Chapter 1937: The Grand Ceremony

Kaelira’s workshop stood behind the main house, in the new shadow of the trunk, and the forge inside it was already lit when Quinlan came through the door.

He had guessed it would be. The shy elf fled to her anvil the way other people fled to bed, and the house behind him was full of screaming brides.

She stood at the bench with her sleeves rolled past the elbow and her dark blue bob tied back, laying out stock in a row.

Pale gold, then silver, then a coil of mithril drawing-wire beside a rod of orichalcum. At the end of the row sat a raw adamantite core the size of her fist, drinking the forge-light and giving nothing back.

The deep metals had come up from the mountain at his word. Brokk, First Hammer of the royal smithy, had emptied the crown’s rack onto an elf’s bench.

Kaelira did not look up. "How many?"

Quinlan grinned.

"Let’s make twelve."

The Runeweaver Titan’s hands stopped on the adamantite core.

She counted under her breath, lips moving, one finger tapping the bench for each name.

She reached ten, then added Nyxara without hesitation, and that was eleven. Her hand stopped over the twelfth with nothing left to put under it, and she raised her violet eyes to him.

"Black Fang?"

He only smiled at her.

"Gotta be prepared."

"..." Kaelira looked at him a beat longer, then picked up her tongs. "Twelve," she said, and left it there.

That was the last quiet thing either of them said for two hours.

"Serika’s cannot be gold," she told him, already heating the first bar. "Gold softens at her hands. She’ll melt it off her own finger the first time she throws a punch. Adamantite is our best bet."

"And Blossom’s?"

"Has to survive lightning. Mithril, with a conductive channel through the core so the current has somewhere to go." She turned the bar in the coals. "Vex’s needs a groove for a curse. If I don’t give her one, she’ll carve it herself and ruin everything."

She called metals off the rack and reasons off the top of her head. The shy elf who said yes to doorframes was nowhere in that workshop.

All twelve rings for her best friends had to be perfect.

Ayame’s band would carry a water-line that ran the circumference without a seam. Aurora’s would be plain silver, the smith said, because Aurora would want to be able to read the script in it. Jasmine’s would be gold, the real kind, and Kaelira would cut the seal herself.

*Tang. Tang. Tang.*

His part came last, as it always did.

She did the shaping, the cutting. He came in behind her with the mana and lit what she had made.

Twelve times a script only the two of them had ever written would wake in the metal and settle.

Sometime after the fourth ring, watching her bent over the bench with her ears pinned back in concentration, Quinlan said what he had been thinking since the door.

"You know it’s your wedding too. I can do this myself."

"Absolutely not."

"What if I ask for help? Brokk, Rykar, or-"

"No. I want to do it."

"I know, but I’d feel bad if you spent this time working for others. Are you sure this is okay?"

The smith set both hands flat on the bench and looked at them instead of him.

"...They’re my family too."

Her palm settled on the cooling adamantite of Serika’s ring.

"It makes me happy to do this for them. With every hammer strike, I can imagine their joy as you present them their rings."

She was spending the one day she had on them and calling it a gift to herself.

"I understand."

He kissed the top of her head, once, before she picked up her tongs.

"Also," Kaelira said to the anvil, in a voice about half its usual size, "I’m ready."

"Oh?"

"For tomorrow. I’m ready." She turned a bar in the coals that did not need turning. "I’ve been ready."

She crossed to the far wall of the workshop before he could ask what that meant, reached up to a rune-stud set into the stone at head height, and pressed it with her thumb.

The wall opened.

It slid back without a sound, and behind it, under lamps that lit themselves, stood a row of dress forms.

Every one of them wore the same dress.

Or the same dress trying to happen. White silk on every form, cut close through the waist, no two alike. The first had sleeves, the fourth had none, the seventh had lost its train, and the ninth had grown it back.

Each form carried a paper tag in Kaelira’s handwriting, a number and the word "prototype." The highest number on the wall was fourteen.

She had been sewing her own wedding dress in secret, one attempt at a time.

"Kaelira, how long have these been-"

"No questions."

"Fourteen. You’ve made fourteen of-"

"No questions!" Her face had gone pink, and she quickly closed the door, hiding the evidence away.

Quinlan’s amused laughter lasted for long enough to make her pout three times in a row.

...

By noon the next day, Quinlan Elysiar had less than an hour left on his daughter’s blessing, and it felt as though the entire continent was standing in his square.

Miri Town had been built as a skeleton, Jasmine liked to say, a frame for a nation to grow into.

In a night and a day the dwarves had put a hall on her square that would have shamed a cathedral.

But they had given it no roof, for Rosie’s canopy was the roof. It stood over the whole town, miles up, and where the square lay beneath it the leaves had turned white for the occasion, so that noon came down through them soft as lamplight.

The four races of Iskaris filled the square to its edges and spilled down every street that fed it.

Farmers from the Program in their festival best. Dwarves down from the mountain with their beards oiled and braided.

Elves in white from Elysaria, and along the eastern side a wedge of beastkin with cubs on their shoulders, the four great lords standing at the front of it.

"Is it true he’s marrying all of them?!"

"Every one, my cousin’s cousin said. At the same time."

"Can you even do that?"

"He conquered the continent. He can do whatever the fuck he wants."

The dwarves had built the front rows a step higher than the rest, and the powers of the continent stood there in a line.

Queen Felicity of Vraven stood first, fourteen and radiant with the importance of it, her father the retired king one step behind her.

Brokk of the royal smithy, beside her in the same formal coat as before, was already sweating in it.

Near the back, dressed for the occasion and standing very straight, was Kaede Fujimori, who had come down from Silverwind with Elder Chizuru at her side.

And in a row of their own, holding papers, sat the heads of the Vesper Consortium.

The old Mediator sat in the middle of them with a folded license on his knee, beaming into his beard. Maelstrom, the Consortium’s general, sat at the end of the row looking like he was attending the funeral of his old life.

It was a funeral, in a way.

The Consortium had bled beside the Villain’s armies through the war, and Quinlan had thanked them the only way a state could thank a syndicate: he made them official. Recognized, licensed, employed, and paid out of the treasury of the very nation they used to rob.

The price was every trade the Consortium had been built on. No more narcotics, no more slaves, no more ferrying whatever paid through whichever border the crown was not watching.

What they got in exchange was the job they had trained for, seen from the other side. Nobody on Iskaris knew better how a man hid money from a state, moved goods past a checkpoint, or bought a magistrate, because nobody on Iskaris had done more of it.

The Obsidian Circle, the Consortium’s heads, were now the best hounds an empire could ask for, and the Mediator looked delighted to be one. He had come away from Quinlan with a snippet of other news: soon, nobility, the hierarchy one gained at birth, would be ’examined’.

That, together with their new position, meant that they were set up to reap immense rewards while the privileged dogs of the old age sank to irrelevance.

Along the aisle that ran from the hall’s great doors to the altar, Isveth’s shrine maidens stood in two white lines with their hands folded, and Isveth herself stood at the head of them.

Their Holy Son, the First Elf’s own child, was marrying his lovers today.

This was a day all elves would celebrate for the rest of their lives.

Arch Priestess Elisabeth, Dawn Breaker, chosen of the Goddess, stepped up to the altar in white and gold vestments that fell straight as scripture. Dawn-colored light gathered on her right hand like the first sun of the day.

Behind her came Arch Priestess Velara of the New Whisperfield cathedral, then the Goddess’s church in numbers, two full columns of priestesses in white and gold.

The Goddess’s church held the altar because Quinlan had asked it to.

His women knew by now that the Goddess was not the figure in the stories they had been raised on.

But many of them had been little girls once, kneeling at a shrine with their hands folded, wondering whether they would one day have a grand wedding of their own, blessed in white and gold at an altar like this one.

The stakes had changed a hundred times since then, yet the dream had stayed exactly where it was. So the Primordial Villain had gone to her temple and asked for the prim and proper wedding so many of his wives had grown up wanting.

At the altar, the Dawn Breaker raised her lit hand and addressed the square in a voice that was warm and enormous at once.

"People of Iskaris. The temple was asked whether the Goddess would witness this marriage, and the temple carried the question to her altar." She took a deep breath before declaring: "The Goddess answers yes. Let all who stand in this square stand as her witnesses."

The great doors opened.

Quinlan Elysiar came through them with a woman on each arm.

On his right walked Emily, the head maid of his estate, who had run his house since the beginning and was crying before her second step. On his left walked Governor Myrasyn of Elysaria, in the white of her people, with her chin up and her eyes wet.