She climbed the platform steps and took her place beside him, facing the assembled crowd.
Cléa, perched alongside Roul, with the Zenith and his mate on her other side, had her wide mouth open in astonishment. Hannalinde couldn’t tell if she was horrified or happy. Carlijn, seated in the human front row with her parents, had both hands pressed to her mouth and tears streaming down her cheeks. And the rest of the crowd was fixated on their forms, too. Her entrance had drawn everyone’s attention.
The officiant was a senior keeper, a small, gray-haired man. He spoke the opening words of the mating ceremony as they’d designed it, his voice carrying across the hushed courtyard with clarity. Hannalinde heard them as though from a great distance, her awareness narrowed to the gargoyle beside her and the faint, rhythmic sound of his breathing and hers.
When it came time to say her vows, she realized with shock that she would mean them. She’d written them herself with Cléa’s help, blending the human tradition with what a gargoyle audience would expect, but she hadn’t designed them to betrue.
“I take you as my partner in life,” she said, voice quavering with the realization as she turned to face Rikard. “In all the hours of the day and all the hours of the night. I pledge to guard what is yours as you guard what is mine. To build what we can from what we have. To shelter you from the storms you cannot face alone. To be your comfort and your companion in all things.”
She’d expected the words to feel like another layer of deception, more silk draped over lies. But as she spoke them, thewords found purchase in her heart. She would guard what was his. She would build a life with him. He would have her loyalty, always.
Rikard spoke his vows in the Old Tongue first, the gargoyle language harsh and percussive, each syllable striking the air like a chisel on stone. Then he repeated them in Common, his voice low enough that she had to lean closer to hear.
“I take you as my own. Your safety is my charge. Your burdens are mine to share. When you are cold, I will be your warmth. When you are hunted, I will be your shield. This I swear in the tongues of moths and men, until the fallen gods return.”
She recognized fragments of the heartstone vow in his words, the guardian’s oath repurposed for a personal promise, and the weight of it pressed against her chest. He was swearing to protect her with the same language his kind used to protect all of humanity. He was making her safety his duty.
The moon cast his scarred features in shadow, and the shredded membranes of his wings were silhouetted like stained glass, every tear and hole illuminated. He held out his hand, palm up. It was enormous. Her whole hand would disappear inside it.
She placed her fingers in his palm. His skin was warm and rough, and his claws curled gently over her knuckles without pricking her skin. The keeper pronounced them mated for life, and the courtyard erupted in a sound she’d never heard before: gargoyle voices raised in a guttural, resonant call that vibrated in her chest, layered over human applause.
She stood in the center of it, her hand in his, a gargoyle’s wife.
Chapter 10
Rikard
At the high feast table, Rikard watched her in his peripheral vision, this human woman who was now, by the laws of both their species, his mate. She sat with her back straight and hands in her lap, receiving the steady stream of congratulations from their guests with perfect human manners. The veil was gone, set aside after the ceremony, but her torn dress moved around her like something alive.
She was more interesting than he’d initially thought.
When he agreed to her proposal, he’d filed her away as another desperate human whose problems he’d solved with a practical arrangement, just like every other human who visited his office. He hadn’t bothered to look at her any closer. Why would he? The whole point of their arrangement was keeping their distance. Separate lives, separate hours, separate everything except his family name and the child they’d both parent. She’d said it herself: they need never cross paths.
In a way, this was his first real glimpse of her. What she’d done to her wedding dress suggested a capacity for emotion that didn’t belong in a contract marriage. It suggested she didn’t view him solely as a solution to her problems, as he’d assumed. She saw through his office to the broken gargoyle underneath, and rather than looking away, she’d picked up her shears and joined him.
He suspected she would be a better mother than she believed. A woman who could do that for someone shedidn’tlove would do far more for someone she did.
He would not tell her this. It wasn’t his place, and she’d likely take it as presumption. But he held the thought in reserve, ready to deploy when it became relevant.
Their mating feast was held in the same courtyard where they said their vows, under a canopy of lanterns that the keepers had strung between the Tower and the surrounding buildings. Moths circled the warm glass, their pale wings catching the light in lazy spirals. Though the humans couldn’t hear them, they twittered ceaselessly about the unusual ceremony location, the bride’s ruined gown, and of course, Rikard’s well-known perversions.
Cléa, who’d normally be mortified by such gossip, was capitalizing on the attention. She’d recovered from the shock of the ruined gown and was now telling anyone within earshot that Hannalinde had designed the gown herself, implying that the shredding was part of the original plan rather than thelast-minute act of…rebellion? Compassion? Rikard admired the speed with which his mother rewrote the story for her own purposes.
Roul sat beside her, drinking steadily and jesting with the Zenith and his wife, who sat beside him. He always enjoyed a party and didn’t much care about its purpose, although he seemed to approve of Hannalinde joining their family. The human king and queen rounded out the high table.
The rest of the human guests occupied the lower tables. A contingent of the nobility had boycotted the event due to Hanna’s family name, but their absence was offset by the lords and ladies and wealthy merchant families who had come out of support for Hanna, social pressure, or the simple inability to resist a scandal. Dressed in their finery, they regularly glanced up at the gargoyles perched on the surrounding buildings with expressions that ranged from fascination to barely concealed alarm.
Thankfully, tensions eased when the platters of meat began to circulate. A huge, steaming tray of venison and quail arrived in front of Rikard and Hannalinde. He’d filled her plate and then begun to fill his own, when his mother elbowed him, tilting a horn toward Hannalinde.
“Feed her,” she hissed at him.
He had not planned to carry on the tradition of feeding his mate from his own hand, especially not in front of such a large crowd. It seemed too intimate. But apparently their guests disagreed, because hundreds of eyes were on the high table, waiting for him to do it.
He tore a piece of quail from the bone and, careful to retract his claws, held it out to Hannalinde. She looked at the offered morsel, then at him, a question in her eyes.
“It is our custom to feed our mates,” he explained quietly. “A promise to provide. You don’t have to take it in your mouth, if you’d rather not.”
He expected her to shy away from such a public performance of the fragile trust between them, but she hesitated only a moment longer before leaning forward to accept his offering. The brush of her lips against his fingers was brief, but for some reason it seared into him.
