skulls."
"He does not."
"Everyone says so."
"Everyone is lying."
Marit sat down beside her.
She had never met King Torren in either life, but she remembered the border letters, and they had been polite and short.
A man who wrote like that did not keep skulls.
"Odile, look at me."
Odile looked.
"What if I told you that you never have to go?"
"Father will never let you."
"I'm not asking Father."
Odile stared at her.
Then her face crumpled, and she threw both arms around Marit's neck.
"You'd really do it?" she whispered. "You hate the cold."
"I hate Casimir more."
A laugh broke out of Odile, wet and shocked.
Marit laughed too, and for the first time since the dress room her chest unlocked.
This was her choice.
Nobody had put it in her hands, and nobody could take it out.
On the third night they traded cloaks in the stable before dawn.
Odile wore Marit's plain gray one and slipped out through the kitchen yard, headed for the old nurse's cottage by the mill.
Marit put on the bridal veil, white silk down to her waist, and climbed into the wagon with the bride's chest.
No one looked twice at the veiled girl.
Her father stood on the palace steps with his gold circlet on and did not even check her face.
The wagon rolled north for four hours.
At the river border the Wildlands escort waited on the far bank, twenty riders in dark furs, silent on tall horses.
Their captain nodded to her across the water.
Then a horse thundered up behind the wagon, and a voice she knew better than her own heartbeat cut across the ford.
"That is not Odile!"
Casimir reined in beside her wheel, his coat spattered with mud, his pale eyes wide.
He had ridden all morning.
He reached for her veil.
The Wildlands captain drew his sword and said, in plain Lowmarch, "Ride."
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