12: LIARS
1238 Words
PHEEONA.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I’d been staring at them for twenty minutes and they were completely unbothered by my disapproval.
Today was my wedding day.
Three husbands. All at once. Which was still a sentence my brain was refusing to fully digest, even standing here in a dress that probably cost more than Lunaris made in a good quarter, with maids moving around me like I was something that needed careful handling.
I kind of was, honestly.
Anyssa was watching me from the armchair in the corner with the expression she reserved for situations where she had opinions she was physically restraining herself from voicing.
“Say it,” I told her.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
“I’m thinking that you look extraordinary and that today is going to be fine,” she said. Then, quieter, “And I’m thinking some other things that I’m choosing to keep to myself for your sake.”
“For my sake or for theirs?”
She smiled thinly. “Yours. Theirs wouldn’t survive it.”
I looked back at my hands.
Twelve days ago I’d sat in my father’s throne room and unclenched these same hands and told three kings I accepted their offer. I’d done it for Lunaris. I’d done it because there was no other reasonable choice and I’d known it and I’d made peace with it.
I was still making peace with it.
“Phee.” Anyssa crossed the room and stood in front of me, tipping my chin up the way she had since we were children when she wanted my full attention. “You are an alpha princess of Lunaris. You have never once walked into a room and let it win.”
“I’ve never walked into a room with thousands of people watching me marry three men who told me I was nothing but a hole and a title the night before.”
“No,” she agreed. “But you’re doing it anyway.”
She said it like that was the whole point.
Maybe it was.
The dress was something else entirely.
Ivory and gold, with embroidery so fine it looked painted on rather than stitched, trailing behind me in a way that moved like it had its own intentions. It fit perfectly, which meant someone had my measurements before I’d ever agreed to any of this, which I filed away in the growing folder of things about these men that I chose not to examine too directly.
When the maids finished and stepped back and Anyssa turned me toward the mirror, I stood there and looked at myself for a long moment.
She looked like a queen.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to be her.
But I lifted my chin the way my mother used to when she walked into rooms that were already watching her, and decided that ready or not, she was all I had today.
They were waiting in the antechamber just off the great hall.
I heard them before I saw them, low voices cutting off the moment the door opened. All three turned at once.
I had thought I was prepared.
I wasn’t.
The tunics were deep black threaded through with gold embroidery that caught the light every time they moved, heavy and luxurious in the way that announced consequence without trying. They wore them the way they wore everything, like the garments had made a sensible decision by choosing them.
Crowen looked immovable. Nashyn looked unreasonably, almost offensively good. And Vizellan—
Vizellan had cut his hair.
The silver fall of it was gone, cropped close to his head, and the effect was immediate and unfair. It sharpened everything — his jaw, his cheekbones, those pale eyes that now landed with nothing to soften them. He looked devastating in a way that the longer hair had apparently been holding back, which should not have been possible but was.
All three of them looked at me and said nothing.
Then Vizellan crossed the room.
He stopped in front of me, looked at my face with that careful attention of his, and held out his elbow.
“Smile,” he said quietly. Low enough that it didn’t carry. “And take my arm.”
I looked at him.
“Wife,” he added.
I put my hand through his elbow, found my composure, and let him lead me to the doors.
Nothing could have prepared me for the hall.
The crowd was enormous. Thousands of bodies filling tiered seating that rose on both sides of the aisle, and when the doors opened and the sound hit me — the collective shift of thousands of people turning toward the entrance at once — my knees had a quiet private conversation about the situation.
I kept walking.
Vizellan’s arm was steady. Nashyn fell into step at my other side. Crowen behind us. Together we moved down an aisle that felt three times longer than it had when it was empty, under the eyes of more people than I had ever stood in front of in my life.
The ceremony was grand in the way things were grand when people with limitless resources decided something mattered.
Vows in the old tongue that my tutors had drilled into me and that I delivered without my voice breaking once, which I was quietly proud of. Words spoken before officiants in robes older than most kingdoms. And then three rings, one from each of them, each different, each clearly chosen rather than matched.
When Crowen held my hand to place his, his eyes met mine and held them, and I couldn’t read a single thing in them.
By the time the final rites were pronounced, I was someone’s wife.
Three somebodies.
I felt faintly like I might pass out and absolutely could not, so I didn’t.
Crowen stepped forward to address the hall.
I stood beside Nashyn and half listened, still coming down from the ceremony itself, still feeling the unfamiliar weight of three rings on my finger and the echo of vows in my throat.
He spoke about Ashenbane. Its reach. Its future. The assembled thousands listened with the attention of people who understood that when a Torvain spoke, you paid attention.
And then—
“We welcome into our sovereign territories the kingdom of Shadowfang.”
The crowd murmured. I blinked. Kept my expression where it was.
“And the kingdom of Lunaris.”
Everything stopped.
“Alpha Aldric Winchester and his son, the ruling beta, will be stepping down from their governance. Ashenbane will be assuming direct rule.”
I heard it.
Every word of it.
And then I heard it again, inside my own head, the way your mind replays something it refuses to accept the first time around.
My father.
My brother.
Stepping down.
The applause started somewhere to my left.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I was standing in the middle of thousands of people with three rings on my finger and his name attached to mine and my father’s throne being stripped from him in the same breath Crowen used to thank the assembled realm for bearing witness.
I turned and looked at Crowen.
He was already looking at me.
Of course he was.
The applause grew. Around me, thousands of people celebrated.
And my father, who I had sold myself to protect, had just lost everything anyway.
- Writer
