The parchment felt heavier than it should have.
Emeric Halden stared at the two names printed in careful black ink; his own, and beneath it, a total stranger, Isolde Rowan.
He wondered, not for the first time that day, how a single sheet of paper could rearrange an entire life.
"You’re staring at it like it’s going to change," his father said, pulling him from his thoughts, himself also glued to a ledger in his hands. Ledgers. His father loved ledgers. Debts owed, debts collected, and now, apparently, a daughter-in-law collected like a debt repaid.
"Just making sure I read it right," Emeric said flatly. His dreary expression lost on his father who, he was starting to believe could care less. The man was all numbers and inhuman. He had learnt this long ago.
"You read it right. You’re married. Congratulations." His father said in a tone that would have been mistaken for the announcement of a funeral, not a wedding.
Emeric folded the parchment and slid it into his coat. Married. To a woman he had met exactly once, seven years ago, at a ceremony where she’d been the brightest thing in the room and he’d been the boy who failed his Awakening in front of four hundred witnesses. Back then she’d been the star of the whole town. She later gained the nickname, Storm Mage. She looked untouchable and people said her name like a blessing.
Emeric stared at the ghost of a woman on the wheel chair a few feet from him. She looked nothing like the bright ray of sunshine he had seen 8 years ago. She stared into the distance, looking at nothing in particular. Once celebrated, now she was rubble the Rowan family wanted quietly swept somewhere out of sight. And so was he.
It made a kind of ugly sense, when he thought about it. Two houses, two failures, one convenient solution: marry them to each other, and neither family has to look at the problem again.
The ceremony itself, if it could be called that, took all but eleven minutes.
No guests but Edard Halden, his father and a civil registrar in a gray coat who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else as he read the old formal vows off a card in a voice flattened by having said them a thousand times for a thousand couples. He wondered if everyone else felt the sense of dread that was creeping up his neck or this was just a unique circumstance of his current condition. Emeric’s father stood in as witness for House Halden, arms crossed as the ceremony went on, checking a pocket watch twice before the registrar had even finished. No immediate family stood in for House Rowan at all — a signed proxy letter handled by a proxy who he was seeing was a maid did that job instead.
Isolde was all but there physically as she was wheeled by the proxy sent by House Rowan. The Rowans had arranged for hers and their signature to be taken separately, at her residence, "for her comfort," which everyone in the room understood to mean her family hadn’t wanted to be seen escorting her to a chapel in a wheelchair. Emeric signed his name across from a blank space where a bride should have been standing, and told himself it didn’t feel as strange as it did.
"That’s it, then," the registrar said, stamping the parchment with more ceremony than the wedding itself had contained. "Copy goes to the Ministry registry by end of week. Congratulations."
Emeric’s father was already checking his watch again.
"Try not to embarrass the house further," he said, on his way out. It was the closest thing to a blessing Emeric was going to get.
The house they’d been given sat at the edge of the noble district, close enough to keep up appearances, far enough that no one would have to actually see them. White walls. Blue roof tiles. Ordinary, in a way that felt almost insulting for what it was hiding.
Emeric arrived first, hours before he needed to. He told himself it was to check the place over — air out the rooms, make sure the kitchen actually had food in it, confirm the one bedroom prepared for two people had been fitted with the low bed and rails the Rowan household had specified in a curt, one-paragraph letter. In truth, he mostly just walked the empty rooms and tried to picture a stranger living in them alongside him.
After the ceremony, she had been wheeled back home to "get her things" but he knew that this was also another pretense to keep the marriage under wraps. But people were resourceful at finding out well kept secrets.
It was a small house by noble standards. A sitting room that got good afternoon light. A kitchen he barely knew how to use. A study with more empty shelves than books. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom longest, looking at the rails bolted along one wall, practical and a little clinical, and felt something that wasn’t quite shame but stood close enough to it. He heaved a sigh, fighting back the wave of nausea that was slowly creeping up on him.
He’d been told she would arrive by carriage an hour later, arranged and paid for by a household that could no longer be bothered to send an actual person to see her settled.
When the carriage did come, he went out to meet it himself. No one else would.
The driver helped lower a wheelchair from the back. It was an old design, iron-framed, not built for comfort and then, carefully, lifted a woman into it. He didn’t linger. Payment had already been arranged; there was no reason for him to stay, and every reason, apparently, to leave as quickly as the horses would allow.
Emeric had prepared himself, he thought, for what seven years and a shattered magic core might have done to the girl he remembered from the ceremony. He hadn’t prepared for how it would actually feel to see her this up close.
She was still striking in pale in a way that looked carved rather than sickly, sharp-boned, her black hair pulled back in a simple braid that did nothing to soften the impression that she’d rather be anywhere else. Her eyes found his and held there, assessing, the way a soldier sizes up unfamiliar terrain.
"You’re the Unblessed one," she said in a way that he knew was not a question.
"Emeric," he said. "And you’re the Storm Mage."
"Not anymore."
He didn’t push it. He’d learned, over the years, that pity was the fastest way to make an already bad day worse, and he suspected she’d had enough of both today.
"I’ll take you inside," he said instead, and reached for the wheelchair’s handles.
"I can manage the chair myself." Her hands were already on the wheels.
"I know." He said, keeping his hands where they were. "I’m not doing it because I think you can’t. I’m doing it because it’s cold, and I’d rather not stand out here longer than we have to."
He waited for a response. A pause, noticing something in her posture change.
"Fine," she said. "But slowly. I don’t need to be paraded through my own front door like an invalid."
"Wasn’t planning on parading anyone. I’ve never been much for spectacle."
His mind went to the day when four hundred witnesses watched him fail his Awakening and he almost laughed. "Trust me."