ONCE THE TRAFFIC of speedy replies slackened, carters and carriers arrived with wedding presents. The third largest reception room joined the second to display the gifts pouring in from both kingdoms. Some, of course, had to be refrigerated in the icecaves which were already preserving wedding feast supplies. Others met with some ridicule, and there were dozens of duplicates, but as some of these were useful items, the donors received gracious thanks.
The bride and her entourage arrived a good ten days before the wedding, with such a baggage train that Cambion was heard to remark aloud that he hoped there would be enough closets in the west wing for everything.
"She's not coming," was the first sentence Lady Willow whispered in the ear of her intended.
"Oh?" Jamas held his fiancйe slightly away from him, looking into her eyes to see if there was a diminution of her anxiety. Despite the dark circles under them, he thought she looked marginally less tense.
"She is pregnant and will not trust herself to being jostled in a coach." Willow paused a beat. "She made my own mother stay behind with her and sent her sister along." Willow actually wrinkled her nose up at him. "To act on behalf of both. It was mean of her to keep my own mother, even if Mother is very good with gestational vapors." Willow sighed with regret. "At least I was allowed Laurel."
"Ah, Lady Laurel," Jamas said, taking the hand of his sister-in-law elect and pulling her into his side to give her an affectionate kiss.
"Don't think you're marrying the pair of us," Laurel said with a little laugh, but his attention had pleased her for her eyes sparkled.
Then Jamas noticed that she was surveying the assembled. Her eyes became focused and he saw that she had been looking for Grenejon.
The equerry, who had been giving directions to a stylishly dressed older woman, hurried to his prince and the two ladies.
"Lady Willow, your obedient and faithful servant," Grenejon said with a deep and respectful bow which he then turned in Lady Laurel's direction. "I am yours equally, Lady Laurel. Countess Solesne is anxious to whisk you both away to your apartments to rest."
Willow let out an exasperated sigh. "I have never fainted in my life, and I am certainly not fatigued by the journey. Sollie does worry that I won't be in looks on The Day." Her voice was almost merry but then her face clouded as she saw who was approaching their quartet from the other large travelling coach. She laid her hand on Jamas' arm, her fingers pressing fiercely. "Prince Jamas, may I make known to you, Fanina, Duchess of Glebes?"
Jamas was seized with an intense desire to say, "No, you may not!" as the small, very elegant lady swayed daintily toward him. She was not unattractive but there was something about the expression in her face or the set of her eyebrows or the masculine squareness of her jaw-line that was somehow repellent. Or maybe it was the acquisitive squint with which she surveyed the courtyard. Jamas raised her from her graceful but shallow curtsey-his rank, if not hers, decreed a fuller obeisance-and wanted to rub his fingers of the moisture left there by her plump little hand.
"My brother at law, Egdril, King of Mauritia, will be here shortly," she said in carefully precise vowels. "He decided to ride through this charming little city."
"IT'S NOT little," Cambion complained later when they reviewed the arrival. "And to announce him like that! She's not a chamberlain or anything. To act as if we wouldn't know who he was or where he came from!"
Grenejon suggested that she either had a speech impediment which her careful enunciation was covering or that she had learned the language late in life.
"I'd bet she came from a very humble origin and had a dreadful twang," was Jamas' notion.
However, on the steps of the castle, he had to prolong the welcoming ceremonies until Egdril and his honor guard clattered into the court and could be officially greeted.
The countess had taken her charges away to the west wing, and the prince and his equerries perforce had to exchange pleasantries with Duchess Fanina. This was not easily done, for she came across as a contentious, critical, patronizingly unpleasant person, and there were many long pauses between comments, with prince and first equerry sharpening their ears for any sound of the approaching royal troop.
Egdril finally charged into the courtyard with his royal honor guard, and Jamas almost embraced him for rescuing them from Fanina. Jamas was not the only one to notice that Egdril didn't much like his relative by marriage. But protocol was acquitted and they could begin the festivities concomitant with such a felicitous occasion.
If Jamas thought he'd have much of his fiancйe’s company, he thought wrong. They still had to steal moments together-generally on the dance floor-to the point where Countess Solesne was heard to remark that she hadn't ever seen the Lady Willow dance so often.
Duty required Prince Jamas to take Duchess Fanina to the dance floor at least once. Although it was the custom for ladies to wear gloves at formal dance evenings, she did not. He had to take her plump moist hands in his. That was the first time the ring changed color. Immediately after he had seen her to her chair, he excused himself and scrubbed his hands vigorously until his ring resumed its normal shade.
"Know much about contact poisons, Gren?" he murmured to his equerry at the next available moment.
Grenejon's eyes rounded. "Since I don't, I shall repair that ignorance. Mangan had a full library on such affairs, I believe."
Jamas noticed enviously that his equerry was able to leave the dance floor with the Lady Laurel. Whenever he and Willow tried the same maneuver, someone followed them: the countess, Egdril, the duchess, Frenery, or someone.
"I've only kissed you four times since you got here," Jamas said, holding the slender body of his intended tightly in his arms. That wasn't as satisfactory, in some ways, as kissing her, but evidently it would have to do. He found he could put a lot of loving in such an embrace in front of all the eyes on them.
"We shall have some time together soon," she said, her body answering his.
He smiled down at her. "So you do love me?"
"More than I thought possible," she replied fervently, and he sighed. Seven more days until he had her to himself, legally and irrefutably.
THE DAYS EVENTUALLY PASSED, and he was being dressed in his wedding finery, resplendent with gold and silver in the vibrant dark green that was Esphania's color.
"You look every inch a fine prince, Jamie," Grenejon said, brushing off an imaginary speck from his shoulders.
"You're not at all shabby either," Jamie replied, for Gren wore an equerry's formal dark blue with a modest silver trim. "Is all in train?"
Grenejon winked, grinning from ear to ear, and patted his left slit pocket.
A polite tap sounded on the door, which Grenejon opened to Prince Temeron, who looked excessively nervous and obviously uncomfortable in his finery. He also looked remarkably like his cousin, the prince, which was somewhat natural since they were closely related. They were the same height and build, Temeron being younger by some eighteen months. But his blond hair curled-and had been barbered-like the prince's, and their profiles were much of a kind.
"Tem, you look splendid," Jamas said, striding forward to shake his second cousin's hand and reassure the lad. Temeron had not yet been informed that he was now the crown prince although Jamas had decided the boy had better leave his ancestral home, high in the northern mountains, and get eased into Esphania court procedures and policies.
"Came to tell you we're all assembled now, sir…"
"Jamas, lad, Jamas," the prince reminded him, and Tem blushed. He had been seconded as a groomsman along with the Moxtell sons and brothers, Grenejon's two younger brothers, and the Fennells.