At Our Wedding Feast, My Husband Introduced His Mistress, So I Asked the Bishop for an Annulment novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The North Wing

The snow soaked straight through Casimir's breeches at the knee.

He didn't feel it.

Isaline stood one step above him in her grey cloak and looked down at him.

The whole court was packed on the palace steps behind her.

She didn't look surprised.

She looked like a woman checking a dose.

"You said ask you when you were free of them," he said. "Both of them."

"I did."

"Both of them are gone from your door. I have nothing left to wait for."

He took his hand out of his coat.

He had melted forty pieces of his mother's silver in the autumn.

He had kept one thing.

A thin gold ring, worn flat on one side from fifty years on her hand.

"Isaline Ostrevant," he said. "Marry me."

The court fell silent, and he could hear the snow.

She came down the one step between them.

She took his face in both her cold hands.

"Yes," she said. "Get up. You'll freeze to the stone."

"Say it again."

"Yes, Casimir."

He stood up and put the ring on her finger. It fitted.

Somebody at the top of the steps began to clap.

It was the countess. It was always the countess.

The last fever house in the high villages opened its door on the first day of the thaw.

A boy of six walked out of it on his own two legs and asked his mother for bread.

Isaline stood in the mud of the lane with her sleeves rolled up and vinegar on her hands, and watched him go past.

In every village under the pass, the pots by the hearths had smelled of sour wine and bark for three weeks.

Nobody in them had died since the ninth day.

That evening Casimir took her up to the north wing of Greyhold.

He had told her nothing.

He had made his steward and every mason in the march swear not to tell her either.

It had been his mother's wing.

When she died, his father shut it, and Casimir had never opened it again. The roof leaked. The chimneys had fallen in.

On midwinter night, after the king's feast, he had sat up in his cold townhouse and written to his steward.

Because he had danced with her through the twelve bells and felt her count every one of them against his shoulder.

He hadn't known what she'd seen at midnight.

He had known she expected to lose him.

And he had known that if she ever came north, he wanted her to find something that had been waiting for her.

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