Right.“With this vow,” she repeated.
“I bind myself to him.”
“I—” She swallowed tightly. “Bind myself…”
Garin waited for her to finish the sentence. When she did not, he continued, brows knitted. “In holy wedlock, as ordained by our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Lilac choked, suddenly blinded by her tears. “I—” She shook her head, unable to finish. “Just put the fucking ring on, Garin.”
“Are you sure?” His hands fell immediately. “Let me?—”
She cut him off with a glare. “Do it.”
He dipped his head, held his breath, and took her left hand in his.
With reverent restraint, Garin—her regnant, her friend, her great love—slid Maximilian’s ring onto her second-to-last finger.
46
The shouting beyond the walls sounded throughout the chapel, a persistent reminder of the cost of her own selfish cause. Lilac couldn’t tell whether they were winning or losing. Garin’s face remained stoic as he listened, his eyes glazed over.
It was a solemn and quick affair. There was no ceremony for the crowning. No row of bishops to kiss her hand or congratulate her. No cardinal to bless her. Only the hanging silence of a chapel filled with strained reverence, and her aching knowledge that every step forward, for herself or her kingdom, had come at a price.
Father Guillaume and Henri stood on the step above her.
The crown loomed, heavy and foreboding, lowering onto her head like a chain clasped shut. And still, she remained standing.
Lilac didn’t falter, nor faint. The applause through the room was quiet, as if everyone felt her heart breaking.
No one realized Garin’s hunger until it was too late.
His hand trembled, and he stared down at it, confused. Then, his arm lifted—and he reached for her. She thought he would caress her face, but he kept going… and gently lifted the crown from her head.
He was merely shaken. Lilac hushed everyone who made a disapprovingcomment and extended a hand to him—to her crown—but he jerked his shoulders back, just out of reach.
“Garin?”
“No,” Garin hissed, curling into himself, staggering away as if her touch would burn him. He dropped the circlet, which clattered against the chapel stones. “It’s the hunger. Kestrel’s deal?—”
He snarled, clawing at his head.
Dread tore through her. She yearned to help him, to calm him, but every part of her screamed to run. “But the chest was delivered!” Lilac stepped forward, pale in the sputtering torchlight. “Garin, talk to me—please.”
Everyone shot from their seats and began backing away, freezing when Garin’s head popped back up, tracking their movement.
He shrank away from them. “Bast,” Garin croaked, low and deep. “The chest.”
“We—we sent it off in the faerie fire,” Bastion said, fingers twitching toward the blade at his side. “I swear.”
“We did,” Piper cried. “It vanished like you said it would!”
Henri and Father Guillaume stumbled back toward the altar, while Marguerite was already halfway up the organ’s woodwork, skirts hiked, hair wild.
Garin snapped his head up at her, and his eyes were no longer human. Deep crimson bled into them, twin pools of bloodshot hunger. His fangs split his mouth in a snarl too wide, too ravenous to resemble anything human at all.
Yanna and Isabel surged forward, but he turned andgrowled, a deep, guttural sound born of curses and carrion, and it rooted them in place. “Help her,” he said in a voice no longer his own, “and you will be slain.”
“Get back!” Lilac shouted, throwing a hand toward the doors. “Leave us! Go!”
