The binding came first. It always came first. Thessaly unwound the previous day's strips and set them aside, and Seralyn stood in her shift and felt the brief relief of having her back to herself for sixty seconds, and then Thessaly began the new wrapping and the pressure returned in increments and she breathed through it with the practice of seven years. Today the binding had to be flawless. The gown was structured through the bodice but the silk was thin and unforgiving, and if anything shifted it would show. Thessaly knew this and worked accordingly — slower than usual, more careful, checking each wrap before proceeding to the next. Neither of them spoke during this part. They never did.

When it was done Seralyn rolled her shoulders once and let out a breath.

"Good?" Thessaly asked.

"Good."

The gown came next.

Her mother had wanted something magnificent. Cathedral length, layered, with the Duskengrove gold worked into the embroidery at the hem and the cuffs and the long formal train that would sweep the temple floor behind her for the full length of the processional. It would have been a statement — her mother's preferred mode of communication in formal contexts. It would have said: this house has not diminished itself. This is not a retreat. This is not fear.

Seralyn had looked at the design her mother's dressmaker presented and thought: I will not wear someone else's statement on my own wedding day. It is the one day I am permitted to make a statement of any kind, and it will be mine.

The gown she had chosen was silk, white and unornamented, fitted through the bodice and falling from the hip in one long clean line. No train. No embroidery. The sleeves had a narrow pleat at the wrist that was the single concession to occasion she had permitted herself. Her mother had looked at it and said nothing. That nothing had lasted three full days.

Thessaly lifted the gown with both hands and settled it over her, and Seralyn felt the silk come down and the bodice close around her and then Thessaly's hands at the back, working the fastenings from the bottom up. The room was quiet. Through the window the morning light was fully gold now, doing what Aelundran light did — finding every surface and making something of it.

She looked at herself in the glass while Thessaly worked.

She looked like herself. That was the intention and it had been achieved and she stood there and felt, with full clarity, how little it mattered. She could be entirely herself. She could be composed and self-possessed and dressed exactly as she chose, and it changed nothing about the fact that in three hours she would stand in front of the High Priest of Solan and say words she had not written and be bound by terms she had not negotiated and become the legal instrument of an alliance that her father had decided required her.

The last fastening closed.

She had done nothing wrong. She had done nothing to deserve this and nothing to avoid it and there was no version of her choices in the past three months that would have produced a different outcome, because the outcome had been decided before any of her choices were made. That was what sat in her chest like something that had not agreed to be carried.

"Your hair," Thessaly said, quietly. "Come and sit."

She sat. Thessaly began, and her hands were deft and certain, and Seralyn closed her eyes for a moment and simply existed — a person sitting in a chair while someone she trusted did something careful with her hair.

"He is not a bad man," Thessaly said, after a while.

Seralyn opened her eyes. "No," she said. "He is not."

"That is not nothing."

"No. It is not nothing." She watched a pin go in. Then another. "It is also not the point."

Thessaly did not argue with this. A third pin. A fourth. The arrangement was taking shape in the glass — simple, as Seralyn had asked, drawn back from her face and secured without architecture.

"What is the point?" Thessaly asked.

Seralyn considered it. "The point," she said, "is that I am twenty-five years old and I have read everything in that library and I speak four languages and I have managed this household's correspondence during every illness my father has had in the past decade, and the use they have found for me is this." She looked at her own reflection. "A guarantee. A mechanism of trust between two kingdoms that do not naturally trust each other." A pause. "I am not angry at Cassius Halor. I am not angry at Drevorn. I am angry that this is what I am for. That this is all I am permitted to be for."

The room was quiet.

"You are more than this," Thessaly said.

"I know that," Seralyn said. "Everyone in that temple today will know it too, in the abstract. None of it will change what happens in an hour."

Thessaly placed the last pin and stepped back.

In the glass, Seralyn looked composed. She looked correct. She looked exactly like a woman who had everything under complete governance. She stood, and the skirts settled around her, and she pulled on her gloves — white, simply made, buttoned at the wrist — and smoothed them once over each hand.

There was a knock at the door. Her father's man, come to escort her. The timing was correct. Everything was proceeding on schedule.

She wanted to be sick. She wanted to go back to bed. She wanted, with a vehemence that surprised her even now, to simply not be the person this was happening to. To be Orren, who would inherit everything and lose nothing. To be anyone who had not been arranged.

She breathed in. She breathed out.

"Your Highness," Thessaly said. She was holding out Seralyn's bouquet — white flowers from the palace garden, simply arranged.

Seralyn took it.

She walked to the door. She opened it. Her father's man bowed. The corridor beyond was bright with morning light, and at the end of it was the staircase, and at the bottom of the staircase was everything that came next.

She went through.