The Bride Who Stole the Eclipse

How it begins

Lethra stole the eclipse from the wedding cake.

It had been placed there as a blessing, suspended above the highest tier in a little cage of gold. The guests had applauded when the sun dimmed. Nobody applauded when she put the darkness in her pocket.

Across the ballroom, three hundred candles went blue.

The groom looked relieved.

That was the first thing she had not expected.

"Run," he said.

She did.

Her dress caught on a chair. She left enough silk behind to satisfy a smaller marriage and went through the service door barefoot. The eclipse pressed against her thigh, cold as a coin kept too long in a dead hand.

Behind her, the music continued for four bars before the musicians noticed the ceremony had lost its sky.

Lethra found the stairwell.

At its foot stood the prince.

Not the groom. The brother whose job was to count the hours of daylight the kingdom could spend.

He looked at her pocket.

"That belongs to the people."

"So does the woman beneath the chapel."

His expression changed.

She had heard the crying through a floor grille while waiting for her attendants. A woman repeating the same practical question: whether anyone had told her mother where she had gone.

Lethra had asked a priest.

The priest had called it an honor.

Now Prince Sovan moved aside just far enough to let her see the door behind him. It led down.

"I was told the chamber was empty," he said.

"You were told something useful."

Above them, a bell struck noon and failed to stop.

The eclipse shifted inside her pocket. A narrow edge of daylight slid across the stairs, revealing old scratches on the wall.

Names.

Many names.

Sovan touched the first one with two fingers.

Lethra watched him recognize it.

For the first time, he looked less like a prince than a man who had arrived very late at an ordinary act of cruelty.