I stepped into the water, no more than an inch deep. As I walked, Vathek and Andalaan alike flicked sanctified oil toward me.

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.