By the time she finally slept, one thought had settled into clarity:
Lucien Vhalor was not the villain the kingdom had made him. But he was not safe either. And whatever he was, she would need to understand it before the Trials forced her close enough to find out the hard way.
Seven
The Hall of Selection
They came for the brides before dawn.
Not Linet this time. Senior attendants in palace blue, moving through the corridor with keys and quiet authority, opening doors one by one without knocking. Sabine woke to lamplight and a woman’s voice saying her name once, flat and certain, before withdrawing to let her rise.
No choice in the timing. No private preparation allowed.
She dressed in the dark gown she had worn yesterday only long enough to cross the threshold. In the corridor, other brides emerged in similar states of partial readiness, hair unpinned, faces bare, the veneer of court polish stripped away before it could be applied. An attendant gestured them forward. Another fell into step behind. The procession moved toward the preparation chambers in enforced silence.
The chambers stood three floors below the bride wing, accessed through a servants’ passage Sabine had not seen before. Warm air met them first. Then steam. Then the scent ofrose oil, linen starch, and something sharper underneath, ritual incense or temple preparation, she could not tell which.
Inside, the room had been arranged with the impersonal precision of ceremony that had swallowed women before and would again.
Long copper tubs filled with steaming water. Dressing screens arranged in a row. Tables laid with ivory silk, white ribbons, small glass vials of scented oil. Attendants waiting in matched dark dresses with their hair bound back and their hands already reaching.
Halvine stood near the far wall, observing.
She did not speak. She simply watched as the brides were guided, one by one, behind the screens.
Sabine’s attendant was older, efficient, and silent. She gestured once toward the screen. Sabine stepped behind it and began unlacing her gown.
The woman took it without comment and replaced it with a thin robe. “Into the water.”
Sabine lowered herself into the nearest tub. The heat struck hard enough to steal breath for a moment, then settled into her skin. The attendant poured rose-scented water over her hair, worked soap through it with quick impersonal hands, rinsed, and gestured for her to stand.
No modesty. No privacy. The robe had been removed. Another attendant dried her with warmed linen, then guided her to a low stool where a third woman combed her hair with steady strokes that pulled at her scalp until tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.
She heard Brinna’s voice from behind another screen, thin and apologetic. “I can do it myself—”
“Sit still.”
The same process repeated in variations across the room. Water. soap. oil rubbed into skin until it gleamed faintly in thelamplight. Hair dressed with no ornament, no personal style, only uniformity. When the attendant gestured Sabine toward the dressing table, she found the ivory gown already laid out.
Plain silk. High neck. Long sleeves. No house color. No embroidery. No jewels. Nothing that would let the galleries distinguish Corvyr from Vale, Marrow from Rennic, old blood from desperate.
The message was clear: the crown would decide what each of them was worth. Blood alone no longer mattered.
Sabine stepped into the gown and stood still while it was laced at her back. The silk sat against her skin like cold water, beautiful and unforgiving. When the attendant tied the final ribbon and stepped away, Sabine looked down at herself and saw a woman she barely recognized.
Stripped. Prepared. Rendered into ceremony.
Around her, the other brides emerged from behind their screens in identical transformation. Pale figures in ivory silk, differentiated only by height, bearing, and the things no gown could erase, beauty, fear.
Yselle appeared near the center of the room and somehow made the plainness look like command. Her posture alone announced that uniformity could not reduce her. Tavi’s shoulders stayed stiff, her jaw set, ivory silk constraining rather than softening. Brinna looked younger in the pale gown, fragile enough that one of the attendants checked the laces twice as if afraid she might simply vanish inside the fabric.
Halvine moved to the center of the room.
“You will proceed in silence,” she said. “You will walk in the order assigned. You will enter the Hall with composure. The galleries are watching. The court is watching. The crown is watching. You will give them nothing but dignity.”
She paused, gaze sweeping the room.
“What happens in the Hall of Selection is witnessed by kingdom and temple alike. Once you enter, there is no retreat. The ceremony proceeds until the crown’s chosen have been named. Remember what you are here to be.”
