I should stay until the bitter end, even if I was dead on my feet and often, if I didn’t keep close control of it, visions would enter my head, words would be remembered, and I’d feel my hands shaking or my lips quivering.

So I needed a moment to gather my wits and pull myself together.

A moment to find somewhere private, pull forth my shadow, and find some peace.

On this thought, I ran into something.

“My daughter.”

I turned to what I’d run into and saw my father standing there.

He had not gone up with Mother, then.

Surprising.

“My beautiful Silence,” he murmured, looking at me like a mourner at a funeral staring at the body on the pyre.

I did not have to ask when I became his “beautiful Silence,” something he’d never called me.

I was queen now. Queen to a very powerful, very wealthy, exceptionally violent and apparently pitiless king.

This made me powerful.

This made me wealthy.

And this made me beautiful to my father.

“Father,” I murmured in reply.

“You need to be abed,” he declared. “How much sleep have you had? But thirty minutes? And this only on the ride back from those appalling pits.”

“I am quite fine,” I lied.

He shook his head. “You cannot be. The air is rife with that dreadful smoke. I’m getting fuzzy-headed just breathing it in. And how on earth can these people not only breathe through it, but also that shocking incense? They can’t possibly think it smells good. It’s heavy and cloying. I’ve been sick to my stomach since I walked up that mountain path to that ‘altar.’ If one can call such an altar. The view was stunning, of course, but my daughter wasn’t wed in a bloody temple. Instead she was wed on a bloody mountain. Do their gods even sanctify such a thing?”

In all I did not have patience for in that moment, my father complaining about all things Firenz was quite suddenly on the top of the list.

“Father—”

“Allow me to find your mother.” He craned his neck to look beyond me, as if she had not escaped all things Firenz at least an hour before. “She’ll take you up to our rooms. Order you some tea. We brought some of your favorite. It will calm you and help you sleep.”

I knew we’d brought my favorite tea, because Tril had packed it.

My father had no idea what my favorite tea was.

And he seemed to be forgetting it was my wedding night and there was a very good likelihood that sleep was not on the agenda. Not for some time.

Or maybe he did not forget.

“And if she hasn’t already, she should talk to you about…your…your…well, your wedding night,” he went on.

Balls and bloody begorrah.

“Father,” I snapped.