The processional took four minutes.

She had not counted. She had simply arrived at the temple doors and begun walking and arrived at the altar and the four minutes existed somewhere behind her, accounted for by her feet if not her attention. The nave of the High Temple of Solan was long and high-vaulted and full of people she knew by name and title and political allegiance, and she had looked at none of them. She had looked at the altar. She had looked at the High Priest, who was a tall man with a composed face and the unhurried certainty of deep practice. She had looked at the great window above the altar, which was filled with amber and gold glass and was throwing colored light across the stone floor in long warm rectangles.

She had not looked at Cassius until she was standing beside him.

He was already there when she arrived, which was the correct protocol — the groom received at the altar, the bride processioned to meet him. He was dressed formally, dark wool with the Halor crest at his collar, and he was standing very still, facing the altar. He did not turn to watch her come down the nave. He waited, and she processed the length of the temple and came to stand at his left, and then and only then did he turn his head and look at her.

She looked back.

She filed it and faced the priest.

The rite began.

The High Priest of Solan spoke in the old tongue for the opening invocation, which was customary and which Seralyn had known was coming and which was nonetheless considerably longer than she had anticipated. She stood and listened to words she understood approximately two-thirds of and worked, quietly, at the remaining third. The old tongue and the modern tongue shared a root but had diverged across centuries in ways that made translation unreliable. She caught binding and witness and what she believed was a reference to Solan's eye but might have been a reference to Solan's mercy, depending on whether the verb was active or passive, and she was constructing the grammatical case for each when Cassius said, very quietly and entirely without moving: "You are somewhere else entirely."

She kept her eyes on the priest. "I am precisely here."

"You have not blinked in some time," he said, at the same volume. "That is generally not a sign of presence."

She had not realized she had not been blinking. She resisted the impulse to blink now, which was its own kind of admission. "I was attending to the invocation," she said.

A pause. "And?"

"The verb in the fourth line is ambiguous," she said. "It changes the meaning considerably."

Another pause. The priest moved into the second invocation, his voice filling the vault above them in deep, unhurried waves. Around them the congregation was silent and attentive and watching the altar, and the two of them were standing very still and facing entirely forward and speaking in voices that could not have carried past the nearest candlestick.

"Which interpretation do you favor?" he asked.

"The active," she said. "It is more grammatically consistent with the third-century forms. The passive reading requires an irregular conjugation that fell out of use before this rite was standardized."

A pause. "You read liturgical old tongue."

"I read everything," she said.

He said nothing to this immediately. The priest raised both hands. The light through the amber glass shifted as a cloud moved outside and the rectangles on the floor changed color by several degrees.

"You look well," Cassius said. "The gown — " He stopped. Started again. "It suits you."

She kept her eyes forward. "Thank you," she said.

The priest lowered his hands. The first reading began — a passage from the Vaethic Covenant, the terms of the divine agreement rendered in ceremonial language that was very beautiful and entirely impractical. She had read it before. She listened to it again and thought about how strange it was to stand in a room full of people and be the least visible person in it, which was not a new experience but had never before been quite so literal.

"I owe you an apology," Cassius said.

She turned her head very slightly. Not enough to look at him. "For what?"

"The past eleven days." A brief pause. "I thought you might prefer the distance. I should have asked."

She considered this. The reading continued above them, sonorous and formal. "There was nothing to discuss. I did not mind the distance," she said, which was true. She had minded other things, but not that.

"Nevertheless," he said.

She looked at the priest. At the great amber window. At the long rectangles of colored light on the floor. Eleven days of passing each other in corridors and sharing meals with her family between them like a very effective buffer, and whatever had happened in the garden on the first day had simply sat there, unaddressed, waiting.

"We have managed it," she said. "It is of no consequence now."

"Perhaps not," he said. "I should still have asked."

The reading ended. The priest began the rite of binding — the central portion of the ceremony, the part that was not language so much as action. He spoke their names. He spoke their houses. He spoke the words the law required and the faith required, and four hundred years of identical ceremonies had accumulated into something so worn and familiar that she could feel the groove of it underfoot.

She extended her hand when she was meant to extend it.

Cassius took it. His hand was warm and his grip was certain and he held her hand with care. The priest wrapped the cord — white and gold on one side, Drevornian grey-black on the other — around their joined hands in the pattern the rite prescribed, speaking as he worked. She felt the cord settle. She looked at their hands, which was the prescribed direction for this portion, and she felt Cassius's thumb move once across her knuckle — brief, deliberate, there and then gone — and she kept her eyes on the cord.

"Are you all right," he said. Very quiet. Still facing forward.

She thought about the morning. About the window seat and the flat dark sea and her hands in her lap and how steady they had been.

"Yes," she said. "Are you."

A pause. "Yes."

The priest spoke the final binding words. The cord was unwound. The rings were produced — gold, plain, functional. He placed hers on her finger and she placed his on his and the priest raised his voice for the declaration and the congregation stirred and somewhere behind her she heard what might have been her mother and might have been the acoustic properties of the vault doing something complicated.

It was done.

She was married.

The thought arrived flatly, without ceremony. She stood in the High Temple of Solan with Cassius Halor's ring on her finger and the amber light falling across the floor and the congregation beginning to move, and she thought: it is done. And then: and now what.

Cassius turned to face her. She turned to face him. They were very close, the closest they had been since the garden, and she looked at him directly for the first time since she had arrived at the altar and found that he was already looking at her.

"Seralyn," he said.

"Yes."

He looked at her for a moment. "We will be all right," he said.

She held his gaze. Around them the temple was moving, her father crossing toward them, the chamberlain behind him, the long machinery of the occasion beginning its next sequence.

"I expect we do not have a choice in that matter either," she said.