Jem’s father was shocked into silence at the entire exchange. After glancing around at everyone, Prince Lukka approached him and calmly said, “It’s nice to see you again, General.” Jem’s father seemed to remember his manners, and hastily lowered his head, bending at the waist in a deep bow. At the sight, Jem hurriedly turned toward the prince and dropped into a curtsy.

When she rose, she realized that Matias hadn’t bowed, as if he wasn’t required to bow to royalty. And while Prince Lukka had nodded at both Jem and her father, he hadn’t seemed upset about Matias’s lack of deference.

Jem could not figure any of this out. Her mind felt like it was spinning. Matias was alive, he hated her now, he had magic in his hands, and he was friends with a prince.

“We are honored to host you, Your Majesty,” Jem’s father said. “Would you like a room prepared for you?”

“That’s not necessary,” Prince Lukka said. “I’m just here to escort Matias as he picks up his woman. Then we’re heading to the capital.” He turned and walked back toward his carriage.

There was a callousness to his words that made Jem flinch. “His woman?” Jem had felt like property when she was being married off to the elderly Lord Penrose, but this was almost worse.

“Your…Your Majesty, I…I apologize, but I cannot permit my daughter to go with you,” General Vespertine stuttered. Prince Lukka turned and just raised his eyebrows.

“What is going on?” Tauriel’s harsh voice cut through the air, but she froze when she saw the prince standing in the courtyard. She dropped into a quick curtsy, then rose and looked questioningly at the general.

“And why can’t you ‘permit’ your daughter to go with us?” the prince asked.

“I…it…she would need a chaperone for it to be proper,” Jem’s father said. “And I cannot spare my wife with all of the guests we have at the moment.”

“Yes,” Tauriel sputtered. “It would be completely inappropriate otherwise!”

Prince Lukka leaned casually against the carriage. “A husband and wife don’t need a chaperone.”

“It wasn’t a legal marriage.” Jem’s father scowled. “It was the frivolous defiance of naïve children.”

Lukka looked over at Matias. Matias stepped forward and pulled a wrinkled and stained document out of his pocket. As Lukka made a show of reading it, Jem gasped.

It was their marriage certificate. Matias had kept it this whole time?

“It looks legal to me,” Lukka said, shrugging.

“The marriage was never consummated,” General Vespertine said. Jem felt her skin flush with embarrassment. “Matias was gone for two years and presumed dead. I assumed it was technically annulled.”

“Then why don’t we all go to the palace together and sort it out with my father, the king, shall we?” Lukka suggested.

Jem watched her father’s face tighten with anger. But finally, he nodded. “We will prepare ourselves for travel. I believe the king will agree with me. James, come.”

Jem looked between her father and the prince and Matias, standing by the carriage. She swallowed hard and then took a step toward the house, obeying her father’s command.

Matias grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him. “You’d better come back out or I’ll come looking for you. You don’t want that,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. Jem suppressed a shudder, and instead she simply nodded. He let her go and she hurried after her father.

Tauriel was waiting for them in the entry hall. “What happened?” she demanded. “Did that boy really have magic?”

General Vespertine ignored her question. “Prepare my travel things,” he barked. “And Jem’s, too.”

Tauriel crossed her arms. “Prince Lukka is a rake and a scoundrel. I heard he spent a month on a pleasure cruise outside of the kingdom, on a ship full of courtesans.”

“The boy is a ne’er-do-well,” the general agreed. “But he had the fortune of being born royal. He has power whether or not he deserves it. But do not worry. We will sort this out with the king.”

He sounded so certain that the king would take his side. But Jem wasn’t so sure. The prince may have acted irresponsibly from time to time, but he was still the king’s son. And for whatever reason, he seemed to favor Matias. Jem wasn’t sure the king would dismiss Matias’s claim to her so quickly. Her fate was in the hands of the king now. The thought made her swallow hard. She would be either Matias’s wife or Lord Penrose’s. Unless…

“What happened to Lord Penrose?” Jem asked.

“The doctors are tending to him,” Tauriel snapped.

Jem wasn’t sure how to feel about this. She didn’t want to marry him, but she didn’t want him to die, especially not because of her. She already had the weight of one lost life on her hands.

“Come,” Tauriel said, yanking Jem toward her room. When they arrived, two maids stood up quickly and looked at them in surprise. “Prepare James for travel,” Tauriel said briskly. “She is going to the palace.” Without another word, Tauriel spun and exited the room, slamming the door behind her.

The maids stood in amazement for a moment, then quickly moved into action. Jem’s enormous wedding dress was unlaced and unbuttoned and lifted over her head. Her traveling clothes had already been laid out, with the intention that she should wear them to Lord Penrose’s estate. But now she was wearing them to accompany the prince and Matias to the palace.

Jem lifted her arms to have her travel skirt placed over her head and settled onto her waist. She tried to get herself to believe that everything that had happened in the last hour was real. Matias was alive. Alive.

The boy she had loved from the time she was a little girl was alive. Matias had filled the hole in Jem’s heart that had formed there when her mother had died.

Jem lost her mother when she was eleven years old, but her memories of the woman were full of kindness and love. She had always been painfully shy, and in the times when her panic overtook her, her mother had rubbed her back and helped her to breathe deeply. Sometimes she would make Jem a soothing tea or distract her with a game. She was so calm, so noble. She never got angry, not even when Jem had gotten into her box of jewels and scattered them across the floor. Jem’s mother had simply helped her gather them up and put them back.

After she died, the general gave all of those jewels to Tauriel. On the day of her mother’s death, Jem had taken one jewel from the box—a small, simple ring that her mother had always worn. During the funeral, Jem couldn’t stop her shoulders from shaking with sobs. The general had yanked her aside and scolded her for “making a scene” in front of all the guests who had come to pay their respects. So Jem had run into the stables to cry.

There, she had been found by a young stable boy, barely a few years older. He had given her a rag to wipe away her tears and had sat with her in the hay until her crying had slowed. He told her his name was Matias.

After that, they were inseparable. He whittled her gifts and trinkets out of wood and taught her how to whistle with blades of grass. When she was a little older, he was her first kiss. The next day, Tauriel had found them holding hands in the stables and had beaten her so badly with the switch that she couldn’t walk for a week.

After that, she and Matias met in secret. Their love grew in stolen moments together, and when Jem was eighteen, she begged Matias to take her away from her cold father and violent stepmother. The two of them had saved for months, and Jem had never been so happy as she was in the moment she stood across from Matias and became his wife.

But then her father had found them and sent Matias off to war. She thought he’d died. And now he was back, suddenly alive and so different from the boy who used to carve her trinkets out of wood.

Jem gasped as the maids tightened her bodice. This morning, she had been prepared to end the day as a married woman. Well, that was technically still true. Just in a completely different way. Matias was barely recognizable, and it broke her heart to think about how much he seemed to despise her.

“My Lady?” one of the maids said. Jem looked down to see her kneeling at her feet, waiting to slip off her wedding slippers and replace them with traveling shoes. Jem lifted one of her feet and allowed the maid to change her footwear, wincing slightly as the laces were wrapped around her legs and pulled tight.

The other maid threw a traveling cloak around her shoulders and fastened the clasp at her throat. And then Jem was ready. The two maids stepped back and curtsied, their eyes full of questions that they were too polite to ask.

Jem stepped out of her room and into the hall. What an unexpected turn of events. Of course she hadn’t wanted to marry an old man.

But with Matias being practically a stranger, traveling to the palace with him as her husband felt a little like going from one bad situation to an even worse one.