Chapter 256 Book 4 Chapter 52: The Aisle

Book 4 Chapter 52: The Aisle

++A Voret wedding is invariably a large affair, and when the outsider marrying into them is of some particular talent, it becomes all the larger. I suspect they see them as more a celebration of some great acquisition.++

- Aadan Farah, former Grandmaster of the Winzorth Institute.

The wedding was apparently not appropriate to merely hold in a newly-constructed hall near my refineries, and was instead taking place in one of Poloira’s larger churches. My mother warned me that many of Garamon’s nobility would consider even this a slight against them, that people could be quite particular about the details of religion and how those of Poloira were seen as lacking the venerable dignity required to truly do the Gods justice.

As usual, I was fine by this. I may have changed the location had I been told a few weeks earlier, but at this point it would have been worse to suddenly alter it, and it was not like I cared much in any case. As far as I was concerned each slight I managed to level at the Gods was a bonus to whatever else I achieved with it.

Despite the lack of prestige and approval, the church itself looked as big as any I had seen in Garamon. I was there a good few hours before any of the other guests, and my immediate family arrived just as my mother finished having the main set of tables adjusted by another fraction of an inch to better suit one of the million rules of propriety that baffled all present but her.

My father was the first to reach me, moving as close to a jog as he could while having the same number of legs as a pogo stick. He held his arms out to embrace me, crutches momentarily forgotten, then paused as my mother called out sharply.

“Don’t you dare!” she snapped. “Not a finger on her, Agrian. That dress, that hair, every fold of it, every curl, is the work of five damned hours, and all of it spent with her wriggling like a drowning rat. You are not about to ruffle it all up with a hug.”

I had literally seen my father getting struck by lightning and not look as chastened and stunned as he was then. Without his hug, nor his crutches, he suddenly had little to hold him up. I kept him aloft with an idle telekinetic spell while Qaigor appeared to hand him back his balancing aid.

Apparently, my mother had declared the matter of her daughter’s wedding to be yet another entry on the list of territories in which she did not heed my father’s masculine authority, nor tolerate his masculine input. The Baron looked rather embarrassed all of a sudden.

“It’s good to see you again, my dear,” he said weakly. Qaigor snickered, then fell silent as our father shot a glare at him. Victoria approached last, walking up with rather less energy than our brother.

“You dropped me on the estate,” she frowned rather than greeting me. I frowned too, confused.

“What?”

“When you brought us back from Asyran, you dropped me out of the sky.”

I had to think back to remember that. “Oh,” I said as the recollection returned. “Yes. You deserved it.”

My mother chose that moment to decide that we had already used up all the free time she had put aside for family reunions. My father was ushered off to make sure he could properly walk down the isle without falling over like an idiot, Qaigor was given approximately fifty imperial tons of things to haul back and forth, mostly to keep him busy, I suspected, and Victoria was told to ‘practice her bridesmaid duties’, which largely consisted of following me around and watching everybody else actually contribute.

“We will not need to do much until the actual ceremony begins in a few hours,” I told her. Actually I was not allowed to do much, because though I was not yet in my full wedding gown my mother still lived in fear of just about anything causing some microscopic imperfections on my makeup. I was almost surprised my mother had not attempted to confine me in some sort of vacuum chamber to keep airborne dust from dirtying me.

“You dropped me out of the sky!” Victoria snapped.

“Are you still whining about that?” I groaned. “You were fine, you had a shielding amulet. And it was hardly ‘the sky’, just a few hundred feet at most.”

“I was scared!” Victoria yelled.

“Then you have had yet another opportunity to face your fears,” I countered. “How is your casting under pressure?”

“...Better,” she said, reluctantly. Like she was actually annoyed by the fact.

“Good,” I nodded.

“That doesn’t make dropping me out of the sky okay.”

“Yes it does.”

She yelled something else, stormed off, and did not speak to me for another hour.

By the time Victoria returned, other guests had started to flood into the church and the wedding was rapidly approaching its start. I saw many faces, most of which I did not recognise, some of which I very unfortunately did. Nobles and tycoons who all had reason to be friendly with my family, in public at least. My grandfather was present, and surprised me by actually looking halfway happy.

And of course, there was quite the infestation of Vorets attending too. Dozens at least. This led to rather immediate friction between them and the large number of Garamon’s nobility, and my wedding day began with a rather absurd display of mindless intolerance and economically-motivated hatred.

After so much time spent being tormented in preparation for it, the sight of so many other people being miserable was like a masterpiece to my eyes.

They just kept filing in, too. Like ants marching into a nest, all lined up and moving with such a weight of bodies that they almost started to behave like a singular stream of liquid. I was not left to stare at them all for long however, soon enough, and much to my abject horror, people began attempting to talk to me.

Most of them were the sort of rabble I was used to meeting with; petty opportunists who would be the first to sneer and curse at me if they thought there was a social advantage to doing so, but were now endeavouring to be my best friends on account of the news having recently come out that I had made exceeded two hundred million crowns in total wealth.

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Unfortunately, unlike a more typical event, it would be socially unacceptable for me to dismiss these people as I had gotten used to doing. I was the bride on her wedding day, which meant I was expected to be happy and smile a lot. My mother had made that much clear, and I knew that Exyria Voret had advised me in much the same way. So I had to grin and bear it.

One uncomfortable or irritating conversation after another tormented me until I was saved by an unexpected, and entirely unknown-to-me figure. An older man who looked to be in his early or mid forties. He seemed vaguely familiar. Dark hair, turning to grey at the temples, and a wiry build with the flowing attire that signified him as a magician. He smiled at me like he knew me.

“Isabel,” he beamed. “I’ve been waiting years to meet you my dear. I’ve heard so very much, though I imagine you haven’t heard much about me.”

I had not of course. I kept my face blank as I answered. “That is correct. Who are you?” I asked him. He chuckled.

“As direct as I’d heard, but that’s fine. I’m Olgarn, Isabel. Olgarn Vornholt. Your uncle.”

Ah, my father’s younger brother. I searched through my brain for all the relevant information. There was not much. He was the black sheep of the family, before I supplanted that role by being a woman with higher cognitive function, and had briefly educated Agrian in magic when I was born. It was he who Agrian had been staying with during the early days of my infancy.

“Oh. Hello,” I said. I was not really sure what else I could say. Fortunately, being in this conversation meant that others were not pestering me for the moment. My uncle just laughed again.

“Gods, it’s good to finally meet you. And let me say that I am so, so proud of you Isabel, really.”

I nodded. There was no surprise there at least, my talent was the one thing everyone in the world seemed to know about me.

But my uncle kept talking, and I soon realised that he was referring to something else.

“I mean, really. With all the pressure you’ve faced from all sides. The pressure to conform, to cut yourself off from work, to just squeeze out children and do nothing else—I mean, you’re getting married at last of course, but you only even agreed to that once you could guarantee your own financial freedom. You’re the perfect example of what I’ve been saying for years, that the difference between men and women is that men are taught to be strong and women to be weak. In a few more generations, there’ll be masses of women like you, Isabel, all following in your footsteps. You’re doing something great here, for yourself and your whole sex.”

I nodded politely, as he seemed to get more excited by the word, but in all sincerity I did not especially care about the rest of my sex. As far as I was concerned, if people were too lazy to simply enforce their will on others regardless of how outnumbered or outweighed they are, then they deserved whatever they had coming.

Before I could open my mouth to tell him this, however, my uncle was espousing another tirade.

“I mean, honestly, I have half a mind to sit you down for a damned interview on my new book. I’ve been arguing for years that the notion of femininity as anything inherent or innate was utter toss, and now here you are proving me right, ha! You didn’t internalize one bit of your patriarchal conditioning, did you my dear? Not one bit.”

I did not know what those words meant, and given that they did not refer to some new secret of magic, I did not especially care.

My uncle patted me on the shoulder. “You’re a credit to us all, Isabel. I’m so pleased to have met you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and see if I can educate your sister on the invisible labour of the domestic sphere.”

He headed off, and I could not help but notice a few of the other guests giving him a wide berth. Now I finally knew why I was only considered the second most insane Vornholt, being a sociopathic magical pioneer suspected of murder was one thing, but my uncle had gone around Garamon suggesting that women were the equal of men. Not the most socially convenient stance to take.

But soon enough, the actual wedding ceremony was beginning and I was whisked away, crammed into my dress and given one more pass by the chemical-wielding torturers who called themselves my cosmetics team. Once they were certain that my skin had been sufficiently smeared with unknown substances and my hair sufficiently strangled up into an appropriately inconvenient shape, I had only a few more minutes to wait before it was time for me to walk down the aisle.

I had not actually known precisely what to expect from this ahead of time. This was my first Garamon wedding, and many of the details were still rather unclear to me. I knew that it was generally expected for the bride’s father to walk with her. We ran into an obstacle right there of course, given that my father had recently lost one of his legs in a disagreement with the family of my future husband.

Fortunately, it was apparently also acceptable for the bride’s father to limp her down the aisle, and so I entered with my father’s arm around the crook of my elbow and great organs tolling while we walked. The church was absolutely packed, more so than the Vornholt Institute’s grand hall. I did not recognise most of the guests, but some were unmissable. Alira Bella Paula. Professor Brown. Several of the new Vornholt Professors, naturally, and Sethira tucked away in one corner with a few of her own apprentices. Nesariyah, the magical genius who had briefly served as my handmaiden in Orapathaqi. I wondered what she was even doing here.

The faces began to blend into one another as I moved, and the music started to get to me. I winced at its volume.

“Relax,” my father soothed me, misreading my emotions as totally as ever. “You look beautiful Isabel, this is all going fine.”

I decided not to correct him. When I shot a glance over to his side, I saw that his expression was almost pathetically happy. My mother, seated near the front, was beaming even more so, next to her own father.

Well, at least someone was enjoying this damned ceremony. I for one was just mentally counting off the seconds spent doing this instead of practicing my damned magic.

At the end of the aisle was Ilgryn Voret, standing tall and dapper in a suit that looked rather more convenient and comfortable than the circus tent I was currently lugging around. I wondered vaguely how difficult I would find it to walk if I was not bringing the strength of several dozen men into my efforts. Then I reached Ilgryn, and there was no more time for wondering. We stood opposite one another, both looking at the other. He seemed awkward somehow.

This was, to be fair, only our fourth meeting, and one of those previous meetings had ended with my sister being kidnapped, me attempting to kill him in retaliation, and he agreeing to help me get away with it. Considering all that, I supposed he was actually surprisingly comfortable in my presence.

The priest said some words that I did not really listen to, simply giving an affirmative answer when prompted and watching when Ilgryn did the same. There had been at least several minutes of droning on before that, and several more followed after it before he finally prompted us to do something other than stand there and awkwardly look at each other. “Isabel Vornholt, do you vow, in the light of the Gods, to honour and cherish your husband, to stand by him through times both good and bad, and to remain loyal and faithful to the end?”

I did not want to swear anything in the light of the Gods, but I suspected that telling everyone present that their deities were a pack of moronic children would have been considered inappropriate.

“I…do,” I said instead. Ilgryn gave his word as well, and the priest moved on.

“You may now kiss the bride,” the elderly man declared, and Ilgryn hesitated a moment before doing so. His face started to flush, and I rolled my eyes.

“Do it,” I murmured under my breath. “You are only delaying this for both of us.”

He leaned in and did so, and I kissed back. When we parted, the hall opened up in roars of approval and celebration.

Unfortunately, I still had a party to attend before I could get back to work.