Maram stared at me, her eyes blank, her chin propped up on the heel of her hand. She looked as a traumatized child might—she had endured this particular horror before, and today she had shut down and refused to engage.

“She’s right,” she said dully and made a gesture with her hand. The droids retracted their weapons and returned to standing attention. “Get on with it, Nadine.”

I frowned in confusion. It?

“In a week,” Nadine said—was that glee?—and returned to her seat, “Her Highness will be getting married. The wedding is a public affair. You will take her place.”

My eyes widened in horror. Never would I have imagined that I would have to go through her marriage on her behalf.

I had given Idris up after seeing what Nadine would do to my family. Like my connection to the rebels, the cost of our relationship was too high. I loved him—Dihya knew how much I loved him—but there was no world in which we could be together.

“It’s a sacred rite,” I gasped out. “For the Vath and the Kushaila. You cannot mean to have me proxy for you?”

Proxy marriages were an old and antiquated tradition. In the past they were the product of distance and necessity. In some places, parents proxied for their children. But we all of us understood that regardless of who went through the ritual, it was the people on whose behalf we enacted those rituals that were married. And so, though it would be me standing there, Maram and Idris would be the ones who were wed.

She raised an eyebrow, and the Maram I’d known at the beginning of my sojourn in the Ziyaana appeared.

“Yes,” she drawled. “It is entirely reasonable that I should allow Idris, my political shield among your people, to marry my shield, a farmer’s daughter.”

I struggled to not lower my gaze, even as I flushed hot with embarrassment. “Then why?” I whispered.

“Sending a proxy in place is perfectly legal. It will not take away from its sanctity and legitimacy. He will still be married to me.” Her face was now entirely blank, her voice flat. I was in the grip of a panic, my chest tight with anxiety. I did not want to see him again, to watch those feelings rise up, to have a hand in giving him to someone else.

“But—” I started.

“It is public,” Nadine repeated. “And this is why you yet live. If you will shirk your duty, then I will march you to the executioner.”

I almost reached for Maram, almost begged. The intervening weeks had healed the wound of letting him go, of tearing him out of my heart. This—going through the motions of a marriage to him for someone else—would undo it all.