The Bride and the Ashen Knight novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Signing
Sigrid signs the treaty marriage before her father can speak for her, then slips the ring on the ashen knight's wrist and reads the first word written on his skin: her own name.
My father had written my marriage vows himself, and I signed the treaty before he could read them aloud.
The pen was already in my hand when the herald finished calling my name.
"Sigrid Aldemar, Princess of Varnholt."
Three hundred courtiers watched me walk to the long table under the great window.
They expected tears.
Everyone in the throne hall knew who I was marrying, and no one thought I would do it dry-eyed.
I dipped the pen, wrote my name in my own plain hand, and set the pen down.
The scratch of it carried to the back of the hall.
My brother Darian laughed behind his fingers.
"The Ink Princess signs fast," he said. "Perhaps she can't wait."
Some of the court tittered.
I had spent my whole twenties in the palace archive copying dead scripts, and they had never let me forget it.
I ignored him and looked at the doors.
"Ser Garrick Marsden, Lord of Greywold," the herald called.
The hall went quiet in a way I had never heard it go quiet.
The doors opened, and he came in alone.
He was the tallest man in the room, broad through the chest and arms, with black hair cropped close and a heavy jaw.
He wore a plain dark coat with the left sleeve buttoned to the wrist.
The skin of his neck on that side was grey.
It was not pale, or sick, or dirty.
It was the grey of cold hearth ash, ridged and mottled, and it ran from his jaw down into his collar.
Ladies lifted their fans.
A man near the front muttered, "They say he still smells of smoke."
Garrick Marsden heard him and did not turn his head.
Five years ago the kingdom of Rhenmark had marched on the north with winter at its back.
This man had burned the grain fields, the barns and the forests of half his own country, and the invaders had starved and gone home.
The kingdom called him the Ashen Knight, and nobody called him a hero without a sneer.
He stopped on the other side of the table and bowed to my father on the throne.
Then he bowed to me, a short stiff bow.
"Your Highness."
His voice was low and steady.
His eyes were dark brown, and they did not drop from mine.
"Lord Garrick," I said.
"I'm told the treaty is generous," he said.
"I'm told the same."
The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, and then it went still again.
My father cleared his throat.
King Osric was fifty-eight and tired, and he had never in his life made a hard decision where anyone could see it.
"The treaty binds Greywold and the Crown for the lives of both parties," he said.
"My daughter brings forty wagons of grain and a seat at the royal table."
"Lord Garrick brings his lands and his sword."
He did not say the other part, which every person in that hall understood.
Greywold had a burned half that would never feed anyone, and my father had a daughter nobody wanted.
The Crown was keeping the knight close.
The knight was getting a wife nobody had asked.
"The ring," said the herald.
A page carried it forward on a silk cushion.
It was a plain band of grey iron, forged in Greywold, and it was meant for his left hand.
Garrick held that hand out to me over the table.
He had unbuttoned the sleeve.
The grey went all the way down his forearm to his wrist.
It covered the back of his hand and ran into the creases of his fingers.
He watched my face while I looked.
I think he was waiting for me to flinch.
I took his hand instead.
It was warm and heavy and very still.
The ridged skin under my thumb was dry as old paper.
I turned the hand to slide the ring over his knuckle, and the light from the great window fell across the inside of his wrist.
Those ridges were not scars.
They were lines, tiny and even, cut in rows.
I had copied that script for ten years.
It was Old Aldic, a dead language nobody had spoken for four hundred years.
I was the only person alive who read it for pleasure.
My eyes went to the first line before I could stop them.
I read it the way you read your own name on a letter.
The first word on his skin was SIGRID.
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