The Day I Married the Fire God, Three Brothers Regretted It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gown
Helia's three brothers take her wedding gown, crown and sea for Myrrha; she walks out to meet the groom, and he says her name.
The day before my wedding, my brothers carried my gown out of the Hall of Gowns while forty courtiers watched.
It was cloud-silk, stitched with sun-thread, and I had spent a year wearing it down in small fittings.
Aethon held it over his arm.
Eous followed with the red-gold crown on a velvet cushion.
Lampos came last, looking at the floor.
"Stop," I said. "That is mine."
"It's Myrrha's now," Aethon said.
Myrrha stood by the mirrors in her pink morning robe, twisting the ends of her sash.
She was the mortal girl my father had brought home from the human world when she was eight.
I had taught her which stairs creaked.
"Helia, I'm so sorry," she said. "I told them it wasn't right to take it before you agreed."
"Then put it down."
"Let me try it on first. The seamstress needs to pin it, and you can have it back tonight." She smiled at me like I was a friend she was helping. "You know how I get with the hem."
She took the gown from Aethon's arm.
Her hands were cold against my wrist when she squeezed it.
"I'll be careful," she said.
"Nobody is going to be careful," I said. "I am marrying the Fire God."
The hall went quiet.
Then Aethon laughed, and half the courtiers laughed with him.
"Father spoils you enough to pull down stars," he said. "Do you think he would send you to a crippled god with a shattered core?"
"He chose it."
"He chose Myrrha," Eous said. He looked at me the way he did when I was nine and had broken something. "She is the one who needs a home and a husband. You have us."
"Myrrha," I said. "Tell them."
Myrrha's eyes filled.
"I never asked for any of it," she said. "I only wanted to be useful."
"She is about to be married," Eous said. "Are you really going to take her one wedding from her?"
"It is my wedding."
"Is it?" Aethon pulled a scroll from his sleeve and snapped it open for the room. "Father's letter promises the Fire God the daughter he took in and raised. That is Myrrha."
That was not the letter I had seen.
Three years ago I had read my own name at the bottom of the betrothal, in my father's handwriting.
Aethon rolled the scroll up before I could reach for it.
Behind him, two guards were already carrying my sun-thread veil toward the doors.
"The Sunset Cloud Sea is hers too," Aethon said. "The ceremony will be held there, and we will make sure you can't even set foot in the wedding hall."
I looked at Lampos.
He had always been the one who looked back at me.
He kept his eyes on the floor.
The warm spot under my ribs flared, the one that had been there as long as I could remember.
It always did when anyone spoke of the Fire God.
I had never told anyone, because it was only a feeling.
Everyone in the palace shivered in the north wind off the cloud sea, and I never had.
I had thought that was only luck.
Aethon's voice dropped. "Go to your room, Helia. When it's over, we will let you out."
I looked at the guards.
I looked at the courtiers with their bright, careful faces.
I looked at the scroll in my brother's sleeve.
Nobody in that hall was going to take my word over my brother's.
So I stopped asking them.
I turned around and walked out of the Hall of Gowns in my plain white under-robe, with no shoes and no crown.
Aethon called my name once.
Nobody followed.
Father was away at the Eastern Gate until the wedding evening, and I had no way to reach him.
The only other person who could tell my brothers the truth was the man they called a cripple.
I took the bronze token stamped with my father's seal from my mother's drawer, and held it until it went warm in my palm.
Then I went down the Stair of Rays and along the cloud road toward the northern border.
By dusk, the groom's procession was crossing the Ember Bridge, a night ahead of the ceremony.
I stood in the middle of the bridge in my bare feet, in the snow wind that had never bothered me.
Twelve guards in black iron drew their swords.
The carriage stopped.
A cane tapped the floor inside.
The door opened, and a man with ash-dark hair and grey eyes looked down at me.
He didn't ask who I was.
"Helia," the Fire God said.
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