Seraphine
The Day of the Signing

The lily on my vanity had wilted overnight.

If I were superstitious, I would have considered that an omen and canceled all plans for the day. But I wasn’t, and I pushed the thought to the back of my mind by busying myself in the garden.

After pulling a few weeds, I cut a fresh lily and placed the white flower in the glass beside Jorge's portrait and dusted the frame. The painter had made him too handsome, leaving out the details that I had loved about him. The real Jorge had a chipped front tooth and a crooked nose. He had brought me white lilies every week until the day he died, and then I planted a garden full of them in his memory.

"We sign today," I told the portrait. "Try to look impressed."

This was everything he had wanted. Peace with the kingdom we had been fighting generations with over a cause long forgotten. Some documents said land, others said soured family lines. But it was finally ending today, and I knew Jorge would have celebrated wholeheartedly.

I dressed in grey, the most formal dress I had in my wardrobe. My hands took longer with the clasps than they used to. In the mirror, a woman with lines around her eyes and mouth fastened my mother's crown into her hair. It took me some time to accept the woman reflecting back at me, but now I took comfort in the strength I had to get here. I had buried a husband twelve years gone, raised our daughter alone. All while I held a burning border through every one of those twelve winters, and today was the mark of a new beginning.

The corridors were full of skulls, painted faces and yellowing bone. I had doubled the Skeleton Guard for the delegation's stay, I told the envoy it was out of courtesy. We both understood the other reason. They stood at intervals down the residential wing, still in the way only the dead could be, a soft glow low behind their sockets.

They brought me a sense of comfort being amongst them that outsiders struggled to comprehend. I had grown up among them. Most children of Stygia had a Guard they preferred, and mine had been a tall one posted by the library who let me hide behind him from my tutors and never once gave me up.

The Ravenwood envoy had asked, in the gentlest possible diplomatic language, that the bone Guards stand outside the signing hall rather than within it, the delegation found them difficult to negotiate beneath. I had agreed without argument. Hundreds of years of war, and if peace cost me nothing more than the placement of my soldiers, I would pay it twice.