Chapter 24: The Second Wedding

The doors of the wedding hall opened onto the Sunset Cloud Sea, and the sea was full of people.

Two hundred gods sat in the tiers, in silk and sun-gold.

Behind them, filling the back rows and the aisles and the steps, sat everyone I had asked for.

The northern cooks in their aprons.

The soldiers who had stood in the snow, scrubbed and nervous in borrowed cloaks.

The old regent, upright in the front, with her ash staff across her knees and her eyes bright.

When I came through the doors in my crooked gown, the soldiers stood first.

Then the cooks.

Then the tiers rose, row by row, until the whole hall was on its feet and the cloud floor rang with it.

Phlegon walked beside me.

He did not offer his arm and he did not lean on mine.

He carried his black cane in his left hand, though he no longer needed it.

We came to the altar.

My father stood behind the bronze bowl, tall and old and straight, with the heir's gold ring still closed in his fist.

Lampos stood on his right in a plain tunic, trying not to be sick.

Aethon and Eous stood in the first row, just below the dais.

Aethon had no gold on him anywhere.

His hands were bandaged to the wrist.

"Who brings this woman?" my father said.

"I bring myself," I said.

A ripple of laughter ran through the hall, soft and glad.

My father smiled, the real one, and I saw that his eyes were wet.

"Then she comes freely," he said. "As the record should have said the first time."

Phlegon stepped to the bowl.

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