The wedding ceremony was beautiful, and it could not end soon enough.

The wooden bench on which Meric sat was uncomfortably stiff. Beside her, Andrea and Shahin seemed to have no trouble remaining in place, though Cassius squirmed back and forth on the far right. All knights in attendance wore Adrigolian ceremonial garb; Meric's dress was a long, brocaded gown with golden overlay, more opulent than anything she had ever worn. By serving as a knight on the victor's guard, she had earned the finery in which she was dressed. Yet Meric felt no pride in this, and the gown weighed heavily on her shoulders.

Lemarian servants had spent days arranging the great hall for the royal wedding, complete with thousands of benches, millions of flowers, and a luxurious green carpet down which the royal procession could walk. Now Johnathan and Marion stood at the head of the carpet, hands clasped, eyes pointed anywhere but at each either. Because they practiced different religions, the officiating priest spoke generically, of future happiness and unending dividends. According to Garner, when two nations were to be merged, the traditional ceremony had always been this way—godless and soulless, so tense that the air itself could fracture.

The guests were divided across the aisle. On the left sat Adrigolians, facing Marion, the bride; on the right sat Elusians, who stared at their prince-groom with barely disguised discontent. Every Elusian present let their contempt seep into the atmosphere; no hateful words needed to be spoken—hateful thought could be felt just as strongly. One might have expected Adrigolians to behave pompously, but their side of the great hall was surprisingly solemn. Even Cassius had entered the ceremony without saying a word.

Gavin had won, but the victory felt hollow. True victories were hard-won, borne from true challenge; what had transpired between Adrigole and Elusia was more conquest than war. Elusia had given way beneath Adrigole's sword like fruit beneath a knife. In turn, the knights themselves were butchers rather than heroes, and Meric felt the eyes of thousands of guests on her back.

Perhaps they watched her for more than her occupation.

Over the previous month, change had occurred in Meric. Her skin had changed most obviously; as the days had passed, the greenish color had faded to brown. Now only a careful eye could notice the olivine glint off of her hands and neck; now she did not need the cloak.

But she had not lost the feeling of being an other. The sensation had deepened over the past few weeks, even as the plant-like attributes of her body had diminished. She had never truly belonged anywhere, much less the Adrigolian guard. Now she had proof, in the way colors still appeared muted, in the unnatural movement of her body that had not quite faded away. Even among humans, she was set apart.

Among Adrigolians, too, she felt estranged. The knighthood had never truly been hers, though she had donned armor and marched into battle as a knight. She had been tortured as a knight, and now she was praised as a knight, but she had never been a knight. Weeks ago, Gavin had told her that what made a knight was more than battle prowess and combat training. He had said this to assure her that she was a knight, mage though she was, but he had not understood.

Knights loved their country. Meric did not.

The ceremony ended with the priest raising his wrinkled hands over Johnathan and Marion's heads. "Let these souls," he said flatly, "become one soul, and let their hopes become one hope, and let the burden of each day diminish as long as they are together."

Johnathan and Marion were married now. Based on the way they stiffened, eyes averted to the floor or the ceiling, they knew this; the audience knew it too, though they could not applaud yet. The couple would need to complete the ceremony first.

Tradition dictated that the the two parties kiss. Meric had seen one wedding ceremony before, in the Feralian chapel beside the college. In that ceremony, the bride had kissed the groom with astonishing tenderness, and the ensuing applause had been almost reverent. Sometimes she thought about that kiss, when asked about romantic prospects; once she felt an emotion as deep as that expressed in the college chapel, she would understand love.

Johnathan and Marion's kiss was nothing like the one she remembered. Johnathan leaned toward Marion like a board falling against a wall, and Marion nearly swayed backward but stood her ground. The joining of their lips was the equivalent of two statues brushing against one another. Their eyes remained open, frozen with something resembling panic.

When they drew apart, relief propelled the applause that followed. Meric could see Gavin on the bench in front of her, leaning to whisper something to Garner, but the noise was swallowed by the room. Having failed to hear him, she turned her gaze on the Elusian guests to her right. No one smiled. In fact, she had never seen so many people frowning in the same place before. She could not view the Adrigolian guests behind her, but their applause sounded as lackluster and scattered as the Elusians'. When Meric could perceive no difference between the two sides, she realized with a start that there was no difference—in name, both sides were now Adrigolian.

"Off to the reception, then," Cassius murmured on Shahin's right.

Off to the reception, then.

Distinguished guests would move from the great hall to the banquet hall, where a sumptuous spread had been laid in celebration of the kingdoms' union. Meric could only imagine the festivities would resemble those of the Adrigolian knights' welcome feast, only busier and more tense. The common guests were lucky, because they would be able to leave the castle and celebrate in the streets. Drunken on cheap mead and stuffed with flaky Lemarian pastries, the common folk might forget that the union was not a happy one. Guests in the banquet hall would have no opportunity to forget—the perpetrators of their misery would stare them in the face all night.

But Meric would not witness any of this, because she would not attend the reception.

She escaped in the flood of guests from the great hall, letting herself fall behind her knight brethren. When she found herself tangled in a crowd of merchants, she increased her pace and strode forward, out the double-doors of the castle rather than further into the palace. Andrea might be wondering where she was by now; they had planned to sit beside one another at the feast and poke fun at the nobles' ceremonial dress.

By the end of the night, all the knights would feel her absence. She would not have arrived at the banquet hall, and her chair at the table of honor would be unfilled. They would return to their chambers in the royal guesthouse still wondering where she'd gone; they would wake in the morning with no answer.

Because as Meric left the palace that day, she understood that she was leaving for good. She would not accompany the king and his advisor on their victory tour, and she would not take a station of honor in the king's personal guard. Andrea and Cassius and Shahin would never see her again, except perhaps in passing, on the streets of an undefined town. They might see a woman with a green cloak over her head, and they might pause and crane their necks to examine her. They might be reminded of someone they had known briefly, in a time of crisis. But by then Meric would have slipped away, and the knights of Adrigole would be left clutching a memory in their polished gauntlets.

The thought placed a twinge of guilt in Meric's stomach. The knights had been good to her—Solaria and Andrea, Shahin and Cay, all the warriors who had come and gone. When she had disappeared into the forest for days on end, they had taken over her duties, protecting her standing in the guard with fierce loyalty. When she had been tortured in Johnathan's dungeon, they had risked their own lives to defend hers. At every point of weakness and powerlessness, Meric had been shielded by the strength and wit of her companions.

But Meric was not truly a knight, and so she could not stay, as much as the parting pained her.

Knights loved their country, but Meric did not. King Gavin's cause engendered no passion in her chest, as it might a true knight. She had joined the knighthood as means to an end, believing it would lead her to her father and, consequently, her mother. When this mission had failed, she had clung to the knighthood as an executor of justice—Elusia had stolen too much from her for her to redeem their leadership. Anger had bound her to Gavin's side, as had memories of torture and a hollow feeling where her magic had once resided.

But Meric had changed over the past month. As Gavin's forces absorbed the entirety of Elusia, she could not deny the truth—Adrigole and Elusia did not represent right and wrong. She had visited the infirmaries in Fallholt, stuffed with the slowly dying and the hopeless; she had seen the wagons of townsfolk on the main road, traveling to places where military occupation might not touch them; she had seen her own face reflected in the eyes of those who feared her. Elusia had committed atrocities, but Adrigole had done the same. Both were wrong.

Meric could not reap the rewards of her kingdom's ugliness. The victory tour would be a farce, and the station of honor would be useless; neither served a purpose but to parade Adrigole's superiority. Meric knew, too, that somewhere in the future, Gavin's sights would rest on another kingdom. When that day came, the knights would be asked to ride once again, and Meric would find herself an agent of brutality.

She could not stand with Gavin. She would have stood with her knight-comrades, had circumstances been different, but she could not stand with them under the Adrigolian banner.

Neither could she return to Wicaria. The only family she had known resided there—Zuri still trained for his professorship, and the Feralian sisters worshipped the old gods in their roughly-hewn chapel—but they had given her all they could. For a moment, she imagined cresting Traveler's Hill and watching the buildings of Wicaria come into focus. She imagined knocking on Zuri's door, seeing his face light up at her return, letting him usher her inside to a boiling pot of tea. They might pick up where they'd left off, with Zuri sharing too much of himself and Meric sharing far too little, with Zuri never seeming to mind the discrepancy.

Perhaps she would go back, someday. She paused on the main street of Lemaria and allowed herself to smile. Yes, she would go back there. She would be a different woman then—different even than the woman she was now—but she would fall into that same old world and feel as if nothing had changed.

But today, Wicaria could not give her what she needed.

She knew of only one man who could.

*

The Silver Chalice was a small tavern on the outskirts of Lemaria, its brick walls weathered by wind and rain. A tarnished sign dangled from the wall—perhaps the sign was real silver, then—and a green-painted door hung open, providing a dim look inside the bar. From what Meric could see, the place was already filled with poorer celebrants of the royal wedding. A stout man near the door was raising two mugs of beer in a raucous toast, and the red-faced woman beside him was straining to grab the mug in his right hand.

As Meric passed over the threshold, her cloak seemed to disguise her features thoroughly enough. No one glanced too closely at her, though she'd worried the heavy pack she wore might draw villagers' gazes. The pack contained all she owned of true value—keepsakes from the towns she'd visited, a spell book she'd brought from Wicaria, her plain traveling clothes—but despite its weight, the pack appeared too small to Meric. She had never been a materialist, but she had imagined her possessions might take up more space.

The man Meric found at the center bar took up plenty of space. From behind, his shoulders appeared massive, almost like a giant's; he wore no hat, and his curly, tangled hair hung loose around his shoulders. Though his presence was enormous, no one looked at him, and he hunched over a small tankard of ale without moving.

Meric slid into the seat beside him. When the rosy-cheeked barmaid approached, Meric only shook her head and stared at the wooden counter, into which countless words and symbols had been etched. The most prominent was an arrow pointing towards the large man's seat, emblazoned with the moniker "Sir Giant."

She said the words aloud: "Sir Giant?"

Her voice was too quiet, but the man's head lifted anyway. Meric watched as his entire weight shifted on the tiny barstool, rotating so that he might see her face.

Time seemed to stop.

His skin was far darker than hers, as was his hair, which covered his chin in an impressive beard. But those eyes—the brown color was hers, and the shape of the lids, and the way they turned inward as he concentrated. The nose was hers exactly, down to the bump on the bridge. The full, resolute lips might have been hers, except Meric's lips were not nearly so resolute because they were trembling.

Ambidex Ophelen said nothing for a full minute. He blinked, and he looked at her, and he blinked again; Meric fought to keep her face as stolid as his, but she'd been overcome with the urge to cry, and she felt as if she were breaking.

For the first time in weeks, she could no longer feel the weight of magic in her chest. Neither could she feel the weight of her pack. Her entire body seemed to have been lifted, spread across the heavens by a sensation she had only imagined.

"Sir Ophelen, then," Meric managed to say, but her voice was fractured and weak, and she was already falling apart.

He leaned in as she crumbled, his great arms coming to rest around her cloaked body while she wept. He was sturdy in every respect, but something inside of him shook. He smelled like cloves and ale and the plants that grew alongside the farm-road.

When he spoke, his voice rumbled from somewhere deep within him: "Oh, Meric."

He knew her name, and this made her weep harder.

She had imagined this moment countless times, when she had still lived with the Feralian sisters in Wicaria. She had imagined a stiffness in Sir Ophelen upon seeing her—he was supposed to have been jolly in all the stories, but she thought that the jolliness would fade when he was forced to acknowledge what he'd done. She had imagined a distance would come between them while she asked where her mother was. She had imagined that after he'd told her about her mother, she would never see him again.

But she couldn't have predicted the feeling.

Of everything she had pictured, the reverse was true. She had found him quiet and morose, and she had stirred something in him, something that trembled in his chest as his arms enveloped her. She had thought he would feel as distant to her as every would-be home had felt in the past, and yet the deepest parts of her knew that this was right.

Here in her father's arms, she could not imagine leaving.

They drew apart, Meric still shaking, Sir Ophelen staring at her as if he'd never seen something so beautiful in his life. Gods, she'd intended to ask him about her mother. She'd never needed a father, particularly one who had abandoned her in a town he'd merely visited. She'd wanted to gather information and leave, and yet here she was.

Impossibly, she had found herself at home.

"You'll have questions," Ambidex Ophelen rumbled, his eyes shining as he gazed upon her still.

And Meric did have questions, but she expected this man would have the answers. He could answer about the eldritch abominations she'd created, the forces that took hold of her when she least desired them to; he could tell her about her mother and her abandonment in Wicaria and the countless missing pieces from her personal history.

He could answer questions she didn't know she'd wanted to ask.

But they'd have time for that. As Meric stared into her father's eyes, and as her vision blurred, she was sure—they would have plenty of time.