Adrian Silvercrest's Arc

Chapter 5 of 23

Adrian and Aldric worked all morning on the gifts. Adrian walked the meadow behind the cottage and cut blue cornflowers, silver yarrow, and a handful of yellow buttercups until the stems filled both his hands. Aldric sat at the kitchen table with a scrap of red glass and a pair of tweezers and whispered over them for an hour. When he set the finished thing down, it was a flower of red jewels with small blue stones along each petal, hard and bright as a promise. "She'll know something is wrong," Aldric said. "No one brings a woman two gifts on a Tuesday." "Let her know," Adrian said. "I want her to ask." Elara came in from the garden with dirt on her apron. She had not looked at Adrian in four days. She looked at him now because he was standing in the middle of her kitchen with a bouquet, and Aldric was standing beside him with a jeweled flower in his palm. She put down her basket. "What is this." Adrian held out the bouquet. "For you." Aldric held out the jeweled flower. "Also for you. I made it this morning." She did not take either. "Say what you came to say." Adrian set the bouquet on the table. He told her the whole shape of it. The betrothal a stranger had waiting for him. The kiss she had seen in the lane. What he felt for Aldric. What he had come to feel, over two weeks of bread and fence posts, for her. The plan. A wedding in the village's eyes. A marriage of three behind the door. Elara sat down. She picked up the jeweled flower and turned it in the light. Small blue stones caught the sun. "You want me to lie to every person I know," she said. "Yes." "Because you love him." "Yes." "And me." "Yes." She set the flower down. She looked at Aldric. "Do you love me, wizard, or are you agreeing to keep him?" Aldric did not soften it. "I did not love you three days ago. I have watched you feed him and cover for him and not ask a single thing back. I love you now. It is new. It is real." Elara pressed her hands flat on the table. She was quiet a long time. Adrian counted his own breaths. "The village gets a wedding," she said at last. "A prince and a maiden. My mother's dress. The whole show." She looked up. "The three of us marry in this kitchen the night before. No priest. Our own words. If either of you breaks it, I burn the cottage down and go." "Agreed," Adrian said. "Agreed," Aldric said. She picked up the bouquet. Her hand shook. She smiled at him for the first time in four days, and Adrian understood he had a wedding to plan and a stranger's family riding toward him.