Wedding day

Our procession moved in silence. Everyone seems to understand that a wedding during war is a joyless affair. Although the war has raged for generations, the new king of our enemy has made it worse.

To be the darkest of those already living in the shadows, it made my skin crawl to think of the blood on his hands. Deep in the north, the shadow elves plotted against my father's kingdom. And after the death of their last monarch on the battlefield, his heir was carving a path of carnage through the land.

Even now we were far too close to the border with the north than I had ever been in my entire life. As a princess of Mithra, I had spent my entire life in the kingdom of Sunlight, Galad. But now that things were desperate, my father was sending me to marry a Mithran Duke whose army we desperately needed to turn the tides of war.

Here I was riding in a gilded carriage that might as well have been a pretty cage, sitting in silence with two handmaidens who spent the time on needlework. The y