Page 30 of The Queen's Shadow

Cassandra wore a dress dripping with white lace and pale blue trim, with a train so long she was sure she would trip on it. One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting had spent half the morning doing Cassandra’s thick hair in an elaborate coif, festooned with pearls and sapphires.

“You’ll be fine,” the queen said as they waited not far from the throne room for the ceremony to begin. The queen was dressed in an elegant gown of gold and pearl, her hair piled high on her head, the crown of Rendra sitting regally on top. She had no ridiculous train to contend with.

“What if someone attacks me?” Cassandra said petulantly. “How am I supposed to get to my daggers without ripping the whole thing apart?”

The queen’s brow rose. “Please don’t tell me you have a dagger on you on your wedding day.”

“Daggers,” she couldn’t help correcting.

The queen gave her a look, but there was a hint of amusement in her gaze. “No one is going to attack you,” she said. “We’ve spent weeks making sure of that.”

“You never know,” Cassandra muttered. “Two sovereigns in one place and all that.”

After much cajoling, the Mediran king had deigned to attend a wedding he had greatly desired not to take place in Rendra. Cassandra thought he would have accepted an unreasonably remote, snow-laden island in the southern sea beyond the Alliance lands just on principle. There had been a long back and forth between the two nations about the wedding arrangements and the exact terms of the alliance, which had tired Cassandra to no end. The queen had been patient—incredibly patient—with a man who clearly couldn’t see beyond his own bulging nose. Now, more than ever, she understood Arphaxad’s exasperation with the king and his position.

“We will come to an agreement,” the queen had told Cassandra after a particularly irritating exchange. “This should have happened a long time ago. Our peninsula needs this.”

Cassandra snorted. “You are a much kinder person than I am.”

“I don’t know about that. I just hide it better.” Her mouth quirked. “Besides, you want to marry Arphaxad, if the way you moon around after him is any indication.”

“I do not moon,” Cassandra protested weakly. The queen was right about one thing: she very much did want to marry Arphaxad. And she might have been a bit of a puddle lately whenever he was around. She was also becoming increasingly convinced that they should just drop the whole ridiculous elaborate wedding and elope somewhere where no one would bother them.

The bright sound of horns and stringed instruments threaded through the doorway, indicating the start of the procession. Cassandra’s body thrummed with a mix of fear and excitement. It was happening. She was getting married.

As soon as the doors opened, her gaze snapped to Arphaxad standing at the head of the throne room, and the rest of the pageantry and fanfare faded away. He was dressed in a fitted green tunic trimmed with red and gold. His boots were black and rose almost to his knee. She thought she could detect the outline of a dagger in each one. His eyes widened when he saw her, and she couldn’t help the giddy grin that slid across her face.

The walk toward the throne at the end of the room felt like an eternity. She paced slowly beside her sister, trying not to trip on her train, while music played and a full gallery of elaborately dressed courtiers and ministers looked on.

“The wedding is going to have to be as extravagant as possible,” Arphaxad had said with a grimace a few weeks before. “We’re making a statement that this is not an alliance that is to be trifled with. People are going to expect pomp and circumstance.”

Cassandra had made a face. She knew he was right. It wasn’t every day that the Rendran queen’s sister married the Mediran king’s nephew.

The news that the queen’s shadow was the old king’s daughter had come as a shock to most of Rendra. But the queen’s dogged insistence of Cassandra’s rights as the king’s daughter and Arphaxad’s sharp comments whenever someone questioned her position or said something snide had quickly silenced the naysayers. At least in her presence. She had spent years at court building her reputation as the queen’s shadow. She had enough clout for most people to accept her, if not with enthusiasm, at least with hopeful skepticism.

The rest of the ceremony passed in a blur. She stood side by side with Arphaxad, her body burgeoning with tension, as they repeated the ancient vows that had been part of the royal marriage ceremony for generations.

And then it was over, and they were recessing arm in arm out of the throne room, past the dark, pouting face of the Mediran king and the polite smiles of Arphaxad’s parents—who had turned out to be reserved but kind—and the sly grin of his younger brother, and out into the glittering sunlight in the courtyard beneath a brilliant blue sky. Out beyond the palace, Cassandra could make out the snow-capped peaks of the Malathi pass. Her heart squeezed. If it hadn’t been for the rogue Inetians and the enclave, she wouldn’t be here today, standing hand in hand with Arphaxad Ilin Serra, the entire world before them.

A gilded carriage pulled by eight white horses—exactly as Cassandra had once imagined a fitting conveyance for a queen—was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps, and Cassandra almost rolled her eyes at the extravagance. She allowed Arphaxad to help her in, dragging that ridiculous train in behind her so that it pooled like a lake of white around her feet. Arphaxad climbed in behind her and shut the door firmly behind them. The carriage had hardly started moving when he enthusiastically pulled her against him and kissed her.

A giggle bubbled up from her belly, and she pulled away briefly to grin at him. “Wasting no time, I see.”

“Now that we’re married, absolutely not,” he said.

“Don’t we have a party to attend after this?”

He groaned. “I was hoping we could skip it.” He trailed a few kisses along her jaw, his fingers tightening at her waist. And now she really, really wanted to skip it too.

“Wasn’t it you who declared our wedding was to be as extravagant as possible?” she said with a grin. “An absolute spectacle. For the sake of the alliance.”

“You can be insufferable, you know,” he said against her neck. She could hear the smile in his voice.

“I don’t think I’m alone in that,” she whispered.

She kissed him the rest of the way to the gala and didn’t care that her hair had fallen down.

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