The Necromancer’s Second Wedding

Before noon, Celeste's dead husband would interrupt her second wedding.

For now, the last lily had only opened crookedly. She turned its face toward the chapel window, where December light would soften the crease, and tightened the wire beneath its head. There. A person could marry beside an imperfect flower.

“You have green on your sleeve,” Anja said.

Celeste looked down at the cream wool she had spent three evenings altering. “Where?”

“Other sleeve. No, the part you’ve just rubbed against your waist.”

Anja caught Celeste’s wrist, scraped the leaf fragment away with a thumbnail, and inspected the result.

“It’s a wedding. People will look at your face.”

“People look at everything. At funerals they tell me what the undertaker had for breakfast.”

“Then give them something better to discuss.”

Marek stood across the chapel taking off his gloves, one finger at a time. He had bought a dark blue coat instead of hiring formal black. Celeste had liked that decision. At thirty-two she knew exactly how much mourning cloth she wanted at her second wedding, and it was none.

He looked up as though her watching had touched him. His smile arrived slowly, making the small chapel and its damp wool smell unexpectedly intimate. Last night he had helped fasten the little pearl buttons at her cuffs while she tried the dress on. She had kissed the untidy part in his hair, and he had put his face against her waist for a moment, saying nothing. She had wanted tonight very much.

Now he raised his eyebrows at the arrangement, asking whether he might approach it.

“Finished,” she called. “You may risk your life.”

“With flowers?”

“With criticism.”

He came across and took her hand. His fingers were cool, his thumb warm where it rested inside her wrist. She wanted to tell him that the good thing about being thirty-six was that he had stopped trying to make every kindness look accidental. Instead she straightened his collar.

Beside the bench waited his square leather satchel. He had brought it in from the hired carriage himself, refusing the attendant’s offer to put it near the stove.

“Still working?” she asked.

“A delivery I couldn’t leave unattended.”

“Today?”

He glanced at the bag. “It’s sealed. It won’t interfere.”

She believed him. He supplied technical materials, some delicate enough to require ice, and had once fetched a broken glass measure all the way from the district seat because her usual merchant would only sell a box of twelve. She understood inconvenient stock. Her own unfinished funeral orders waited in the shop two streets away.

Leontine Brask tapped the marriage register with the blunt end of her pen.

“If the flowers have consented, I require the people.”

There were nine guests, counting Anja, and no music. Celeste had invited Tomas’s sister, who had written a brief refusal from her freight office. She had kept the letter. Lida had not been cruel; neither had she pretended readiness. The empty place at the end of the bench hurt a little without making this morning wrong.

Celeste stood beside Marek. The chapel attendant turned the stove damper, metal scraping softly behind them. Outside, a cart rattled over the market cobbles. She could have been at work, counting stems while somebody else’s future was decided. Instead Leontine asked her the question, and she answered for herself.

Marek’s yes was quiet but perfectly audible.

They signed. Anja and the chapel caretaker signed beneath them. Leontine checked the names, blotted the ink, and looked at the clock above the door.

“Eleven forty-three, December fourteenth. The marriage is entered and complete.”

Celeste turned to Marek, absurdly pleased by the official sound of complete. She put a hand on his chest and rose to kiss him.

The lilies bent.

All seven heads turned toward him. Their stems creaked inside the willow frame, flexing against the direction in which she had wired them. One wire sprang loose and struck the chapel tiles.

Marek caught her wrist before her mouth reached his.

“Away from the roots.”

He said it with the certainty of a man calling out a damaged stair. Celeste looked at him, then at the flowers.

Water climbed the stems. It gathered where no vase mouth existed, shining between petals, and stretched upward into a shoulder. The willow frame sagged. Above it appeared a wet shirt, an open throat, a face she had washed before burial eighteen months ago.

The brown mark beside Tomas’s ear was there. So was the chip in his front tooth. He had been thirty-four when he died; he looked that age still, except that she could see the window muntin through his cheek.

She heard somebody push a bench back. Anja said her name once.

Tomas looked past her at Marek.

“Why did you steal my heart?”

Celeste’s hand was still beneath Marek’s hand. She withdrew it. His face had become horribly attentive, every muscle engaged in something other than surprise.

“Tomas,” she said.

The wet figure turned toward her. A lily petal lay against the hollow of his neck, half inside it.

“Celeste?”

Her knees felt unreliable. She caught the edge of the registrar’s table, which held steady under her weight. Eighteen months. She had counted them reluctantly at first, then less often. She knew the grave’s location, the burial date, the invoice for the coffin. None of those things offered instructions for this.

The attendant seized the poker from beside the stove.

“Burn the lot,” he said. “Before it gets into anything.”

He caught the arrangement’s willow handle with the hooked iron tip. Tomas recoiled, his outline thinning against the window. Water spattered the register table.

“Put that down.” Celeste moved between him and the flowers.

“Mrs. Venn—”

“Ardin. Put it down.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“Neither do you.”

He hesitated, poker held awkwardly across his middle. Celeste could smell the hot soot on it. A few inches nearer and it would catch her dress.

Marek set his satchel on the far side of the bench. “She’s right. Burning a connected bed is unsafe.”

Connected. Bed. Words he had available while she struggled to find even husband.

“There’s a basin in the washing cupboard,” she told Anja. “The zinc one. Bring it with water.”

Anja stared at Tomas, then went. Celeste lowered the whole arrangement onto the tiles, keeping both hands under the frame so the wire would not tear loose. The nursery had delivered living bulbs in moss rather than the cut lilies she had expected. Free wedding stock, their note had said. She had designed around it, pleased at the extravagance.

Now the roots smelled of river mud.

“We need to leave,” Marek said close beside her. “Somewhere quieter.”

“We need somebody to write down what happened.”

“Celeste, people will—”

“They’re already doing it. Mistress Brask?”

Leontine had closed the marriage register and moved it away from the spreading water. She took a loose sheet from her case.

“I’m recording the time.”

“And that he appeared after you completed the marriage.”

“I can record what I witnessed.”

Celeste looked at Tomas. “Did you hear?”

He stared at the bench where Marek’s bag stood. “He had a knife.”

The attendant made a small choking sound.

“Who?” Leontine asked.

Tomas pointed at Marek. His finger appeared to pass through the lily leaf beneath it, though the leaf trembled.

“Him. His hands. There was a knife.”

Marek did not deny it. Celeste waited, bent over her ruined arrangement, while he said nothing at all.

Anja returned carrying the basin against her hip. Water slopped onto her skirt. Together they lowered the bulbs and their frame into it. Tomas’s feet became visible above the moss, bare and indistinct. When Celeste lifted one loose stem, his shoulder stretched unpleasantly toward it.

“Keep the roots together,” Marek said.

She obeyed because she had seen the change herself. She hated the relief on his face when she did.

A paper tag dangled beneath the willow handle. B17, in purple nursery ink. Celeste laid it flat on the dry edge of the basin rather than let it dissolve.

Leontine asked Tomas whether he knew where the knife had been, what day it was, and who else had been present. Each question produced the same small movement of his gaze toward Marek.

“His hands,” Tomas said again. “I couldn’t move.”

Celeste remembered lifting his stiff fingers to tuck a sprig of rosemary beneath them. She had known he could not move then. She could not reconcile that memory with this voice, which sounded tired, frightened, and exactly like him asking where she had put his clean shirt.

She crouched beside the basin.

“Tomas. What happened before the knife?”

He opened his mouth. The water around the moss shivered.

“I don’t know.”

Celeste steadied the willow frame.

“We’ll go to the shop,” she said.

Marek reached for the basin. She moved his hand away before it closed on the handle.

“You carry your delivery. Anja helps me with this.”

He accepted the instruction. Yesterday she would have asked him to take the heavy end without thinking.

Leontine folded her sheet into her case. “I’ll accompany you as far as the workroom. The register remains here.”

The guests crowded away from the aisle. Nobody offered cake. Celeste asked the caretaker to store the parcels from the reception table and told him she would collect them later; she could not abandon food and borrowed crockery simply because the dead had disrupted her wedding.

At the threshold the cold caught her wet cuffs. Anja shifted her grip, muttering that bulbs were an appalling choice for a bouquet, and Celeste almost laughed. Then Tomas turned toward Marek again.

“Why did you steal my heart?”

Celeste held her side of the basin firmly. “Both of you are coming to my workroom,” she said. “And this time I intend to hear the answers.”