Prologue

The First Bridal Bell

Widowmere Abbey asks every bride to sign her name before it permits her to see the groom.

I sign someone else’s.

The quill scratches SERAPHINE VALE across the register in my own hand, but the ink belongs to my dead grandmother and the intention belongs to no one the abbey can easily consume. A small deceit, beautifully executed.

The page drinks it anyway.

Cold travels through my fingers.

Across the reception chamber, nine women watch me from beneath veils of pearl, bone, silver, and mourning lace. Each has come to marry an immortal heir no living person has seen. Each believes the Vale inheritance will pass to the bride who survives ten rooms designed to measure feminine perfection.

Patience.

Grace.

Obedience.

The abbey has carved the virtues above ten doors.

No door bears the word love.

“Your Grace,” the trial mistress prompts.

I release the quill.

An invisible blade opens the pad of my thumb. One bright bead of blood falls beside my signature and spreads into a perfect red ring.

First clause accepted.

The other brides applaud.

They do not understand what they have witnessed. Neither, apparently, does the trial mistress. She smiles and gestures me toward the line, satisfied that one-tenth of my consent has been secured.

Consent divided into pieces is not consent.

That is the first reason I came.

The second hangs somewhere inside this abbey in a painted prison.

My sister Lyra vanished during the Bridal Trial seven years ago. Widowmere declared she withdrew before the final room. Her body was never returned. Her name was removed from the family Bible. Only her portrait remained, delivered to our estate with the paint still wet and her eyes turned toward a door that did not exist in the room where it now hangs.

I have dreamed of that door every night since.

Tonight, when the trial mistress raises her silver bell, every portrait in the reception chamber turns its painted face toward me.

One does not.

The figure is unfinished: a bride without features seated beside a veiled groom. Fresh white paint gleams over the woman’s throat. The artist has sketched ten delicate chains around her wrist, each disappearing into a different painted doorway.

At the bottom of the canvas waits a blank signature line.

I step out of formation.

“Duchess?” the trial mistress says.

“The portrait is new.”

“The wedding portrait renews for every trial.”

“Who paints it?”

For the first time, her smile falters.

Then a servant door opens behind the canvas.

Ilyra Thorne walks through it carrying a box of charcoal.

Seven years of practiced indifference leave me in one violent breath.

She is leaner than the woman I remember, dressed in common linen with black pigment beneath her fingernails. Her hair is pinned badly, as if she cut it with a knife and regretted nothing. The abbey lists her as Ilyra Fen, a penniless provincial bride admitted by lottery.

The lie would fool anyone who had never kissed the real name from her mouth.

Her gaze finds mine.

Nothing in her expression changes.

The shadows at her feet recoil.

Ilyra was my lover before she became my enemy. She left my bed three nights before Lyra disappeared. She stole a page from the Vale grimoire and sold it to people who wanted my house weakened.

Or that is the story I have carried because anger was warmer than grief.

“The common bride will finish the portrait,” the trial mistress says. “Should she survive long enough.”

Ilyra sets down her charcoal box. “I usually do.”

Several brides laugh.

I do not.

The bell rings.

The first door opens beneath the carved word PATIENCE.

Inside waits a dining room set for ten. Steam rises from empty plates. At the head of the table, a veiled male figure sits so still he may be another painting.

The trial mistress explains that we must wait for the groom to eat first.

An hour passes.

Then two.

The bride in pearls begins to sob. Another pounds on the locked door. One woman whispers that she is not angry.

The room takes the anger from her.

It leaves through her mouth as red vapor. Her face goes slack. Her hands settle in her lap. When the doors finally reopen, she cannot remember why she wanted to win.

The trial mistress calls this refinement.

I call it hollowing.

Ilyra meets my eyes across the untouched table.

Her shadow points toward the servant corridor.

I follow five minutes later.

The corridor descends behind the kitchens and ends at a locked studio door. Ilyra opens it with a key hidden inside her braid. Beyond lies a painter’s darkroom smelling of linseed oil, damp stone, and the particular smoke produced when magic has recently died.

Two doors.

No windows.

No abbey wards.

I test the threshold with a spark of witchlight. The flame remains mine.

“You brought me to a lawless room,” I say.

“You followed me to one.”

Her voice is lower than memory and no kinder.

“Why are you here, Ilyra?”

“To marry an immortal heir.”

“You never wanted a husband.”

“Neither did you.”

The candle between us bends, though there is no wind.

On the far wall, a charcoal study shows ten women standing beneath ten doors. Nine have shadows.

The tenth is my sister.

Lyra’s painted hand presses against the paper from the other side.

I cross the room before I decide to move. “Where did you see her?”

Ilyra catches my wrist.

Our skin never meets.

Our shadows do.

The contact travels through me like remembered fire. Ilyra releases me at once, but the absence strikes harder than the touch.

“The wedding portrait is choosing between us,” she says.

“For what?”

Her gaze shifts to the unfinished coffin-shaped frame leaning behind me.

“Burial.”

Above, the second bridal bell begins to ring.

Footsteps gather outside the darkroom.

Ilyra closes one door and leaves the other visibly open. A choice. Always a choice with her, even when we hated each other.

Our shadows lengthen across the wall.

They turn toward one another before either of us does.