Page 8 of The Consort's Curse
Beside me, Lord Stefan stirred. “Surely you’re joking,” he muttered.
The priest’s smile widened and grew more pained. “You shall be united in the sight of the gods, by the laws of Calatria, and by your own, ah, love…”
The ceremony took only ten minutes. We sipped the sacramental wine, pressed Ennolu’s golden star to our hearts and lips, and joined hands. Lord Stefan’s dwarfed mine, big and strong and with suspiciously rough calluses for a man who didn’t look like he’d ever done a day’s work in his life. His touch jolted through me, all the way down to my toes and up to my tingling scalp. Heat bloomed in my abdomen.
He dropped my hand the moment the priest pronounced the final blessing, possibly because my sweaty palm disgusted him.
Or possibly because every detail of my person disgusted him.
“Your mother regrets her inability to attend the wedding, but we will both expect you to dinner,” the Lord Chancellor said. His smile gleamed through his thick gray beard, a muchmore genuine expression than the priest’s.He’dgotten what he wanted, the bastard. “You will attend—”
“My consort and I will dine with you in three days, as is proper after a wedding,” Lord Stefan cut in. I blinked up at him through the throbbing pink haze that seemed to have descended over my vision. His consort. That meant me. I’d married this man, and now we would…we would…it hadn’t been real before. Oh, gods. But at least he intended for me to be alive in three days, if he’d made dinner plans? I could cling to that optimistic idea. “Thank my mother for her efforts, but regrettably they have been wasted on this occasion.”
His voice couldn’t have been colder and drier, and all of a sudden, his resemblance to his father leapt into sharp relief.
A sharp, angry protest from the Lord Chancellor, and his son’s icy rebuttal, and the priest’s soothing patter, all blended into a hum in my thickened hearing.
A big hand wrapped around my upper arm. I listed sideways, just as nauseated and off-balance as I’d been on board the ship that had brought me here to this stranger who now owned me.
“Come,” Lord Stefan said, and he half-steered, half-dragged me out of the chapel, holding me up effortlessly as my feet caught clumsily on the tiles. Behind us, the Lord Chancellor called out yet again, but I only caught “ungrateful” and “unacceptable” before we were in the hall and his voice faded into the general background noise of the palace.
Lord Stefan opened a discreet side door and pulled me through. His lips were pressed tight and his eyes blazing when I glanced up at him. The rapidity of his walk and the intensity of his expression were entirely at odds with the languid fop who’d entered the chapel, and the contrast confused and frightened me. What game was this man playing?
We emerged into a kind of alley between the side of a building and a high brick wall with flowering trees overhanging it. Bees hummed above me and birds chirped from the other side of the wall. It didn’t seem real after the stuffy chapel full of angry men, and I blinked in the onslaught of sunlight. A shiny black carriage stood waiting, a coachman on the box and a footman leaping to open the door.
I’d have given much to have simply disappeared into whatever pleasant palace garden lay beyond those bricks, donned my old cassock again, and tended the flowers.
Instead, my lordly husband nodded at his servant and hustled me into the carriage.
The door closed, shutting out the bees and the flowers and the breeze, and the carriage jolted into motion, carrying me off to whatever fate Lord Stefan chose to inflict upon me.
Temporarily. I’d find a way out of this, Iwould. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes against a wave of nausea.
Temporarily. I had to believe it.
Chapter Three
Lord Stefan didn’t say a word to me. He released my arm the moment he had me in the carriage, letting me slump into the far corner of the seat while he took his own place beside me. There would’ve been a few inches between us if the luxurious folds of his coat hadn’t filled them, and all that rich silk taffeta brushing against my horrid plain clothing underlined the dreadful inequity of my situation.
Sweat would certainly be visible under my arms and behind my knees at this point. It might even be seeping through along my spine and dampening the plush violet velvet upholstery. My cheeks burned, my fingers twitched, and my breath rasped. Little stinging barbs of magic flickered up and down my limbs. The curse would have me soon.
And then my husband would.
Myhusband.
Who still hadn’t so much as looked at me, gazing straight ahead at his own family crest painted in gilt on the front wall of the carriage as if he’d never seen it before and needed to commit it to memory.
My husband, who could’ve sat for a series of illustrations of the perfect courtier, from the lace spilling out of the cuffs of his coat all the way to the mirror gloss on his heeled shoes, from the sharp strength of his profile to the arrogant set of his shoulders. The air between us grew hot, oppressively heavy…although that might have been my own magic gathering around me, and nothing to do with him.
But my consciousness of his presence only loomed the larger, and I felt smaller and smaller by contrast, shrinking down into a body that couldn’t hold up against the weight of my own magic and its response to this stranger beside me.
The coachman called out to the horses and the carriage rolled to a smooth stop.
Lord Stefan opened the door without waiting for his footman to do it and climbed out as if he couldn’t stand to be next to me for an instant longer than necessary.
For a moment I stared at the open door, weighing my options.
No, I had nothing to gain from making a terrific scene and forcing him to drag me from the carriage.
