William Taylor had not wanted to attend the wedding but feared that his absence would be noted. The Taylor family’s business interests and York’s wizard collegium both needed positive representation, so he’d come and brought a wedding gift for the duke, hoping to curry favor.
Unfortunately, his most valuable possessions were Florence and his personal library, and the duke seemed to share his predecessor’s prejudices against necromancy; fortunately, he had access to the storage rooms adjoining the alchemy laboratory, where the early batches of test cloth had been stored. Technically, it was property that belonged in shares to the former owners of the York Textile Company, but Jacob Hebert was missing, and the other two individual investors were dead.
It would be some time before anyone else attempted to track down company inventory held by the collegium to demand their fair share of it, and the collegium had a substantial inventory of paper and cloth used for testing dying solutions. Cloth that was valuable but could not be easily sold without drawing attention to the fact that it mostly properly belonged to the dissolved York Textile Company’s investors’ heirs.
So, William had brought a wheelbarrow laden with various types of cloth of the purest shade of white, alchemically dyed with the solution that should have made the York Textile Company a household name among every dressmaker in the country. The castle guards had accepted the cloth, carrying it off to somewhere out of sight inside the great hall, and then he’d settled in to watch the wedding, positioning himself somewhere that could be seen.
Then there had been the attack. William hadn’t seen the first bolt fired, but the crowd had suddenly erupted in confused motion and babble. By the time he’d gotten to a good vantage point to see, there was a blonde woman lying very still on the grass wearing an all-too-familiar heavy cloak. It was Edward’s old cloak, one that William himself had enchanted as a journeyman for weatherproofing and warmth.
A pair of guards and a wolfhound were standing next to the cloaked body, one guard holding a springbow and sheaves of bolts, the other telling the crowd to keep a distance. William pushed forward, heedless of the halberd that pointed menacingly in his direction as he dropped to his knees next to the body. A gruff voice spoke words at him, but he didn’t quite hear them, staring instead at the familiar face beneath the unfamiliar blonde hair.
“Beatrice?” William tugged at the blonde wig, revealing his niece’s familiar dark hair beneath. As he did so, her head rolled limply to an unnatural angle. “It is Beatrice,” he said with a heavy sigh, picking up the body and cradling it. “Oh, dear sweet little Bella, what have you done?”
The body didn’t answer his question.
William shook his head, then looked back up. The sharp metal point of the guard’s halberd was shockingly close to his face. “I’m a certified master necromancer, and her uncle—I can take care of the body from here,” he said, glancing over at the wheelbarrow he’d brought to the castle. “It… it isn’t as if she will need to stand trial for what she has done; she has already paid with her life. Please. I had no idea she would do something like this.”
The halberd stayed in place for a long moment. In the distance, the tall form of the duke turned, looking over at him, and then both of the guards cocked their heads to the side at the same time.
The guard holding the halberd raised it away from William’s face and to a less-threatening vertical position before he spoke. “Very well. There is no place for a corpse at a wedding. Take her away forthwith.”
Between his family’s business connections and his Cambridge classmates, William Taylor had been to enough fancy weddings and banquets to know that corpses had several places of potential importance in a wedding, but he suspected that contradicting the man on the subject would be unwise in several ways. Instead, he hoisted the body over his shoulder.
She’s all grown up, he thought to himself as he handled the body, carrying it over to the wheelbarrow he’d brought and laying it gently within, folding up the arms and legs to make it fit neatly. Very well-formed, too; I hadn’t really noticed before—and hardly any damage other than the cracked neck and the finger.
It was a shame that his pretty little niece was dead, but she had left behind a very fine corpse—exceedingly well-formed, youthful, and with unbroken skin. Her injuries were simple, acute, and primarily to the skeleton itself. William hummed to himself as he pushed the wheelbarrow containing his latest acquisition, paying no mind to the pair of wolfhounds trotting in his wake.
Between all of my recent acquisitions, it would be quite easy to come up with ten or fifteen pounds of human soap—and I have all my old notes from the Florence project, William thought to himself as he crossed the bridge, leaving the castle behind. Perhaps I could even try a Scottish-style rite as the base—from what I’ve read, the fact that she’s a blood connection should make that process significantly easier.
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Avery walked slowly back towards the irregular line of elevated platforms, Merilda’s hand clasped in his. Avery wasn’t looking at his large blonde bride, though; his gaze was fixed on the splotch of long auburn hair spilled across the grass like a bright pool of blood. Fiona’s sea-green gown gleamed in the sunlight, shimmering like a pool of water with waves in motion, gently rising and falling.
Not dead—not yet. Avery’s steps quickened, and he pulled Merilda along behind him before kneeling next to the fallen woman, her gasping, short breaths audible. He took hold of one hip and shoulder, slowly turning her over onto her front.
Fiona’s hand was clasped over her midsection; her eyes met his, her mouth gasping wordlessly. Avery opened a connection. Just think the words, he sent, cradling her in his arms.
That shot knocked the wind out of me, Fiona sent back. Or maybe the fall. Did the shooter get anyone?
Let me see the wound, Avery sent. He gently pulled Fiona’s hand away from her bodice to look at the wound. A creased circular impression could be seen pressed into the silk, nearly an inch around, but there was no hole—no blood. Lying on the grass was a bolt with a flattened head, the discharge of its own magic having been forced back against itself by the more powerful enchantment of the gown.
I will be fine. If I can catch my breath. Fiona looked up at him. But the others? I heard at least one more shot out of the springbow, and—and I also heard something awful, a horrible, disgusting sound ending with a body falling to earth. Who died?
As he helped Fiona stand, Avery looked back in the direction of the fallen shooter. The ducal guard had moved into action—and there was William Taylor, of all people, holding the body of the shooter in his arms, the corpse’s dark hair nearly brushing against a blonde wig that lay on the ground as her neck lolled at an unnatural angle. In plain sight and framed by hair of a familiar shade, Avery could recognize the face. Bella had been the cloaked shooter.
The other brides are fine, Avery silently sent into Fiona’s mind. The shooter is not. He broke his connection with the auburn-haired one and reached out with his mind, touching the mind of the ranking guard with a note of wordless inquiry.
Man wants to take body. Is family—can smell that much. The guard sniffed, tail curled proudly high. We detain? Interrogate?
Avery looked for a long moment at the shocked face of William Taylor and the limp corpse that the necromancer held, a corpse that had once been a pretty girl who seemed to wish for nothing more in the world than to marry the Duke of York. A pretty girl whose father had died because said duke had decided to dissolve the York Textile Company. Whose family had likely lost a fortune.
No, Avery sent. Tell him he may go. I have caused that family more than enough pain. But someone should follow and keep an eye on him in case he is minded for revenge.
He turned away and walked back around the little row of uneven platforms, holding Merilda’s thick right hand and Fiona’s delicate left hand, steering two of his brides back into their proper place with a solemn frown on his face. Fiona’s silken gown was pristine in spite of her dive into the grass, but Merilda’s knuckles were spattered with blood, and there were a matching set of parallel streaks on her gray homespun dress marking where she had wiped her hand after the fateful blow.
Sabine stood in front of her platform, her hand halfway extended. As Avery grasped her hand to assist her in stepping back up on her platform, he looked into her bright blue eyes, opening up a channel of mental contact in preparation for speaking with her privately. Sabine’s gaze flickered down to her feet as the blonde woman shivered. She took a deep breath, then looked him back in the eyes, composing her expression.
“Do we still proceed?” The imperial notary’s raspy voice broke Avery’s concentration.
Avery turned to look at the notary. “Yes,” he said, then looked back at his brides, hesitating. “That is—if you are still willing? I do not blame any of you if you wish to take your leave to reconsider, under the circumstances.”
Fiona firmly gripped the wrist of an uncertain-looking Merilda. “We do,” the auburn-haired wizardess said at the same time as two other voices, neither of them Merilda’s, said “Yes.”
Althea opened her mouth, then closed it as Helen’s foot pressed down over hers. The strawberry blonde girl went up on her tiptoes to whisper in her brunette friend’s ear. Althea frowned, listening, then looked down at her friend, nodding. “We are with you, Your Grace,” Althea said aloud, grasping her friend’s grass-stained hand.
The wash of wordless determination flowing through Avery’s mental connection to Sabine reminded him that he had left it open. We will speak later. He focused, severing the connection and looking back and forth along the line of his brides one more time. The expressions of the faces looking back at him varied from grim determination to lip-biting nervousness to a furrowed brow of confusion, that last expression belonging to Fiona as she looked at the other seven brides.
The quarter-elf bent, picking up a small orange paper fox out of the grass, which disappeared into her sleeve as she shook her head. Standing near the front of the crowd of witnesses, Master Warin nodded, rolling his hand in a motion resembling that of a wheel turning. Fiona fixed a smile on her face that did not quite reach her eyes as she looked at Avery and spoke:
“The ceremony shall proceed.”