Princess Melodia's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Princess Melodia counted the guards along the east wall and found three fewer than yesterday. The crown had thinned her watch on purpose. Anyone who stood near her now risked the same decree that hung over Garrick — lose your title, lose your land, lose your name. She had asked seven people in the castle to marry them. Seven had bowed and refused. The last one, a chaplain who had baptized her, would not meet her eyes. She found Garrick in the lower courtyard, cutting a slab of pale stone with the flat of his hand. His wings folded tight against his back. He did not look up when she spoke. "No one will do it," she said. "Not one." "Then we go without one," Garrick said. "Tonight. The arch in the clearing." "A wedding needs a witness." "It needs you. It needs me. The rest is paper." They left through the servants' gate after the bells. Melodia kept her hood up and her mouth shut, because her voice carried farther than she wanted. The court called her mad for choosing him. The court was also afraid of what she could do when she sang, and fear was the only reason the guards had not already dragged her back inside. She used that fear now, humming a low note under her breath as they passed the last patrol. The men turned their heads away like she had slapped them. The clearing lay past the tree line. The stone arch stood where Garrick had built it, moss dripping from its beams, paper lamps lit and swaying. Beside it sat a fountain he had carved from the same quarry, water running clear over lotus blooms. No priest waited under the arch. No family. No signature but the ones they would give each other. Garrick cupped water from the fountain and drank. He passed the next handful to Melodia and she drank too. The water tasted like cold iron. "I take you," he said. "Nothing takes you back." She said her own vow plain, without singing it, because she wanted him to hear the woman and not the magic. They pressed their palms together over the fountain's rim. That was the wedding. It took less than a minute. Then Garrick knelt on the grass and set his hands on the earth. Stone rose under his palms — a woman's shape, her face, her crown, her open hands. He worked without speaking for an hour while she watched. When he stood back, the statue wept small bright drops that caught the lamplight and did not stop. "A marker," he said. "So the crown knows where to find us." Melodia looked at the effigy of herself, still crying, and understood what he had just done. He had not hidden the marriage. He had signed it in stone, in the open, where any rider from the castle would see it by morning.