Ten: Wedding Bells!!

The seven lamps had been burning long enough now to matter. What light still reached the mound came in low and thin under the western edge of the cloud. Against it the flames on the dais had stopped looking like decoration. They were the brightest thing on the hill.

Andy had not moved from where he stood. His face was still wet—he had not done anything about it, and neither had anybody else.

Arabella came along the front of the dais and stopped where all seven brides could hear her.

“There is one thing more,” she said, in the unhurried voice she kept for words that were not hers to rush. “Every one of you left something on this dais before any of it began, and it has been waiting there ever since, in the dark behind the lamps. Go now and take it up. Bring it to him, and set it on him with your own hands. Take his ring when he gives it to you, and do not give it back.” She paused, then smirked. “Then this is finished, and you may go and be happy somewhere else.”

Candy came off the mound’s edge first, then Skye, then Katherine, each taking back the flowers of the brides she had walked with. Katherine ended up with three bouquets against her chest, her chin tucked over the top of them to stop them sliding. Every bride’s hands were empty.

The brides went up one at a time and lifted the gifts out of the dark behind the flames. Cloth folded on the boards. A chain so fine it was mostly the idea of a chain. A band of pale metal that came out of the shadow already throwing the light back.

Andy put Claire’s folded page into his right inside pocket, stepped out in front of them and turned around, facing all seven at once. Sam moved when he moved and settled at his shoulder, the brand low, its smoke going straight up. Harper stopped at his elbow with all seven rings cupped in one hand, her own mithril band on the fingers underneath.

“You’ve got about ninety seconds before you start crying again,” Sam said, barely above a breath. “I’d spend them wisely.”

“I’ll take forty.”

“Take the ninety, Cooper. Nobody out there is going anywhere.”

Andy felt his shoulders come down an inch, which he suspected had been the entire point of the remark.

Myra came to him first.

She carried a white mantle over both arms. She shook it open. The lining came around into the lamplight: green thread worked through the underside, the exact green her foxfire went when it rose off her skin. She laid it across his shoulders, then ran both palms down his back, smoothing it down, the way you would settle a blanket over somebody asleep. The mantle reached his ankles, sat comfortably on his shoulders, a weight he was aware of.

Harper put the first ring in his palm. Andy took Myra’s hand and slid it on.

“I’m the ground floor,” Myra said. “Everything they put on you after this goes on top of mine, and I want that on the record. I want it written down somewhere. I waited a long time to be the ground floor of anything.”

“It’s been on the record since the first bridge.”

“Good,” Myra said, with a kiss, and both her tails swung once behind her, pleased, and she stepped back.

Emily was in front of him before Myra had finished moving, the clasp open in her fingers—two small hands wrought in gold and pink-gold, not yet clasping each other, the same colors as the hair that fell to the top of her thighs and covered what she had long ago decided not to cover any other way. She fitted it at his throat, closed the mantle, and gave it one short downward tug, the two hands closing into each other under his collar.

“Holds,” Emily said.

Harper had the second ring out already, and Andy put it on her finger.

“You’ll check it every hour anyway.”

“Of course I will. That’s what a clasp is for.” She turned the ring around her finger once with her thumb, as if testing whether that would hold too. “Nothing on you comes off today. Not one thing… until tonight.” She grinned, kissed him, and stepped back.

Dawn came up with a length of rich dawn-colored cloth running through both hands. She reached under the mantle, found his waist, and wound the sash around him, pulling the knot snug with the kind of quick certainty that comes of having tied a thousand aprons. His jacket didn’t wrinkle, didn’t fold oddly—it rearranged itself, as if it had always been conceived as part of the regalia. Then she let the mantle fall over it. Her ears stood straight up the whole time.

Andy took the third ring from Harper without looking away from her.

“Liesa said it out loud, on the water,” he said, low, meant only for her. “That you’ve kept the fire lit for everybody you love since you were a kid. She’s right. I watched you do it throughout this whole season and nobody thanked you enough, and I let that happen. But you’re not carrying it on your own anymore.”

Dawn’s ears flushed pink right out to the tips and folded halfway down. She did not have anything to say to that. A smile got away from her instead, wide and helpless, and she pressed her lips together over it and failed. She gave him a quick kiss.

Erin came next and came fast. The last of the light was still finding her, low and level across the mound, doing what it always did to her, quietly and without stopping. She got hold of his left wrist and snapped a cuff of sun-gold shut around it. Her hand was out for the ring before Harper finished passing it.

“Fourth,” Erin said. “Finally.”

“You’ve been counting.”

“I’ve been counting since about nine this morning,” Erin said. “Put it on.” Andy laughed under his breath and put it on. She threw her arms around his neck, kissed him soundly, and stepped back.

Claire came without a sound.

She had a locket, small and shut, on its thread of chain. Andy had read her vow aloud for her ten minutes ago and had got two thirds through before his voice went. This was the one thing of hers staying closed. He knelt before her and she drew the chain around behind his neck and fastened it by touch, ears tipped forward, tail moving in one slow curl.

The locket settled against his sternum, and what came through the bond was not nerves and not relief. It was calm—flat, settled, entirely certain, as if she had finished thinking about this some considerable time ago and had been waiting for the rest of them to catch up.

Claire took his hand, laid it over the locket, and held it there with both of hers.

“I know,” he said. “It stays shut. I’ve got it. You’ll tell me when, and if you never tell me when, that’s fine too.”

What went back down the bond reached her before he had finished saying it. Her ears dropped flat. Her tail stopped moving. Her eyes went bright and stayed bright until she blinked them clear. Harper passed the fifth ring. Andy slid it on. Claire nodded once—one small precise movement, tail flicking happily, all the answer she was going to give—kissed him, and went back to stand beside Erin.

Emi came forward with the circlet held out in all six hands, spread evenly around its rim—pale gold, crown-work, older than anything else on the hill, an empty setting at the front.

Andy bowed his head.

She lifted it in all six hands at once and brought it down onto him. Her lowest pair worked it in fractions until it sat level, the empty setting just above his brow.

Emi’s eyes spilled over. She laughed at the same time, which she had been doing all day.

“You have to keep your head up now,” she said. “Forever. That’s the rule. If you slouch it slides and then everybody knows.”

“I’ll manage.”

“You will not,” Emi said. “I’ll be right there. I’m going to be fixing this for the rest of your life.”

Harper held out the sixth ring. Emi offered him her top left hand while the other five kept the circlet steady, and he put the ring on. Then she lifted all six hands away at once and stepped back—not to the line, where the other five stood, but around to his other side, into the place where Laura was going to be.

All three of Laura came up together and stopped in front of him, close to the bush.

The body nearest it reached in alone, and came away with one small blue rose between her fingers, the exact electric blue of her own eyes.

Laura lifted it to the front of the circlet and set the stem into the setting. It seated. It locked. Then the blue went hard—petals and stem taking the same sheen and weight as the metal around them, until what sat above his brow was not a flower that would be brown by morning but an enameled blue thing fixed there for good.

For a moment the middle of the mound held three people and nobody else. Andy, Emi at his shoulder, Laura in front of him—the same three who had been friends in Warrenville before the Hotel, before the river, before any of it.

“Back to the beginning,” Emi said to her. “Like I told you last night.”

“Back to the beginning,” said all three of Laura. “Three kids and a bad idea.”

The air around the three of them turned warmer and a little sweeter, the way it did whenever Emi stopped keeping it to herself. Harper held out the seventh ring.

Laura drew her bodies in close and began pulling them back into herself, one and then the other. It was not the easy thing it looked like when Andy did it. Her jaw set. Her breathing went short, in through the nose and held, as if she were carrying something up one flight of stairs more than she had planned for. Then one Laura stood in front of him.

Andy slid the ring onto her finger. It touched the gold one Inanna had put there on a footbridge back home. The two went together at once, without a sound, the new drawn into the old, until there was a single ring on her hand carrying both, white fire glimmering alongside the flame the ring carried before. Andy didn’t need to look, to know his own ring had changed the same way.

She let the hold go.

The release went through her all at once. Her shoulders came down and her breath went out. Her other two bodies stepped back out on either side until three of her stood there again, each with the one ring on her hand. Laura laughed with all three voices, wet and undignified, and came around beside Emi.

Harper placed her hand on Andy’s shoulder for a moment, and went back to her place beside Laura Black.

Andy let himself feel the weight of it. The mantle, the clasp, Dawn’s sash at his waist, the cuff, the shut locket, the circlet with Laura’s rose in the front. None of it had changed anything about him. He was the same man who had come up this hill alone before the first bride crossed, with nothing on him at all. And yet, he felt like something enormous had just begun.

“You look ridiculous,” Sam said at his shoulder.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t,” Sam said. “You look like a guy in a bathrobe with a hat. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

Andy looked down the line of five, and then across at the two beside him. “I’m never taking it off.”

Out past the water the guests came up out of their chairs, and the applause went round the circle and met itself on the far side.

Myra’s head turned away from the noise, out over the water toward nothing that was there. Both her tails went still at once, as if she had caught a thread in all that happiness that belonged to nobody she could find. She stood like that for a breath. Then her face cleared and she turned back into the sound and let it go, because everything else arriving at her was joy and there was a great deal of it.

Arabella let the noise run until it wanted to stop. Andy stood under the arbor, crowned, his seven wives around him and the seven lamps burning in their row at his back, under a sky that had come down another shade while nobody was counting.

---

Myra and Emily and Dawn, Erin and Claire, stood in the line where they had stood all afternoon. Emi and Laura had not gone back to it and nobody had asked them to. They held their place at Andy’s other side, Emi with two of her hands already tucked around Laura’s nearest arm. Sam kept the brand low at his shoulder. Down at the dais Arabella waited by the basin, with Nick Reynolds behind her and Liesa a pace forward of them both.

Laura Black came away from the wedding party with the cup.

She went down the slope with her wings folded flat against her back. She crouched at the water’s edge and dipped the cup under until it stopped making a sound. Then she came back up holding it level in both hands, watching the rim the whole way, and gave it to Arabella.

“Colder than it looks,” she said.

“It always is,” Arabella said quietly. “Thank you, Laura.”

She turned with the cup and held it out to Andy first.

Arabella held the cup out to him, her eyes holding his. “From the one, to the many,” she said, her voice low and carrying. “And from the many, returned to the one.”

“That part I know,” Andy said.

He took it in both hands. Erin’s cuff caught the lamplight as his wrists came up. The water tasted of nothing much—cold, and faintly of stone, the way water tastes anywhere it has been running over the same rock for a long time. He held the swallow in his mouth a second longer than he needed to. After this there was nothing left on the hill to do but leave it.

He lowered the cup and turned to Myra, who was nearest, and held it out to her himself.

Myra’s hands came up and closed around it cleanly. To her it was the brightest object on the hill—a cup-shaped outline lit in every color coming off everyone looking at it, which just then was everyone.

“Both hands,” Andy said, low.

“I can see it better than you can,” Myra said, with a smile. Her tails swung once, and she drank.

From Myra it went down the line the way they had crossed. Emily took her swallow and passed it on without a word. Out past the water the long rows had gone so quiet that the chairs could be heard settling. In the front row Carol Cooper sat with her hands folded in her lap and her chin up, following the cup along the line as if she were watching a rope being paid out. Jim had not taken his eyes off Laura since the rings.

Dawn drank, and then held the cup out to Erin and said something under her breath that nobody past the two of them could have caught.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“So are yours,” Erin said.

Dawn’s ears twitched once and she let go of the cup.

Erin drank and passed it to Claire. Claire drank and passed it to Emi, who took it in two of her six hands, drank, and held it out to the nearest of Laura’s bodies with the other four doing nothing at all.

“Three mouths,” Emi said. “You’re going to be here a while.”

“Worth it,” said all three of Laura. “You have six hands and you’re giving me grief about volume.”

The nearest body took the cup and drank. The cold went through all three of her mouths in the same moment, one swallow arriving three times over. Then that body passed the cup sideways to the next without looking. The second body drank and the taste landed everywhere at once and stacked on what was already there. The third drank last. By the time she lowered the cup, every mouth Laura had was full of the same cold three times over, and all three of her faces wore the same expression.

The third of her held the cup out to Arabella with the last of the water shining in the bottom of it.

Arabella took it and carried it back down the mound to the water’s edge. She crouched and tipped the cup. The last of it ran out in one thin unbroken line—no splash, no sound to speak of—and went back where it came from.

“What was taken is returned,” she said.

Arabella straightened, held one open hand out over the ring, and gave the water her blessing in her own plain words, slowly, without a single contraction in any of it.

“This water was here before any of you came into this garden,” she said. “It gave every one of you a share of itself today. It has taken back what you left in it, and it is no poorer this evening than it was this morning. That is what water does. It gives back what it takes.” She looked at Laura fondly.

Then she turned and faced the mound.

“Andy Cooper. And Myra, and Emily, and Dawn, and Erin, and Claire, and Emi, and Laura.” She let the seven names finish. “Give to one another as freely as the water gave to you today. And return what you are given.”

Nobody on the mound moved. Down the line Myra had gone very still, both tails held straight and low, as if she were bracing against something coming at her faster than she could sort it. Erin was looking at the grass. Dawn had both hands pressed flat against her own stomach.

On it gives back what it takes, Andy turned his head toward Laura. All three of her faces were already turned the other way, toward the ring, and had been for some time.

All three of her breathed out together.

He reached for the nearest of her hands. That body took it, and her other two closed their empty hands in the same moment, the way they always did, holding nothing. He bent his head down to hers.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“I’m scared,” said all three of her, so quietly it went no further than the two of them. Then, because she had never once in her life been able to leave a sentence where it landed: “Not of you. Not of any of this. He’s coming soon, isn’t he? That’s what the sky is saying.”

Andy did not say anything to that yet.

“I wanted it out loud,” Laura said. “That’s the part I can’t get over. All of it out loud, in front of my mother-in-law and a whole garden full of people who think they came to an ordinary wedding, with everybody’s families sitting there in their good shoes. You have no idea how badly I wanted that.” Her voices had gone thin. “And your dad found me this morning. On my own, before any of it started. He asked me to call him Dad.”

His hand tightened on hers before he had decided to do it.

“I cried all over him,” said all three of her. “And I said yes.”

“He’s been waiting sixteen years to ask you that, and didn’t know he ever could,” Andy said. “He asked me first, you know. Whether it was his place to walk you. He didn’t think he’d earned it.” His thumb stopped on her knuckles. “I said I’d ask you that night. I never did. I'm sorry.”

“I know. He told me you’re a little slow with passing on messages.” It came out half a sob and half a laugh. “He earned it, Andy. He earned it a hundred times over. I do have a Dad, after all.”

Emi had not moved. She still had two hands wrapped around Laura’s nearest arm and had made no attempt to look as though she were not there, which was the most tactful thing available to a woman standing two feet away with six of them, and she did not say a word.

Andy found the ring with his thumb—the one ring now, hers and Inanna’s gone together into a single band—and ran his thumb across it, and back. “You’re not dying today,” he said.

He said it the way you say a thing you have decided rather than a thing you know, with his hand flat over the back of hers, as if he were holding something down to keep it from moving. He had settled it the night before, lying awake with her asleep on his chest, and he had not told her or anyone else. He had no more standing to promise it now than he had then. He said it anyway. Whether that made it a promise or only a preference was not a question he intended to answer tonight.

Laura looked up at him with all three faces and did not argue.

Arabella came back up the mound and put the empty cup into Laura Black’s hands, and Laura Black carried it away to her place with the wedding party. Arabella went back to the basin and turned around to face them all.

Andy stood under the arbor, crowned. Myra, Emily, Dawn, Erin and Claire stood in their line, and Emi and Laura at his side, and every one of the seven had his ring on her hand. Sam had the brand. Nick was at the basin, Liesa forward of it, Harper and Laura Black behind. Candy and Skye and Katherine held the bouquets at the mound’s edge. Out past the ring the guests sat in their long curving rows and nobody moved.

Below them the water had already gone flat where the last of the cup went in. There was nothing to show it had ever been disturbed, and nothing in it now but the darker sky.

---

For a few seconds the mound held still, the way a room holds still after the last note of something.

Then Arabella stepped back from the water’s edge and tipped one open hand toward the bridges.

“It is over,” she said. “Go and celebrate somewhere with chairs.”

“That’s the first thing anybody’s said today that I’m qualified to do,” Andy said.

He put a hand up to check the circlet before he moved, which was reflex, and which was a mistake.

Emi’s top right hand came over and nudged it an eighth of an inch back to level. “Do not touch it,” she said. “I spent four minutes on that.”

“You spent forty seconds.”

“I spent four minutes,” Emi said, “in my heart.”

Andy laughed out loud, for the first time in about an hour.

Then the weight of the thing settled on him again, now that somebody had drawn his attention to it. It put him somewhere he had not been in seventeen years. Laura at twelve, in her back garden in Warrenville, with a crown she had built out of construction paper and most of a roll of tape. She had put it on his head and held it there and would not let him duck out from under it.

“What’s it for?”

“You’re going to be in charge of things,” Laura had said, in the voice she kept for facts. “You have to learn how to rule.”

He had worn it for most of a week, because she checked. He still had it, somewhere in his old apartment, a treasure from a time he had thought, back then, he could never live again. Andy looked sideways at the nearest of her. All three of her were already watching him, wearing the expression she kept for arriving somewhere ahead of him and waiting to see how long he took.

The brides came away from their places all at once and closed in around him. There was no arranging it. Myra got his left arm and the nearest of Laura’s bodies got his right, and everybody else found somewhere to be. Andy brought them down the slope to the foot of the first bridge, the one Myra had crossed hours ago on Marie’s arm, when he had been standing up here on his own with nothing yet put on him.

Every one of them had come over on her own bridge, alone except for whoever had walked her. They went back across together. All eight at once, which with three of Laura made ten.

The boards took three abreast and no more. They crossed in a short line of knots, each one packed tight against the one in front. Andy had the middle of the leading three, Myra on one arm and Laura on the other. Behind them Emi had made herself the center of everything, as she did whenever hands were available. Three of her hands held a hand from each of Laura’s bodies. The other three had Claire’s and Dawn’s and Emily’s.

It was not elegant. Ten people on a bridge three wide made a slow, elbow-to-elbow business of it, and somebody’s heel found somebody’s toes about every fourth step. Nobody minded. Nobody was in any hurry to reach the other end.

Erin reached for one of Emi’s hands and came up empty.

“You’ve run out,” Erin said, flat, in the exact tone she used for reporting a fact. “You have six and you’ve run out. Sparkles, that’s a planning failure.”

“It’s not a failure, it’s a maximum.”

“It’s a failure. You had one job and it was hands.”

Erin hooked her arm through Dawn’s instead. “You’re it, Dawnie. Try to keep up.”

Dawn’s ears flicked straight up—and she laughed hard enough to have to grab the rail.

The white boards thumped under nine pairs of feet and stayed completely silent under Claire’s, as they always did.

And then the noise came.

All along the outer edge of the water the guests came up out of their chairs together. They let go of everything they had been sitting on all afternoon. They cheered them across. They clapped and shouted and banged the backs of the chairs in front of them, the whole way round the ring, so that the sound came at the bridge from both sides at once and met over the middle. It did not sound like a ceremony at all. It sounded like the end of a game somebody had won.

Augustin Delgado was on his feet with his hands over his head. Alejandro Moreno had both fists in the air and was shouting something in Spanish that got lost on the way over. Kathleen Allen was crying and clapping at the same time and doing neither of them well. Marie had her fingers in her mouth and was whistling like a dockworker, which Andy would not have guessed about her in a hundred years.

He leaned his head down toward the nearest of Laura.

“You asked for loud,” he said, half-shouting it.

All three of her turned to him in the same moment with the same wide, split-open, undignified grin.

“I did ask for loud,” said all three of Laura.

“You asked for stupid, too,” Emi called over the top of it. “We’re working on it.”

“You’re all doing beautifully,” said all three of her. “Keep it up and I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

“You will,” Emi said. “Tomorrow. Before breakfast.”

“Probably,” said all three of Laura. “I’d like it on the record that I don’t care.”

The air around the three of them went warm and sweet again, right there on the boards in the middle of a bridge, and stayed that way as they walked.

Myra had the worst of it and the best of it. Every one of those people was feeling the same thing at the same time, and all of it arrived at her at once—from the whole circle, from every direction there was. For once it did not matter in the slightest that she could not tell whose was whose, because there was only the one thing to tell. She threw her head back and laughed out loud with both tails swinging behind her.

“Andy,” Myra said, and had to say it twice to be heard. “I wish you could see this. The whole ring of it is one color. I have never had that happen. Not once.”

“What color?”

“I have no idea what it’s called,” Myra said. “It’s the good one.”

The eight of them came off the far end of the bridge together onto the outer bank, and came apart as they did it. The knots loosened into seven women and one man standing on grass with people all around them. Emily got an arm around Dawn’s waist and held on.

“We did it,” Emily said, to nobody in particular. “We actually did the whole thing.”

“I thought my knees were going to go on the bridge,” Dawn said.

“You were fine.”

“I was not fine. I was upright.”

Claire put her forehead against Erin’s shoulder for a second and took it away again. Nobody had said anything to organize any of it.

Jim Cooper got up out of his seat and came over. He took the back of Andy’s neck in one hand—the way he had done at graduations, and on every bad night since. He looked at the circlet and the mantle and the shut locket for a while, as if he were pricing the whole business and had decided not to say the number out loud.

“Well,” Jim said. “Your mother’s going to want a picture of that, son.”

“She’s going to want four hundred.”

“She’s already taken about six hundred. You looked fine, son. You both did.” He let go of Andy’s neck and turned to all three of Laura’s faces and gave her one single nod. It took him a noticeable moment to get through it, and he did not attempt anything else. Then he went back in among the guests, where Carol was waiting for him with the camera still in her hand.

Arabella’s voice came across the water from the mound, pitched to carry.

“There is a reception,” she said, “and it has been waiting a great deal longer than any of you. Follow the lights. Do not follow the groom. He has no idea where it is.”

That broke the whole thing open. The guests came away from the water’s edge and started along the twisting garden paths in a loose, noisy, disorganized river of people. Marie Williams was among the first to fall in, and Julien Connard beside her, and Hana a pace behind them with her shoes in her hand.

The wedding party came off the mound after them by way of the first bridge.

Sam and Liesa crossed first, arm in arm—Sam still carrying the brand, Liesa moving the way she moved, which by now was simply how Liesa walked.

“Andy,” Sam called ahead. “You’re wearing a crown.”

“I’m aware.”

“I just wanted to hear myself say it,” Sam said.

Candy and Skye came next with Katherine between them, all three loaded with bouquets, Candy’s butterfly wings half lifting with every bounce of her step and settling again. Then Nick Reynolds, and Harper, and Laura Black. Arabella crossed last of all, unhurried, taking her time, the only person on the whole hill who had not hurried once all afternoon.

Andy and Myra and Emily, Dawn and Erin and Claire and Emi, and all three of Laura, walked at the head of the procession. Arabella and the wedding party came behind them, and behind those the guests, and the noise went with all of them into the trees.

Andy could not have told anyone afterward what he was thinking on that path, because he was not doing much thinking. Myra still had his arm. One of them had hold of his other hand and he did not look to see which, on the grounds that it did not matter and that finding out would mean letting go. Erin was still towing Dawn. Somewhere behind him Emi was explaining something to Claire at length and Claire was not writing any of it down.

Ahead the path bent and went on bending. The gardens had begun putting their lights on among the hedges, small and yellow and low to the ground. The noise of a hundred people came along with them through the trees. It was the kind of noise that carries no information at all, only the fact of everybody being pleased at the same time, which was exactly what Laura had asked for that morning over burnt toast.

Behind them the mound stood empty under its arbor. The blue rose bush had one flower fewer than it had that morning—one, out of hundreds, and nobody would ever find the gap. The seven lamps burned on in their row over the clear, still water, as if the hill were expecting somebody back. There was nobody left up there to put them out. Not one person on the path looked round.