Six: Wedding Bells!!!!!!

The ring of water around the mound was so clear it read at first as a flaw in the grass. It looked like a seam, a place where the garden had been cut and set back down half an inch out of true. It made no sound. Whatever fed it fed it from underneath, and the surface held the whole sky without a ripple, seven white bridges laid across it in a circle, none of them going anywhere yet.

Andy came up the inside of the slope alone. The grass gave under his shoes the way ground gives when it has been watered that morning, and the smell coming off it was green and wet and completely ordinary, which was somehow the strangest thing in the garden.

The suit had opinions about the walk. It was new, and built for him rather than bought, and it did what new tailoring does on a man who lives in soft clothes: it held his shoulders half an inch further back than he would have put them himself. The collar sat high. He had been in it forty minutes and had already caught himself standing straighter twice without deciding to.

Then he was at the top, under the arbor, standing in the spot that had been marked out for him.

He stopped. There was a rose bush beside him.

He had walked this part of the Inner Gardens more times than he could count. He had never seen it before. It stood chest-high, thick at the base with old grey wood, loose and new at the top, pruned by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. Every bloom on it was blue.

Andy reached out and tipped one of them toward him with a fingertip.

The jacket pulled across his chest as he leaned in, and something inside the breast pocket gave a small dry crinkle, once, the sound paper makes when it is folded and then pressed.

He did not look down. He did not hear it, in any way that counted, because by then he was looking at the color. Not the flat chemical blue of a florist’s dye job, and not the violet people call blue when they are being generous. It was the blue of Laura’s eyes.

The Garden of Glass had ended at a footbridge in the rain.

It had started in the evening and it had finished at dawn, and Andy had spent every hour in between in a throne he was not allowed to leave. One night. Twelve women went in one at a time and came out having stood inside the worst hour of somebody else’s life, repeatedly. Then they stood inside the worst of his, and he watched all of it happen and could not put a hand out to any of them. Arabella had called it a challenge. It had been a challenge the way a river is a lot of water.

Near the end of the dark, the rain. A footbridge over Willow Run outside Warrenville, and all of them lined up on the bank to watch a thirteen-year-old girl go under.

He had gone in after her.

Arabella had said that the past could not be changed. She had said it to him three separate times, in three separate rooms, in the flat voice she kept for things she did not intend to argue about. Andy had heard her every time. He had understood her every time. When the current took Laura he put both hands on the rail and went over it anyway.

What he remembered was not the cold, which he knew had been unbearable, and not the swimming, which he did not remember at all. He remembered the weight of her once he had her, and how little of it there was. He remembered his own mouth on hers on the bank. He remembered counting, and the two flat seconds after the last breath when nothing happened and the world was over. Then a cough. Then a small hard body twisting under his hands, and her eyes coming open.

Blue. Even then. Even full of river.

The next thing after that, as memory files things, was a beach a long way from Illinois. A woman in his arms who was twenty-nine years old, who had been dead for sixteen years, unconscious, and breathing against his neck.

He had not understood any of it. He had not asked, either, because he had been afraid that asking would undo it.

Arabella had come to them on the second morning. She had come barefoot, in a plain robe, with her hair down and her face bare, and by then he had known her long enough to read the state of her as a statement in itself. She stood there—like a friend, not like a Host—and she told them.

“When a person dies, the soul can be earmarked by the Producers—set aside for use, like a page bookmarked for later,” she had said. “If it isn’t, the soul does what souls do; it drifts, finds its way beyond the veil. The only tether left to the living world is the memory in those who remain. The world is webbed with these threads, but memory is fragile. Over time, even the strongest thread fades. Eventually, nothing remains but a wisp—sometimes not even that.”

Laura had not said anything. He remembered that too. The particular quality of her silence, and her hand very still in his.

“Your soul, Laura, was anchored here—not by the will of the Producers, but by the grief of those who loved you. Mostly, though, it was Andy. That kind of grief is rare. Sixteen years is a long time for a soul to linger. Most memories fade in a fraction of that.”

He remembered her next words.

“He never let you go. That’s what kept you here. Every year, on your birthday, he brought you back—song by song, page by page, memory by memory. He refused to let the thread dissolve. Instead, he wove more of you with every passing year. Even when everyone else forgot, or moved on, or numbed themselves with habit, Andy kept adding to the tapestry. You became more than a memory. You became a possibility.”

The red notebook was still in a drawer upstairs. Red cover, corners gone soft, eighteen songs in it and a date at the top of each one. He had played nearly every one of them alone in a room, on her birthday, year after year, to a girl who had been in the ground since he was thirteen. He had felt stupid about it every single time. He had done it anyway.

It turned out that had been the load-bearing wall. Not the seeds, not the feather. That.

Then the four things. She had counted them off on her fingers, slowly, as you recite a recipe to somebody who is going to have to make it themselves one day.

“The pomegranate seeds of Persephone, crushed to unmoor you from the land of the dead. The edict of Ereshkigal, to grant you passage back. A feather from Ma’at, to ensure you returned true to yourself. And finally, a rose from the Inner Garden, which is the only thing capable of holding together all the grief and memory that kept you alive.”

“A rose?” Andy had asked.

Arabella had nodded. “There is a rose that grows both in this place and in the world you left. It flourished on your grave, tended by your friends and family, but also here, in the Inner Garden of The HH. The same rose, two places at once. It only bloomed now, after sixteen years of work. It’s woven from the memories of everyone who mourned you—every parent, every classmate, every person who wished you could have stayed. But most of all, it was shaped by Andy. Each time he grieved, the rose grew stronger. Each time he remembered, another petal formed.”

The roses under Andy’s hand were the siblings of that rose.

He looked at the one he was holding, at the fine lighter veining where the blue ran almost to white at the edge of the petal, and he let it tip gently back into place. The bush did not move. It sat there in the grass as if it had been growing on that spot for thirty years and the garden had simply declined to mention it.

Another of the four things Arabella had counted off had a name in it, and the name was coming for Laura today.

Nobody knew when. They had all stopped saying that part out loud sometime yesterday, because saying it added nothing—not the hour, not the shape of it, not whether it would come through the hedges or up out of the water or out of nowhere at all. Sometime today. The whole day stood open like a door nobody could find the latch for.

Andy reached for Laura.

He never had to do anything to reach for her. It was not like picking up a phone, but like checking that his own hand was still where he had left it, and it had worked that way since he was a baby and neither of them had known there was a word for it. He’d have given almost anything to keep that. To have one thing left that worked the way it always had.

He got her place. She was behind him and below, past the far hedge, out of everybody’s sight, exactly where she was meant to be, and the bond gave her to him down to the inch.

He got her fear. It came through low and steady and enormous, as if he were standing with his palm flat against a wall with a machine running behind it.

That was all of it. Since the thinning, that was all the bond carried. Where she was, and how badly she was frightened. He would have traded every other thing he owned for one more kind of information, like it used to carry until two days ago.

He pushed past it anyway, the way you press a bruise to find out whether it is still a bruise. He went looking for anything else in her this morning. Any of it. Whether some part of her was glad. Whether any corner of her was standing in a garden on her wedding day and enjoying it. He got her place again. He got her fear, unchanged, as if he had asked the same question twice and been handed back the same card. But nothing else.

Last night she had fallen asleep against his shoulder and gone to three bodies in her sleep without waking. He had lain in the middle of all of her and listened to three sets of breathing go slow. He had known exactly how happy she was. He had known because she told him, out loud, in words, four separate times.

He should not have needed the words. That was the thing. That was the whole small ugly size of it, on a day this big—the kind of ache that has no one to complain to, because the woman it is about is alive and downhill and about to marry him.

His eyes stung. Andy stood under the arbor with one hand still near the roses and blinked until they cleared, and he could not have said, if anyone had asked, whether it was the bond that had thinned or her.

Andy turned away from the roses and looked out across the water.

Seven bridges. White wood, no rails. Each one was wide enough for three people walking side by side and not an inch wider. Every one of them was empty, for now.

Laura would come to him over one of those. He did not know which. Nobody had told him the order. He had not asked, either, because there had been a whole week of things he could have asked about, and he had spent it on other things.

On the far side of the ring the guests were still settling. He watched them do it without really seeing any of them—the slow shuffle of more than one hundred people finding the chairs they had been put in, a bag going down beside a foot, somebody’s hat coming off and being held in a lap. It was the sound of any wedding anywhere. He let it go on being that for a moment.

Then he counted the bridges.

One. Two. Three, four, five. Six.

Seven.

His throat closed on the last one. He stood there and let it. Seven women were going to walk seven bridges to him today. This was the last stretch of the whole day he would spend up here by himself.

“You’re doing the thing with your jaw.”

Sam came up the last of the slope with the fire brand burning in her right hand and the bundle of reeds pinned under her left arm. She was wearing her tux and walking slower than she needed to. He noticed that.

“I’m not doing anything with my jaw.”

“You’ve been doing it since you got here. It’s very distinguished. Very sea-captain.” She held the brand out to him, upright, the flame standing straight in the still air. “Careful. It’s hot at the neck.”

Andy took it. She was right about the neck; the heat came off it onto his knuckles and stayed there, a thin, insistent line of it, like holding your hand near a stove to test it.

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Don’t thank me, you'll have to give it back. Also, I stole it off Mildred.”

“There’s a whole ceremonial brazier for that.”

“There is, and Mildred is standing next to it being extremely serene about the fact that I took her torch.” She did not go to her mark. She stayed where she was, at his shoulder, half a step behind, and turned to face out over the water with him. She shifted the reeds into the crook of her arm and ran a thumb across their cut tops the way a person counts money they have already counted.

Neither of them said anything for a second. Out on the water, the light moved.

“So,” Sam said. “Big day. Seven weddings, one venue, no refunds—”

“Sam.”

“I had a whole thing about the caterers.”

“I know you did.”

She let it go.

“Whatever comes today,” she said, “I’m ready for it. I want you to hear me say that out loud and not have to guess.”

Andy kept looking at the bridges. “I know you are.”

“Knowing and hearing aren’t the same.” Her eyes stayed out on the water too. “You’ve got about nine people today who’ll spend the whole ceremony doing math in their heads about where everybody’s standing. I’m one of them. That’s the job.”

“And the reeds.”

“And the reeds. Seven reeds, Andy. I’ve counted them four times.” A beat. “You don’t have to be one of the nine. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“I’m going to be one of them anyway.”

“Yeah, well.” She almost laughed. “Aim lower.”

And there it was—the opening she had just handed him, whether she meant to or not. He had been carrying this since before breakfast, sideways, looking for a door. There was not going to be a better one, and there were not going to be many more minutes.

“Sam. If anything splits me off from you all,” he said, “I want you to carry the harem bond.”

She turned. Not her head—all of her, squarely, off the water and onto him, in one movement.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Sam’s face did not do anything clever. “Makes sense. I hope it’s not necessary, and there's always Laura, but if it is, you told me. Done.” She shrugged one shoulder, and the reeds rustled. “For what it’s worth, I’d have been annoyed if you’d asked only Erin.”

She stepped in and got her free arm around him, keeping the reeds and the flame well out to the side. She hugged him the way she had hugged him at twenty-two outside a dorm building, which is to say completely, and slightly too hard for a man holding a lit torch. Andy felt the strength in it. The full unhidden amount of it, his ribs keeping score. He was grateful his Gifts made him sturdier.

She let go and stepped back to her mark, and reached over without looking and flattened down the front of his lapel where she had crushed it.

“For the record,” she said out of the side of her mouth, not looking at him, “if you cry before the third one I’m telling everybody.”

“You’ll be crying before the first one.”

“Obviously. I’m the Best Woman. It’s structural.”

The corner of his mouth came up before he could do anything about it.

Arabella came onto the mound then, and the garden seemed to get quieter around her, the way rooms do. She took her place beside the dais without a word. She had put the Host’s mask back on, the posture and the arrangement and the untouchable calm of her, and this morning on her own terrace Andy had held her while none of it was there at all. He met her eyes across ten feet of grass and nodded once. Arabella inclined her head in return, and that was the entire conversation, and it was enough for both of them.

Nick Reynolds came on behind her and took up his post at the basin, sleeves already turned back. Harper followed him with the box of seven of the rings Genet had given Andy, held in both hands as if it might reconsider, and settled a step behind Andy and Sam, with Laura Black beside her, her wings folded so close to her back they read as a dark cloak. Behind them, at the edge of the ring of water, a small ghostly blue girl in a red ringmaster’s outfit, a puff of smoke instead of legs, tiny cylinder hat tilted on her head, bobbed in the air and grinned broadly and waived at Andy, pointing at the box Harper was carrying. “Rings!” She yelled happily, before bobbing away among the audience.

Andy had no idea what he had just witnessed, but then Liesa came.

She came up the slope alone, and her body made the walk into something else on the way. Every step rolled out of her in a slow figure eight. She had not asked for it, she could not stop it, and she had given up apologizing for it a long time ago. She passed close behind Sam on her way to the front.

“Your hands are shaking,” Liesa said, very low.

“They are not.”

“Is fine. Mine also.” And she took her place a pace ahead of Arabella and Nick, and folded those hands, and was perfectly still.

Candy, Skye, and Katherine came up together and lined out along the edge of the mound. Candy’s wings, blue and black and gold, sat folded and bright against her back, and she was already up on the balls of her feet. Skye stood at Candy’s shoulder. Katherine took the far end and stood the way she always stood, wearing nothing at all, hands loose at her sides, her face entirely unembarrassed.

Out past the water a small stir went through the seated rows, a turning of heads, a few programs coming up as if the light had got suddenly worse. It took about four seconds and then it died. Andy watched it go and thought that the people in those chairs, who had been told nothing at all and given a memory of an ordinary envelope, were handling today better than anyone had any right to expect.

The mound was full now. Andy with the brand. Sam at his side with the reeds. Harper and Laura Black a step behind. Arabella at the dais, Nick beside the basin, Liesa a pace in front of the two of them, and the three at the edge.

The guests went quiet on their own, the way a crowd does when it senses something has already started.

At the far end of one of the white bridges, two figures stepped into the light, a bride and whoever was walking her, too far off for Andy to tell which of the seven she was.

He lifted the burning brand, squared his shoulders, and set his feet under the arbor.

---

Seven bronze lamps stood dark on the dais, in a row, each one no bigger than a teapot and each one polished to the point of being hard to look at. Between them sat the basin, empty and dry. Behind them the water made no sound at all, and neither did the people, which was a stranger thing.

Sam shifted the reeds into the crook of her arm and ran her thumb across their cut tops. Counting them. Again.

Out on the first bridge the two figures came on, and at about the halfway mark they stopped being figures.

It was Myra.

Andy had spent ninety seconds refusing to guess who would be first, and now that it was her he could not think why he had ever expected anyone else. She was in white, the dress simple and close and long, and her two tails were down and still against the back of it. Her ears were up. She was walking with her chin slightly raised, the way she walked everywhere, a faint flush to her cheeks.

When Myra had told her mother what she had done to Laura, she had done it as people stand in front of a judge, braced, waiting to be told the sentence. She had carried it for years without ever truly knowing what it had cost. When she finally did, she had told Laura first, and then she had told her own mother, in one unbroken story, and had not softened a word of it.

Now she was crossing a bridge toward him with her chin up.

Her hand was in her mother’s hand.

Marie Williams had the same bones through the cheek and jaw. Close enough that seeing the two of them in profile at the same angle was a small physical event, the kind of resemblance that answers a question nobody asked out loud. She had dressed plainly and well. Her face was set tight and composed and giving away nothing at all, and that, Andy thought, was an enormous amount of work being done very quietly.

Four rows back on the near side, a woman with Marie’s jaw sat between her husband and her two grown children, with an older couple on the far side of them. All of them were leaning very slightly forward. Andy made himself look away, because he had a job today and it did not include coming apart in front of the audience.

At the halfway point of the bridge, Myra faltered.

It was not a stumble, but a hitch, a quarter-second where her whole body forgot the next step. Andy understood what it was before he had finished seeing it. More than one hundred people were sitting around that water waiting, and all of them were feeling something, and all of it reached her at once and unsorted—anticipation, tenderness, excitement, three or four cases of genuine nerves—with no way for her to tell whose was whose.

Marie did not ask what was wrong. She tightened her grip, leaned her head in, and said something too low to carry.

Andy did not hear a word of it. He saw Myra’s chin come back up. He saw both tails settle against the white of the dress, smoothing down from the base outward, as if somebody had run a hand along them. Whatever Marie had said had been short. It had worked in under two seconds, which suggested she had had it ready before she left the building.

They walked on. They came off the bridge and up onto the mound together, and Marie’s hand did not loosen until it had to.

Liesa took one step forward.

“Myra Calder,” she said.

The name went out over the water and came back off it, and nobody moved. More than one hundred people sat as if a hand had been laid flat on all of them at once.

“Myra feels everything,” Liesa said. “Not her own only. Yours. All of yours, all at the same time, all day, whether she asks for it or not. A room of strangers is very loud for her.” She let that sit for a second. “And she would take it again tomorrow. She has told me this herself.” Liesa’s accent came down harder on the last of it, the way it always did when she meant a thing. “Because the other choice is to be alone in a room, and she has already had years of that one, and she did not care for it.”

Somewhere out in the rows, one person laughed—the short wet laugh of somebody who had not meant to—and that was the only sound.

Marie’s jaw worked, once. Her fingers closed on her daughter’s hand and held.

“Mom,” Myra said.

“I know.”

“No, I—” Myra stopped. She turned her face toward Marie. “You walked me all the way over. I love you, Mom.”

Marie’s breath went out of her.

“I love you too, sweetheart,” she said, embracing her. Then she let go, before either of them could make it into anything, and turned, and walked back across the first bridge with her chin up and her hands at her sides, and sat down in her chair among the guests.

She did not look back. Andy watched the whole length of that walk and understood he was watching somebody spend everything she had on getting to the chair.

Katherine came off the end of the line before Myra had to ask.

She stepped in front of her, close, and held out both hands. Myra put the flowers into them. Katherine gathered the stems against her chest, both arms around them, and stepped back to her place.

Nick knelt at the ring’s edge with the jug, drew water, and carried it up to the dais without spilling a drop. The basin filled. Myra approached the basin and lowered both hands into the water.

Arabella spoke. She did not raise her voice; she did something else to it, opening it out so it carried to the last row without ever sounding loud.

“Leave behind the dust of all your former lives.”

Myra’s hands moved under the surface, deliberate, one over the other, and came up wet. Sam already had the first reed out of the bundle and turned; she pressed it into Myra’s fingers and closed them around it.

Andy brought the brand down and held it low, steady, out from his body, and kept it exactly where he had put it.

“Right here,” he said quietly. “Whenever you want it.”

Myra’s hand came to it. The dry head of the reed went into the flame and caught with a small sound, and she drew it back, and for a moment the light on her face came from her own hand.

She carried it to the first lamp. She bent, and touched the burning reed to the wick, and the wick took. The flame stood up straight in the still air and steadied, small and gold and absolutely ordinary, one lit lamp on a dais with six dark ones beside it.

Katherine was already there with the flowers. Myra took them back, and stepped to her place, and stood beside her lamp with her tails still and her face turned out toward the water and the seats and the whole enormous unsorted feeling of the crowd, and did not falter again.

Out in the first row, Marie put her hand over her mouth.

---

The second pair came out onto the second bridge before the first lamp had finished settling.

Emily’s hair caught the light a long way off. That was always how you found her in a crowd: a cascade of gold going pink at the ends, down past her hips to the top of her thighs, moving with her the way water moves in a carried bowl. She had her hand through her father’s arm.

Mr. Allen was tall and stooped at the shoulder. His head was shaved close. The suit was one he had clearly owned for years and was perfectly happy to keep owning. He put his own broad hand over Emily’s where it lay on his arm, as they stepped onto the bridge, and left it there.

Then he shortened his stride to match hers and held it the whole way across.

Nobody works that out in the moment. Andy would have bet the house that Mr. Allen had practised it at home, once, in a hallway, and told nobody he was doing it.

Emily was wearing nothing at all. Her hair did what her hair always did, her shoulders were back. Her skin carried that faint warm gloss nothing ever seemed to touch, not weather, not a whole day of walking.

Andy watched the rows for it. He could not help it. All those faces, and no double take. No elbow. No careful sliding of the eyes off to one side, as if there were something on the bridge that needed managing. A woman in the fourth row leaned over and said something to her neighbour about the flowers.

Her father saw his daughter naked at her wedding, and nothing about her struck him as needing a comment.

Andy had eaten dinner in that man’s house. A rowhouse in Brooklyn with a hand-painted birdhouse by the stoop and a hall that smelled of onions, and a father who had a beer open and in Andy’s hand inside the first minute and read a refusal as a challenge. He remembered the bottle cap coming off on the edge of the counter with one flick of a thumb, a trick Emily had apparently watched him do her whole childhood. He remembered the long look from under those eyebrows. It was not hostile, but exact, the way a man reads a tape measure twice before he cuts. And he remembered one word. “Who?” It had carried more in it than an hour of questions would have.

At the door afterward David had put out his hand and said take care of her, and had not let go of Andy’s hand until Andy said yes out loud.

He had never worked out whether he had kept that promise or simply been lucky. Emily had been taken apart by another season before Andy ever met her, and everything good that had happened to her since had happened in a place where she could still be taken apart again. It was the kind of debt that comes with no address to send the payment to.

They came off the bridge. At the edge of the mound David stopped, and Emily stopped with him, and for a second neither of them moved.

“All right, Emmy,” he said. Just that, in the flat undemonstrative voice of a man who fixes his own gutters. Then, quieter: “Your mother’s got a handkerchief and she’s not using it yet. So that’s good news.”

“Dad.”

“I’m proud of you, Emmy.” He looked at her for a moment longer, and his eyes were wet. “Go on.”

He let go of her hand. Emily went up onto the mound alone.

Liesa stepped forward.

“Emily Allen,” she said.

She waited for the name to finish crossing the water.

“Every yes Emily gives, she gives because she chose it. Not because somebody wanted it from her. Not because it was easier.” Liesa’s chin came up a little. “She had to fight for that. She had to fight harder than any of you know, and she did not do it loudly, and she won. So when she says yes today, understand what she is handing over. It is hers. She had to go and get it back first.”

Emily’s chin came up. She looked straight at Liesa and smiled. Her mother was in the first row with her hands in her lap, and she had gone the specific still that mothers go. But out at the edge of the mound, her father turned his head and found Andy across fifteen feet of grass.

He did not say anything. He gave one slow nod, held it a beat longer than a nod needs, and that was the whole message: heard it, and I’m holding you to the other thing. Andy nodded back. Then Mr. Allen walked away across the second bridge with his hands loose at his sides and sat down next to his wife, who did, at that point, start using the handkerchief.

Something in the garden loosened.

Andy noticed it and did not have a word for it. Shoulders came down two rows deep. Somebody laughed at nothing. A man who had been holding his program like a hymnal put it on his knee. It happened around Emily everywhere she went, in every room, whether she wanted it to or not. Harem Harmony, the last transformation she had acquired, had a component that affected more than just the harem. Nobody had ever once wanted her to stop.

Candy came forward on the balls of her feet, wings half lifting off her back, blue and black and gold. “Okay so,” she whispered, taking the flowers, “everybody’s crying. Everybody. Front to back. You did that.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You walked. That’s it, that’s all it took.” Candy gathered the stems up against her collarbone. “Devastating. Go wash your hands.”

The laugh got out of Emily before she could catch it. Entirely undignified, audible for about six feet. She put her fingers over her mouth and looked briefly furious with herself, and Candy beamed at her as if she had won something.

That was the last of Emily’s nerves gone, and Andy suspected it had been the whole point.

Nick had the basin fresh and filled again by the time she reached it. Emily put her hands in.

“Leave behind the dust of your former lives,” Arabella said, shorter this time, with the ceremony in it and none of the explanation.

Sam already had the second reed out and waiting. Emily took it, wet-handed, and turned to the brand. Andy lowered it for her.

“You good?” he said.

“Ask me in four seconds.” She got the reed into the flame. Her eyes came up over the top of it, and she was close enough now that only he could hear her. “Can I tell you something stupid?”

“Always.”

“I kept thinking somebody was going to hand me a dress at the last second. Out of kindness. Like a coat at a door.” She was still watching the reed. “I had a whole speech for it. I worked on it. It was good.”

“Did you need it?”

“Nope.” The reed caught. Emily watched it take, and the small flame put a line of light along the underside of her jaw. “Nobody offered. Not one person, all morning, not even—” She stopped, and started again, smaller. “Not even the ones who’d have been doing it to be nice.” She said it as if she were reporting a minor miracle in a country she had only just moved to—which, Andy thought, was more or less the size of it.

“Go light your lamp, Em.”

“So bossy,” she said, flushing with pleasure, and went.

She set the burning reed to the second wick and it caught at once, and then there were two of them on the dais, side by side, and the pair of them together threw a noticeably warmer light than one had. Myra’s ears turned very slightly toward the sound of Emily settling in beside her. Candy pushed the flowers back into Emily’s hands with both of her own and mouthed something that made Emily shake her head.

Two lamps. Five dark.

Andy brought the brand back up in front of him and found that his hand was entirely steady, which surprised him, and then did not, because the only part of today he had ever actually known how to do was this part—standing still while women he loved walked toward him one at a time.

---

Riley Bennett’s hair had got off her lap again.

It happened every time she sat still for more than five minutes. It came off her knees in slow increments, went over the back of the chair, and pooled on the grass behind her in a heap somebody was going to step on. Both her hands were spoken for. JJ had the crook of one arm, and the other was about to be needed.

She brought it up a loop at a time.

It came over her shoulder in lengths, gathering, and she moved it across her lap and around the baby, one turn and then another, until he was lying in the middle of a dark red-black coil with nothing trailing anywhere. He was awake. He watched the whole operation with the unbothered interest of somebody who has decided the world is basically fine, and when the last loop came past his face he got a fistful of it and closed his hand.

“Hey,” Riley said. “That’s attached.”

He held on.

From the water’s edge the mound was a bright small stage a long way off, with one lamp burning on it and Myra standing beside the lamp with her tails still. The second bridge was empty. Six crossings to go, and a very long afternoon after them.

In the next chair, Chloe moved hers four inches closer against every rule of a set ceremony, and got her shoulder up against Riley’s. Then she found Riley’s free hand and took it.

“Okay. Do you need anything? Water, or—I can hold him. Is he warm enough? Because the light’s changed and I don’t know if that means—”

“Chloe.”

“Sorry. Yes.”

“He is currently inside the warmest object in this garden,” Riley said. “If he gets cold, I’ll take it personally and so will the hair.”

“Right. Sorry. I’m doing the thing.”

“You’re doing the thing.”

“I know. I nearly did it to Katherine this morning. I got halfway across the room before I heard myself.” Chloe pushed her hair back with her free hand. “I’m going to sit here and be a guest at a wedding. That’s the whole plan.”

“Ambitious.”

Chloe laughed under her breath and settled, and their shoulders stayed touching, and out on the water the next bride came into view.

You could tell it was Emily from two hundred feet. That hair did something in daylight that nobody else’s did, gold running out into pink at the ends, bright as a struck match against all that white wood. Her father was a tall stooped shape at her side.

“Oh,” Chloe said. “Oh, look at her.”

“I know.”

“She’s just going to walk out there and be herself in front of everybody’s grandmother.” Chloe’s voice had gone soft and slightly wrecked. “I couldn’t do that if you paid me and gave me a year to get ready. I’d find a reason. I’d find a really good one, and I’d believe it.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.” Riley watched Emily come on. “She had to go and take that back off somebody. You never had it taken. Those are different jobs, and you don’t get points for the one you weren’t handed.”

“That’s a very generous way of describing being a coward.”

“It would be, if it were generous.”

They both went quiet, and the quiet had a shape to it, and Riley knew exactly what shape.

Emily was crossing a bridge to marry Andy. Riley had shared a bed with both of them, and with Chloe, all four of them in one night, and afterward nobody had put a single word on it. Not one, since. They had gone on being whatever they were, easy and tangled and unnamed, in all the time it would have taken any of four adults to say a single sentence out loud.

“Not today,” Chloe said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You went still.” Chloe’s thumb moved once across Riley’s knuckles. “Whatever the three of us are, it can wait until tomorrow. It’s waited this long. It can do one more day.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow.”

Out on the mound, Emily stepped up off the bridge, and Liesa spoke her name, and it came across the water thinned out by distance.

Two.

That was what Riley’s whole body did with it, and she could not stop doing it: two of seven, and every one of them brought the last one closer. Emily was the second. Laura was the seventh. Riley could feel her out there the way you feel a hand held an inch above your skin. Behind the far hedge. Sixty-odd yards off. Not moving. She had not moved in a quarter of an hour. Riley knew her position to the inch, as if somebody had written it on the inside of her own arm, and knowing it had never once in her life been this useless.

Nergal was coming for her today. Nobody knew when. Not the hour, not the minute, not whether he would come out of the water or the sky or the hedge Laura was standing behind right now.

And if he reached for her, and if nothing else was working, Riley and Myra were going to step in front of him and make themselves the more interesting thing in the garden. Two of Laura’s blood, offered, loud, to buy Sam the time she needed. They had agreed it before they told a single other person, and neither of them had softened it by a syllable. Riley had gone over it every night since, patiently, from every angle, the way you check a door you already know is locked. There was no hinge in it anywhere.

Riley’s eyes went where they had been going all morning, on a loop, the kind of circuit a person walks without noticing they have started.

Myra, on the mound, standing at a lit lamp with her tails still. Sam, at Andy’s shoulder, with the reeds in the crook of her arm. The foot of the nearest bridge, forty feet to Riley’s left.

Nine steps. Nine from this chair to the stone at a walk, around the end of the row. Six over the chairs. She had counted it three times and got the same number every time, and she had already decided which of the two it was going to be.

Riley’s hand tightened on Chloe’s before she knew it was going to.

“Riley.”

“Mm.”

“How are you actually doing?”

“I’m scared for Laura,” she said.

“Okay.” Chloe did not flinch off it. “Yeah. Me too. Since about four this morning, if we’re being accurate.”

“We’re being accurate.”

“Four, then. I got up and stood in the bathroom for a while.” She said it as if she were confessing to something much worse. “I keep catching myself planning next week. Like if I book enough of it, she has to turn up for it.”

“I’ve been doing the same thing since Tuesday. Mine has a calendar.”

A gull went over. Somewhere behind them a chair leg scraped. Chloe’s shoulder stayed where it was, against hers. “Is that all of it?” she said.

Riley did not answer. She could have said no, and she could have said nothing, and those were the only two doors in the building, and she took the second one. She closed her hand around Chloe’s instead, hard, once.

Chloe felt the squeeze and understood precisely what was inside it.

Myra had told her this morning. In their own room, with the braid half-pinned and Katherine at the window, Myra had laid the whole thing out—Riley, herself, Nergal, the offer, the seconds it was meant to buy—and had said, plainly, that she was telling Chloe now so that Chloe would never have to learn it secondhand from somebody in a corridor.

So Chloe already had the answer. She had been sitting on it since before breakfast. And Riley, who could not tell a lie and had just spent one entire second declining to speak rather than tell her, had no idea.

It would have been so easy to say *I know*.

Chloe thought about it for the length of one breath and put it down. It was not hers to open. Riley would say it when Riley could say it, tonight or next week or never, and Riley had exactly two exits out of a question like that where everybody else had four. Taking one of them off her as a kindness would not have been a kindness.

She squeezed back and let the question go.

Chloe’s mind did what it always did, which was to take the next turning without asking her first, and Riley’s silence put her straight into her own.

She had said yes out loud. At the lunch, in the Banquet Hall, with Andy asking the whole table and Riley sitting four chairs down—Chloe had said yes, and she had meant it, and she had not taken it back in all the time since. If Andy went through the First Gate the bond went with him and took every one of them, permanently, into whatever was on the other side. No more classroom. No more September. No more Chicago. Her whole small ordinary life would end, and it would not end in a decision she got to make on the day, but in a door somebody else walked through while she was standing behind him.

She still meant it. That was the thing she kept running into. She turned it over and turned it over, looking for the place where she would want to take it back, and it was not there.

Her free hand had drifted up to rest flat against her stomach. Chloe noticed it, and took it down, and folded it into her lap with the other one.

On the mound, Emily brought her reed to the flame in Andy’s hands, and carried it, and touched it to the second lamp, and the second lamp caught and stood up beside Myra’s.

Inside the coil of hair, JJ’s fist came loose. His hand opened. Three seconds later he was asleep, heavy and warm against Riley’s arm, doing that thing babies do where they go out mid-thought.

Chloe put her head on Riley’s shoulder.

A single lock came away from the coil in Riley’s lap. It moved as if a hand were guiding it, which, in every way that mattered, one was. It crossed the gap between the two chairs, went once around Chloe’s wrist and once more over their joined hands, and settled there like a cuff.

“You’re showing off,” Chloe murmured.

“You have no idea.”

At the outer end of another bridge, two more figures came into the light, and one of them had ears.

“Two,” Riley said under her breath, counting them off the dais. “Five dark. Laura’s is the last one.”

Chloe bumped her shoulder against Riley’s, once, and left it there.

Neither of them moved from their chairs. Their hands stayed joined under the loop of hair, and the baby stayed asleep, and together they turned to watch Dawn Moreno start across the water.

---

From the mound, the light over the gardens had come down a shade.

Not cloud, and not evening. It was the kind of dimming that happens when a day has decided something and has not said so yet. The only thing it actually changed was the lamps: two small flames that had looked perfectly ordinary ten minutes ago now sat warm and distinct against the grass, as if somebody had turned one dial down a quarter-turn so another could come up.

Andy registered it. He filed it. He did not look at the sky, because two hundred people were watching him and he was not going to be the one who taught them to.

Myra and Emily stood at their two lamps. Sam had five reeds left. Out along the row of chairs the guests had gone still again, the way a crowd does when it has worked out the shape of a thing and stopped needing to be told.

Dawn came out onto the third bridge with her hand tucked through her father’s arm.

Her ears were up and forward. Her tail gave her away completely: it was going, small and quick, the way a metronome goes, which was what it always did when she was excited past the point of hiding it and had given up trying. She was in ivory. Somebody had put flowers in her hair and she had sat patiently for it, and she looked like a woman who was going to be absolutely fine right up until she wasn’t.

Alejandro Moreno walked beside her and looked at the water.

Not at the mound, and not at his daughter. He kept his eyes on the clear water running under them the whole way across, steadily, as if there were something down there he had been made responsible for.

His jaw was set in a way Andy recognized. He had seen that exact set on his own father, and he could see it now on about half the men in the rows behind him, and he knew what it was for. It is the thing you do with something too big to be carried in your face.

Andy had never met him before this weekend. He knew two things about him.

One: there was a cold, undrunk cup of coffee sitting on that man’s chair at this moment. There had been one in his hand every time Andy had seen him, and it had never once been warm.

Two: what he had said to Dawn at home.

I did nothing. You did everything.

She had been a kid when her mother died. She had made the lunches.

They came off the bridge. Dawn stepped up onto the mound and Alejandro stopped at the edge of the grass, and Liesa moved forward.

“Dawn Moreno,” she said.

The tail went still.

“Dawn’s grandmother had a saying,” Liesa said. “She told it to Dawn when Dawn was small, and Dawn told it to me one night while we were cooking, and I have thought about it perhaps a hundred times since. Some people are born to be princes. Some are born to be padres.” She paused, and got it right, and gave it to the whole garden. “But in our family, we keep the fire burning.”

Nobody made a sound.

“Dawn has kept the fire burning since she was a girl,” Liesa said. “For her brothers. For her father. For every single one of us, every day, and mostly when nobody was looking, and mostly when she was tired.” She looked directly at her. “So. Today somebody else lights one, and you only have to stand there. Is allowed.”

Dawn’s ears went flat and then folded right down.

A laugh got out of her, small and mortified, and she put a hand up over her face and said, into her own palm, loud enough for the first four rows, “Oh my God, Liesa.”

That broke it. Half the garden laughed with her—the warm kind, the kind that goes around a crowd and gives everybody something to do with their hands. The other half did not laugh, because the other half was crying.

Andy looked past Dawn to the man at the edge of the grass.

Alejandro Moreno had finally stopped looking at the water. He was looking at his daughter, and his face had not moved, and it did not need to. A stranger with an accent had just stood up in a garden and told over one hundred people, in the plainest words available, what his daughter had been to him and his sons.

He did not argue with it. That was the part Andy would remember. He took it the way you take something heavy that somebody hands you without warning—badly, with both hands, and without putting it down.

He took his daughter’s hand in both of his. They were working hands, and against her they looked enormous and very careful, and he folded them all the way around hers and held on and did not say anything for a long time. Four seconds. Five. Long enough that people noticed. Long enough that Dawn stopped doing anything at all with her face and just let him.

“Go on, mija,” he said, low. “You are my pride.”

He let go. He turned around and walked back across the third bridge with his shoulders square, and he sat down between his sons.

The older one put an arm along the back of his father’s chair without looking at him, as if he had simply run out of room for it anywhere else. The younger one leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and kept his eyes on Dawn, grinning like an idiot, and did not stop for the rest of the crossing.

Skye came forward.

She was short and she did the whole thing like a court official at a very small, very serious court: a step, a bow from the waist that was a genuine bow and not a joke, both hands out for the flowers.

“Skye.”

“It is a formal occasion.” Skye took the flowers, tucked them into the crook of her elbow, and stepped back without turning around, which made it worse, and Dawn had to bite the inside of her cheek.

Nick filled the basin a third time and stood back. Dawn put her hands in. The water went over her wrists and she shut her eyes.

“Leave behind the dust of former lives,” Arabella said, and this time it was only the line itself, bare, with nothing around it. It had been a sentence the first time. Now it was not a sentence, but a shape the garden already knew by heart, and it landed harder for having been worn down.

Sam drew out the third reed. Four left in the bundle, and she squared them with her thumb before she turned, the way she had been squaring them all morning.

Andy brought the brand down.

Dawn’s hands were still dripping when she took the reed. She did not look at the flame; she looked at him over the top of it, wide-eyed, with her ears half up, and for one second she was not a bride at all but a woman at a job interview she badly wanted.

“Am I doing this right?”

“There’s no wrong way to do it.”

“Okay, but is there a better way, because I would like—”

“Dawn.”

“Right. Yes. Sorry.” She put the reed in the fire, and it caught, and her whole face changed. “Oh.”

She carried it to the third lamp and lit it, and set the burned reed down where Nick could take it, and Skye pressed the flowers back into her hands with another small bow.

Three flames on the dais now, in a row, with four dark ones beside them. The three of them together had stopped looking like lamps and started looking like the beginning of a line.

Dawn took her place next to Emily. Emily, without turning her head, reached over and squeezed her wrist once, and Myra’s ears came around toward the sound of it.

Sam tucked the four remaining reeds back into the crook of her arm.

“Three down,” she said, out of the side of her mouth, barely moving her lips. “You’ve gone completely to pieces and you’re hiding it well. I’m very proud of you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re radiant. You look like a bride. It’s uncanny.”

“Sam.”

“Four more. Pace yourself, Cooper.”

A pace in front of them, Liesa pressed her lips together and looked very hard at the far shore.

The garden waited. The mound held everybody it was going to hold for the next few minutes—Andy with the brand, Sam and the reeds, Harper and Laura Black behind, Arabella at the dais and Nick at the basin, Liesa forward of them, Candy and Skye and Katherine at the edge, and three women standing at three lit lamps in a row.

Out past the water the guests sat in the lowered light. Dawn’s flame steadied beside the other two.

Three of the seven were burning, and the fourth bridge was not empty any more.