The cathedral was vast and it was cold, and Flora Caffi stood alone at the altar in the middle of it.
She was the new princess of Pedania. She was meant to be the future empress of the empire. The guests who filled the pews behind her were not impressed by either fact. They looked at her plain face and her plain hands and the way her shoulders shook under the weight of the gown, and they made no particular effort to lower their voices.
She would not last a week, someone said. A month at the very most.
Flora heard every word of it. She kept her eyes forward and thought, quite calmly, that being sent away would be a relief. If they packed her back to Pedania in disgrace, she would at least be alive to be disgraced. It was not the whispering nobles she was afraid of. Her fear was reserved entirely for the man she was about to marry — the murderous tyrant who had built his throne on a mountain of bodies.
She knew what she was to such a man. Nothing. Less than nothing. And knowing it, she made herself a promise there at the altar: she would do anything, endure anything, agree to anything, if it kept her breathing.
The emperor was late.
The nobles began to shift and murmur. Flora's knees trembled beneath the heavy skirts. Near the front, Count Carl fumed openly, saying to the man beside him that this delay was no accident, that it was a calculated insult aimed at every Pedanian in the room.
A cold voice cut across his complaint from the back of the cathedral, and the whole assembly turned.
Emperor Ottol Sionea had arrived.
He came down the aisle without hurrying, and the air seemed to change shape around him. If Pedania wished to cause trouble, he said, then he would simply make them submit again, exactly as he had the first time. He stopped level with Count Carl and asked him, almost pleasantly, whether he doubted that.
The count went white. He retracted his words at once, bowing so low that his forehead nearly touched the pew in front of him.
Ottol reached the altar. He barely glanced at Flora at all. He said that the ceremony would begin now, and the priest began.
The words the priest spoke were about a long and happy life together, and they rang hollow in the enormous stone space. Flora listened to them and thought: I am not a bride. I am a hostage.
Her mind went back, unbidden, to the maids in the palace at Pedania, the ones who had folded her travelling clothes and whispered over her head as though she could not hear. The orphan substitute, they had called her. Sent off to her doom. One of them had wagered she would not survive three days alone with a tyrant emperor.
"Your hand."
She was snapped back to the present. Ottol was waiting, cold and impatient, and she lifted her hand for the ring.
He slid it onto her finger with great care, and his gloved fingers were arranged so that not one of them touched her skin. Flora understood the gesture perfectly. It told her precisely what she was worth to him. Absolutely nothing.
Then, halfway through, the glove caught. For a single second the fearsome Emperor of Nordvein fumbled with a ring like a man who had never done this before. Flora looked up at him, confused, and he set his jaw and finished it.
The priest announced the vow kiss.
Panic seized her so quickly that the words came out before she had decided to say them. She told him he did not have to force himself.
He ignored her completely. He lifted her veil and leaned in, and Flora shut her eyes and braced for the contact.
It never came. He simply pulled back, leaving her untouched. The public display had been enough for him, and Flora was left standing at the altar in stunned silence, veil up, face burning.
Instead of the kiss, Ottol went down on one knee. He took her gloved hand and kissed the back of it, formally, the way a knight might kiss a queen's ring. Then he rose, called for applause from the congregation, and turned to leave.
She watched him go, stunned — and, underneath the astonishment, a little relieved. At least she had not been dealt with on the spot.
Halfway down the aisle, the emperor stopped.
He had caught something. A scent, faint and unfamiliar, drifting from the woman he had just married. He stood absolutely still with his head slightly turned, and for a moment something flickered across his face that looked almost like intrigue. Then he composed himself and walked on out of the cathedral, and left her standing there entirely alone.
In her new chambers, a maid told her to rest and withdrew, and the door closed, and the reality of her wedding night settled over Flora like cold water.
There was a nightgown laid out on the bed. It was very delicate, and it had clearly been chosen by someone who expected it to be seen.
Her mind began to race. The emperor was supposed to visit tonight. She had to make a good impression. She had to be pleasant and quiet and useful, she had to give him no reason at all to reach for a sword.
She put her hand on the bed and stopped. It was extraordinarily soft. She pressed down on it with her palm and marvelled, because she had never in her life slept on anything like it, and this was a luxury so simple that no one in the palace would even think to call it one. She lay down for just a second to savour it.
A noise from the hallway brought her bolt upright, heart hammering, the moment of peace shattered.
An hour passed. Flora, dressed for the night, sat with her hands in her lap and accepted that the emperor was not coming.
It brought a small wave of relief and, riding underneath it, a deep uncertainty. She did not know what it meant. She did not know whether it was better or worse than the alternative.
Looking for anything to occupy herself, she found an ornate box on the table and opened it. Inside lay a delicate handkerchief. She turned it over in her fingers and wondered whether she might give it to him as a gift.
The thought carried her back to the morning of the wedding, when she had confessed her terror to Queen Mila and said, in a small voice, that this marriage felt like a death sentence.
The queen had not softened for a moment. Their kingdom's survival depended on this union, she reminded Flora. She was to hold her head high and behave as the new empress, and she was to fulfil her duty.
Remembering that command, Flora stood up.
She would find Ottol. She would offer him the handkerchief as a wedding present and hope it was an appropriate gesture, and then at least she would have done something.
The door of his study was ajar, and the room beyond it was dark. Flora stepped inside and found chaos. A medicine bottle lay shattered across the floor, glass and liquid spread over the boards.
Ottol appeared out of the darkness, searching desperately for it — under the desk, along the shelves, his movements frantic and unlike anything she had seen from him. He clutched his head with both hands and screamed at her to get out.
Then he looked up, and his eyes glowed a dangerous red, and she saw for the first time the true nature of the thing that lived inside him.
He was not in the room with her at all. He was somewhere else, trapped in a violent hallucination, surrounded by voices calling him a murderer. Darkness poured in at the edges of his sight. Skeletal figures crowded around him, and he clutched at his chest as though something were being pulled out of it.
And then a sweet floral scent cut through the nightmare.
The visions frayed and fell away, and in their place came a memory so peaceful it stopped him where he stood: a red-haired woman in a field, smiling at him.
He whispered a name out of his past, and it brought him back just in time.
He looked up. There was a woman standing in his wrecked study asking, into the dark, whether anyone was there — completely unaware that she had just quieted the whole storm inside him.
Later, a cool night breeze drifted in through the window of Flora's room, and she stood in front of it with her arms folded against the chill.
A pair of arms wrapped around her out of the shadows.
She cried out. The arms did not let go. A face pressed into her hair and stayed there, breathing, and the man behind her seemed to sag with relief.
It was Ottol.
Completely stunned, Flora demanded to know who was holding her. Instead of answering, he turned her around to face him. Her eyes widened in terror as she recognised the emperor, staring back at her with an intense, unreadable gaze.
His hand clamped over her mouth. His grip tightened. And Flora's mind emptied of everything except one single thought — he is going to kill me — and the fear was too much, and the world faded to black.
Just as she went down, Ottol caught her.
He looked at the unconscious woman in his arms, and recognition flickered across his face. This was the princess of Pedania. This was his wife. Without hesitating he scooped her up and carried her inside.
He laid her down on the bed and stood over her with confusion in his eyes, wondering how on earth he could have mistaken her for Pamia — a woman who had been dead for ten years.
He sat down beside her. She whimpered in her sleep, pleading for her life, and her hand came up and caught his shirt and held on to it, and he went very still.
Why, he wondered, would she come to him at all, if she was so clearly terrified of him?
And then, as he hesitated over her, he caught it again. The same alluring fragrance from the wedding. The one that brought him a peace he had no name for.
He found himself leaning closer without meaning to. He caught himself and pulled back sharply, questioning what he thought he was doing. She was afraid of him. He knew that. And still there was this pull.
It had to be the fragrance, he decided. It could not be anything else.
The next morning, sunlight streamed in as a maid drew back the curtains, and Flora woke alone.
She looked around at the unfamiliar, luxurious room and clutched her head, trying to reassemble the night. She remembered going to the emperor's quarters. After that it was a blur.
Perhaps it had been a dream, she thought. A terrible dream.
But she dismissed the idea almost at once, because she could still feel his cold hands at her throat with perfect clarity. And if it had been real — if all of it had been real — then why was she still alive?
Into the middle of her spiralling thoughts came a maid, who greeted her brightly and introduced herself as Vishi.
That was how Flora learned that the emperor himself had carried her back to her room. Vishi gushed about it while she opened the shutters: how gentle he had been, how romantic the whole scene was, how the maids had talked of nothing else since.
Flora was stunned. The most terrifying encounter of her life, and somebody had watched it happen and seen a fairy tale.
She pulled the covers over her head, completely flustered.
So it had not been a dream. The emperor really had carried her.