The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: The Roof at Dawn

"Is that a threat?" I said.

My voice wobbled all over the place.

"It's a proposal," he said. "The log's full."

I held out my left hand.

It was shaking.

He slid the stone ring on, and it was cool, and then it was warm.

"Yes," I said. "Up here. With everybody. And there have to be buns."

"There were always going to be buns."

He stood up, and I kissed him against the parapet with my laughing stone face watching over his shoulder, until the bells under us struck two.

We picked the third Saturday in October.

We picked dawn, because I'd be coming off my shift, and because Orrin said the light on the harbor at sunrise was the only thing in Greyport worth getting married in front of.

I baked my own wedding buns.

Wilda tried to stop me.

"It's bad luck," she said.

"You made that up."

"I'm making it up now. Give me the dough."

In the end we both baked them, all night, side by side, the way we'd done for four years.

The three brides came at three and knotted the ones for the guests, badly.

At four, I made one tray of something else.

Little round rolls with a cross cut in the top.

My father's rolls, from the bakery with the green awning.

I hadn't made them since the funeral.

Wilda watched me shape them and didn't say a word.

She just put her floury hand on my back for a second, between my shoulder blades, and left it there.

At half past five, everybody climbed.

Eleven flights of scaffold stairs behind the north tower, in the dark, with lanterns.

The old carver complained on every landing.

The crossing guard carried the coffee urn on her back.

The bear-kin woman carried the cake, a new one, shaped like a gargoyle this time, and it didn't collapse.

The Registrar came up last, in his cardigan, with the heron-kin board chairman holding his elbow on every step.

He'd asked to do it.

He said he wanted, once in his life, to stamp something that made everybody happy.

I wore a white dress Wilda had found in a shop by the ferry, and the red scarf, and my hair down.

Wilda walked me along the lead walkway between the gargoyles.

She held my arm tight enough to bruise.

"If he ever makes you sleep on a floor," she whispered, "I'll put him in the walk-in."

"He knows."

"I told him," she said. "Twice."

Orrin was waiting at the end, beside my stone face.

He'd worn the tie.

His wings were open all the way, and the sky behind them was going from black to gray to pink.

Everybody we loved stood along the parapet with the city under them.

The carvers in clean shirts.

The three brides, free, holding hands.

Wilda, already crying and swearing about it.

The Registrar opened his little book.

"Usually I read a lot of things here," he said. "Section this, subsection that. I'm not going to."

He looked at Orrin.

"Do you want her?"

"Yes," said Orrin.

He looked at me.

"Do you want him?"

"Yes," I said.

"Out loud, in front of witnesses, in your right minds," said the Registrar. "Good. That's the whole law now. Somebody kiss somebody."

Orrin bent his head.

I went up on my toes.

The sun came up over the harbor and hit the whole north parapet gold, every gargoyle, every face, my laughing one.

He kissed me in it.

The brides threw flour instead of rice.

It went everywhere.

It went in the Registrar's eyebrows, and he didn't even mind.

We ate buns on the roof until nine.

My father's rolls went first.

At noon, the carvers carried the long table up the hill and set it in the stoneyard, and we ate again, and nobody went home.

Wilda gave a speech that was mostly swearing.

The old carver gave one that was mostly about pigeons, and Orrin put his face in his hands.

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