Reign the Earth (The Elementae #1)(7)

Keeping my eyes away from the thousand-foot drop on the other side of the bridge, I looked over, and my heart matched the thunder of the falls.

As if I had wished him into being, the handsome man I had seen earlier was standing there, his hands behind his back, looking regal and stately. It must be him. It must be my husband.

I looked at him, in his perfect grandeur, as if expecting some signal. But he couldn’t see me looking through the cloth, I remembered. I knew he had a younger brother—this must be the man beside him, slightly taller and more severe, his nose twisted, his face hard and brutal like it was carved from the rock around us.

Of course, I couldn’t be certain. One of them was my husband and one of them was his witness, and I suspected I wouldn’t know for sure until my husband was the one to remove the veil.

Cael stood behind me on the small landing and nudged me toward the Teorainn. I could see the pool to my left and the infinite, terrible drop on the right.

A gust of wind pushed me a little, and I sucked in a breath, trying to plant my feet.

It was unnatural, a desert girl so high above the earth. I was a dragon, a scorpion, not a bird.

I stepped forward and froze. I was shaking so hard I didn’t trust myself to take another step. My whole body was trembling, and I couldn’t look up, staring at my feet and the rushing water beneath the bridge so long the rest of me felt off-balance too.

I am going to fall.

Uselessly, wildly, I put my arms out, trying to balance, and it didn’t help. My heart was pounding in my throat, and I couldn’t even cry out or look for my brother. I was alone, and I was going to die.

Arms caught me, but it wasn’t Cael—my savior was in front of me, and my hands landed on stiff black cloth. I looked up to see the broken nose of the second Trifectate man on the bridge.

My heart sank as I realized my girlish hopes of the handsome man becoming my husband were wrong. Certainly it didn’t matter—despite his nose, he wasn’t ugly, by any means. Besides, I wasn’t marrying him for his face—and he had just saved me from falling a thousand feet, after all.

He took my shaking hands, his skin warm and rough against mine, and the shaking calmed. “Come,” he said, loosing one of my hands. I drew a deep breath, and my heart beat heavy and hard as he took the end of the cloth and unwound it from my face.

Our eyes met in truth for the first time. I drew a slow breath in, and something within me shifted, moved, sliding around my chest and pulling tight, shivering down my spine.

But then it was like the shiver was contagious, and the earth jolted, shaking and moving, threatening to throw us off the Teorainn as I gasped, clinging to the black cloth on my husband’s arms.

It wasn’t my imagination either; someone shouted, and my husband caught me, holding my arm and waist, so close to holding me tight in his arms that I couldn’t breathe.

A moment later the world seemed to calm, and the guests all looked at one another, murmuring about what had caused the tremor. My husband took my hand again.

“What was that?” he asked.

I shook my head, mute. I had no idea.

He looked past me to Cael. “Is the bridge still stable?” he asked, shouting over the water’s roar.

“Mountains break and move,” Cael said. “Jitra is eternal.”

My husband’s eyebrows lifted, looking at me. I opened my mouth to start speaking the words, but he spoke before I did.

“Come,” he repeated. “Meet your husband.”

He pulled me along the bridge as my heart stopped. Meet him? Hadn’t I just …

But no. It couldn’t be.

The one with the broken nose brought me to the apex of the Teorainn and easily stepped around his brother. Behind him, as Cael did for me. His brother’s witness, and not my husband.

I couldn’t help but shake. They had done it all wrong—it was my husband who was supposed to remove the covering, who was supposed to have that magic moment of unveiling. No one else. Not a brother. Not a charlatan!

How could he have not known this error? My mother had schooled me for weeks on every moment of what would happen at this ceremony—had no one told the same things to him?

My true husband really was the handsome one I had first seen, first wished for, his green eyes bright and captivating, staring at me like he was waiting for something.

He squeezed my hand, and I realized I was supposed to speak. “We’ve come to the ends of the earth so that we may journey back together,” I said, so soft it was little more than a whisper. “Here I leave the maiden, the daughter, the child. Here I become a wife, one part with my husband.”

I saw his lips move, saying a version of the same, but I couldn’t hear him over the river water and the violent rush of blood in my ears. Wrong. It was all wrong.

I turned to Cael, and he handed me the bunch of flowers in his hand. I tore off the heads, filling my hands with multilayered blooms, and turned back to my husband. Husband.

My husband held out his hand, and I put some of the blooms into it. He looked at me, and we spoke the final words together, words my cousins made me practice late into the night until I knew them by heart.

“Today we release our former selves like flowers unto the wind. Today we become one.”

I opened my hand and he did the same, letting the flower petals drop a little before they caught the wind and swirled up, a few coming back toward us and the rest flying out into the air.