Finally, I reached the end of the pool. I stepped out and knelt on the waiting cushion as Nadine and Maram’s elder half sister, Galene, came to stand over me.
“Be blessed,” they said, as Galene tipped a small vase of oil over my hair.
Be blessed echoed back from the crowd, reverberating and out of sync. I felt a chill rush up and down my spine. Sometimes it was easy to forget that the Vath were aliens to our world. And the soft, rising murmur, like wind ripping through grass, so different than any wedding celebration I’d ever attended, reminded me. No crying out, no expressions of joy, no singing. Only stately whispers.
Be blessed.
I didn’t think, no matter how much all those attending believed in those words, that it was possible.
A pair of serving girls came forward with a great blue veil of sheer cloth, its edges stitched in the Kushaila style with gold thread. In the Vathek style it would have been white and not so sheer, and as a compromise it was as large as a Vathek veil. The two held it carefully over the gold wreath atop my head and draped it just so, as another serving girl came forward with a pair of gold slippers for me to put on.
I rose to my feet and caught a glimpse of my reflection—of a woman preparing to face a planet that hated her to marry a prince they loved. I loved—we all had loved—stories of clever girls of little means who’d risen high above their rank to marry a prince. Khadija and I had spent hours telling and retelling them to each other, imagining a world where it was possible. I’d imagined—
The dream was over, the story done.
I was grateful for the veil. For the first time in many months, I felt as I had during my first days in the Ziyaana. Not even Tala’s presence beside me carrying the trail of my gown could alleviate the loneliness. The crowd was silent and hushed, though I heard the whir of camera probes and the soft murmur of journalists narrating to their liaisons across the galaxy.
The first words of a Kushaila wedding song rang out over the crowd and at last my tears fell as the whole city seemed to echo in song.
* * *
I didn’t remember the ceremony. I was conscious of the fact that Idris never let go of my hand. That we knelt side by side as the ceremony progressed. That at some point the wreath was drawn from my head and set on a pyre. I knew that I looked up at him and recited Vathek and Kushaila vows and that he repeated them gravely. I knew that I saw the same pain at this final separation in his eyes that I felt in my heart. Neither Vathek nor Kushaila custom demanded a kiss, and for that I was grateful. I could not have endured it.
But at last the applause and cheer of Vathek and Andalaan nobility both pierced my mind, and I looked up as if waking from a dream.
The next I knew, the veil was lifted and at last I could breathe. I was alone with Tala as she touched up the kohl around my eyes and replaced the pins on my shoulders with Kushaila brooches, preparing me for the feast.
She was straightening the folds in my gown when the doors opened. Mathis, King Mathis, stood framed in the doorway, his tall and broad form blocking out the light of the other room. Tala dropped to her knees instantly, and I joined her a little more slowly, as Maram would.
“Your Eminence,” I murmured.
He flicked his hand at Tala, who shot me a quick glance before all but fleeing the room. I couldn’t blame her. There was a malignance to the Vathek king’s presence, as if terror spawned in his wake. I didn’t know if he’d been informed I would be taking Maram’s place, and I would not risk the discovery of a plot that would anger him. Instead, I remained perfectly still, waiting for his leave to rise.
Instead, he came in front of me and slid a gloved hand beneath my chin.
“You are the image of your mother,” he said, his voice low. “Without her softness or her doubt.”
Nothing he said was a threat, and yet I felt the threat of violence in the single movement, in his refusing to give me leave to stand, in the way he spoke of the late queen. And I feared, viscerally, what he would do if he realized that I was not his daughter.
“You will suffer a Kushaila spouse as I suffered a Kushaila spouse in order to do what is necessary,” he said quietly. I felt a spark of rage rise up in me on Maram and Najat’s behalf. If anyone had suffered it had been Najat, whose marriage had robbed her of her life. She’d survived the civil war that predated our conquest, and all the ills and difficulties that came with it. She’d survived the war of conquest, the occupation, the siege of Walili. Her marriage had sapped the life out of her, or so public opinion believed.
How would Maram have reacted to the maligning of her mother, who she—we—so closely resembled? In all likelihood as she had suffered everything from her father. In dignified silence.
“Come along,” he said. I moved as if I were a droid reduced to its base programming. My hand slipped into the crook of his elbow, and his large hand in turn first adjusted my veil so that it fell correctly. I could hear Tala falling in line behind us, straightening out the folds of my gown so that they trailed behind me just so.
The doors to the hall boomed open, and somewhere a herald announced our entrance.
The reception hall was a grand ballroom, with a high glass ceiling, and fortified glass walls all around. This, I knew, was the center of the center of the world. The light refracted off white clouds, so that everything had a pink, orange, and red cast to it. The sun would be entirely gone from this side of the planet soon, and in its place would be a hundred shining orbs of light, and many strung over the ceiling, to mimic the stars.
The king guided me to the center of the room, and I sat demurely on the divan. A moment later his fatherly hands lifted the veil from my face and crown and pinned it to my shoulder.
“Feast,” he said softly, “for tomorrow is a new world.”
3
Up until the ceremony, I’d been surrounded only by women. And during the ceremony itself, I could not focus on anything but Idris—on avoiding his eyes, on trying to make sure he did not see me, realize that it was not Maram who stood across from him. But now, I was aware of all the Vathek and Andalaan men who were present. Those who’d been denied Maram’s hand and access to the throne, and those who mourned the loss of the last heir of the Banu Salih, at last absorbed into the Vathek family structure. By Vathek and Kushaila law, Maram had been absorbed into Idris’s household. But in practice, Idris was more tightly bound than ever to the Vathek throne and their aims. Every now and then I would look out at the crowd feasting and laughing and singing and I would find more than one pair of eyes fixed on me, contemplative and hostile.
It was no wonder Maram didn’t want to attend her own wedding.
Mathis stood behind me with a few other dignitaries and directors. Ambassadors from planets conquered by the Vath, generals in his imperial war, high-level representatives from the galactic senate. Maram’s inheritance of the planet, and therefore Mathis’s hold on it, relied on her marriage to Idris, or so I understood. Here Mathis could survey the work of the last twenty years: his daughter, born of a marriage to a savage he had stomached in the name of the state. The makhzen who, in another life, might have supported her against him now suitably afraid of him and the cost of dissent. Their children firmly in the grip of empire, hostages in all but name, raised in the Ziyaana against their will. The Vathek aristocrats vying for his favor. All the wealth of the worlds laid out at his feet, carousing at his daughter’s wedding.