The Tyrant's Pet novel · Chapter 31 of 32
Chapter 31: The Wedding
Ossian opened his eyes.
He looked down at my hand on his arm.
He didn't seem surprised.
"I wondered when you'd notice," he said.
"You knew?"
"I've looked at it every morning since the Fork," he said.
He turned his arm a little under my palm. "It doesn't hurt."
"So it's what's left of the black," I said.
"No," he said. "It's what's left of you."
I tried to take my hand away.
He put his own over it and kept it there.
"Don't you dare bleed on it," he said. "I'm keeping it."
The wedding was on the river steps below the Coil, at noon, nine days later.
The whole city came.
They packed the steps from the water to the palace gate, and the bridges upriver and down, and the roofs along both banks.
Children sat on their fathers' shoulders.
Somebody on the far bridge had hung a sheet painted with a very badly drawn snake.
I came down the steps from the gate with my arm through Agatha's.
She had the crown in her other hand, because she said she was sick of hatboxes.
The woman who sewed walked behind me holding my hem up off the wet stone.
The gold serpent along it caught the sun.
My scars were bare in the white sleeves.
Nobody on those steps looked away from them.
The tributes lined the lowest flight in their best dresses.
The tanner's daughter stood with them, and the woman with the baby, and the foreman in a borrowed coat.
The boy from Saltgate with the black fingernails had clean fingernails now, and a ribbon in his buttonhole, and kept waving.
The gray-bearded Alpha stood with the wolves.
Out on the river, a long flat barge was moored against the far bank.
Men stood on it in chains, raking black silt up from the riverbed into the hold.
A miner stood at the stern with a whistle.
One of the men in chains had stopped raking.
He was barefoot, his beard gone ragged, and he was staring across the water at the steps.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of The Tyrant's Pet are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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