“Stability,” Cooper said.
“Most unicorn marriages work.”
They had to. Who wanted the shame of having messed up that badly?
Cooper exhaled. “So your Silver Council’s picked someone for you.”
“Yes. Her name is Iris Lightfoot.”
“Do you knowanythingabout her?”
If the Silver Council had selected her to marry a tribute, someone who stayed in the outside world, then they were almost as confident as her as they’d been in him. And he knew what it was like to be their golden boy: in a word, intimidating. In another: confining.
And he knew the kind of person he’d become because of it. When he’d first joined the Marshals, he’d been inflexible, puritanical, and harsh, too obsessed with following the letter of the law to care about the spirit of it. And because of it, he’d almost made the biggest mistake of his life.
The Council thought that he was still that person, and they clearly thought Iris was that kind of person too. Was she?
And if she was, was she as miserable in that role as he had been?
“They’ll send me her picture,” Keith said. “And I know she’s from Purity too. It’s small, so we’ve probably met.”
“But you weren’t friends?”
Keith had to smile at that. “I didn’t really have any. I was incredibly boring.”
Cooper’s mouth twitched, acknowledging that Keith had meant him to smile too, but his voice was perfectly serious as he said, “Well, you have friends now. And we’re all willing to rally behind you if this isn’t something you want to do. Just because you came from somewhere doesn’t mean they own you.”
Even after all this time, Keith still wasn’t used to people caring about him. It especially meant a lot coming from Cooper, considering their history.
He had to clear his throat before he could answer. “Thank you. Really. But ... it’s tradition. Maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe it should change, but for right now, it still means something to them. And that means it means something to me too.”
He’d learned enough about the world to know when to challenge the rules he’d grown up with. He hoped he’d also learned when it was fine to follow them.
“Anyway,” he said, trying to play it light, “she’s probably perfectly nice.”
“I’mperfectly nice,” Cooper pointed out. “You don’t want to marry me.”
That made him grin. “Everything else aside, you’re already married.”
*
Keith didn’t need toleave until the end of the week, and he didn’t see any need to take off early. It’d be nice to soak up a few more days of normalcy.
Relativenormalcy, at least. He knew that giving everyone a heads-up about why he was taking some time off would make things a little weird. He expected confusion, support, and maybe even a side-order of “what the hell are you thinking?”
What he didn’t expect, even though he probably should have, was that almost all of them would make exactly the same joke.
It started when Iz Benoit parked herself on the corner of his desk one day after lunch. She treated him to the kind of offended stare only a dragon could offer.
“I’m a perfectly nice person,” she said.
At this point, Keith had no idea where this was going. “You are,” he agreed.
“I have a good job. I have natural poise. I know how to infuse all kinds of different flavors into lemonade.”
“We all appreciate that. Especially in the summer.”
“Thank you. My point is, you might as well marry me as some random stranger.” She arched her eyebrows at him, like she expected him to immediately concede her point.
