A/N: Oh, I am so excited to be posting another QT fic. (To those of you who subscribed to me and have been waiting for this oneshot since the last chapter of Equilibrium, I apologize for the dreadfully long wait.) Please drop a review—this is pretty heavy on the dialogue, which is essentially its own art form in QT, and it's a wedding scene with a side of gratuitous flirting, which I am not well-practiced in (either doing or writing!). Please let me know if you think it needs any tweaking!

Everything and everyone here is the property of Megan Whalen Turner, whom I opine to be rather a genius.

Spoilers for A Conspiracy of Kings.

"What kind of conspiracy do you suppose it takes to schedule a wedding at the exact time of the day when the blaring sun would be right in the eyes of whomever is standing behind the altar? And how did I get roped into being the officiant at this spectacle?" Eugenides is on his feet, fidgeting. He is not standing at his appointed place, but there are several minutes yet before they are scheduled to begin.

"You know you are the only one qualified to stand there at this particular occasion, and it's quite your own fault." Sitting beside him in the chair reserved for her, Irene is utterly unsympathetic, perhaps because one of her own attendants is holding a paper fan between her fair complexion and the hot sun. "Do for once try to behave like the king."

"You just ought to be glad you never married Nahuserfish—think of what he would be doing in my place," he retorts.

"Nahuseresh," she corrects automatically, but allows them both a smile at his irritated wit.

"Surely, though, standing inside a building would preempt the sun being in one's eyes."

"We are standing inside a temple." This is the best, and the only, explanation she has. This is history's most notorious Thief of Eddis, after all.

He grunts. "Point. The gods do love their childish jokes."

"Do be careful what you say. I shall not be held responsible for any anatomical casualties you may happen to incur today, Eugenides."

His eyes widen in surprise—his missing hand is a perpetual elephant in the room, of which they never speak. In reply, she offers up a single arched eyebrow.

She can watch him trying to read her mind in that single gesture. She has always been very good at hiding her thoughts, but her husband has seen right through her since before she even knew his name. Realizing how unaccustomed she has grown to bewilderment on his part, she stretches for a distraction.

"Childish jokes usually seem an improvement from your perspective. Moreover, if you're in a biting mood, this will take a good deal longer than it ought, and as you have already characteristically complained, it is hot," she answers, deadpan, and rises from her chair to emphasize her point. "I do not want to spend all day outside."

His eyes flick to her hairband. "Don't think I haven't noticed your extra personal touch for the occasion," he says softly, touching a finger to the orange blossom knotted in the chignon of her dark hair. "You are happy."

Despite the warmth that pools in her stomach, she doesn't smile as she looks him squarely in the face from her three-inch height advantage, made six inches by her shoes. "Yes, Eugenides. Though I am made less so in realizing it has taken you this long to figure it out."

Softly he chuckles, and his fingers trail from her hair to linger on her cheek. "Don't worry. It hasn't. I merely like to say it aloud sometimes, in case you don't realize it yourself."

"Now my husband thinks me a dullard as well as a sanguine? It is a wonder I managed to hold the crown so long in such a warm land as this," she says, voice dripping with sarcasm.

Something like a snort comes out of him at that; he is genuinely entertained despite still looking a bit befuddled around the eyes. "You know, that may be the first time, My Queen, that you've ever made a joke where my laughter would be within earshot of the public."

"And you wonder why?" she ripostes drolly.

He grins, and then his gaze settles on Sophos, who stands at his appointed place in front of the Great Goddess' altar, fidgeting irrepressibly with the gold brocade cuffs on his long blue jacket and reaching up to adjust his heavy ceremonial crown every half a minute. Eugenides' smile widens momentarily, then falters. He wipes his palms on his ceremonial robes and sighs.

Irene lays a hand over his, attempting to instill him with a fraction of her omnipresent calm. "Must you twitch continually? What has you all in a lather?"

"War is coming," he mutters. "The Medes are unhappy as is with you, with me, and with Sounis, and after today they'll have reason enough to be angry at Eddis too. The continent will invade soon."

"That, as I recall, is the point of this affair, at least on your end."

"Yes, but this fairy tale of Sophos and Helen's will still lessen our numbered days."

"Eugenides, I know that we have a history of lachrymose wedding days, but that hardly obliges us to impose dark thoughts upon others'."

He is silent. She glances his way and sees a sad smile flicker across his jaw, come and gone so quickly she would dismiss it on any other man's face.

She slips a hand into his, lifting it to her lips and kissing the thin gold band that sits at the left of his signet ring.

"We are happy, My King. Let us not forget it."

He sighs again. "Indeed we are." He leans upwards to kiss her cheek, and then pulls away as she resumes her seat. "I suppose I had better get to my place in front of that altar before Helen beats me there. I try to pride myself on punctuality."

"Indeed." Irene's voice is so dry it could have caught fire if she spoke a whole sentence, but she smiles, too, at his retreating back.

Chloe continues her fanning, pretending to have been deaf to the entire exchange. Though if Phresine isn't asking her pointed questions by the time she changes out of this light silk gown into a heavier velvet for the evening dancing, Irene will have to reevaluate everything she knows about her attendants.

An excited whisper swells in the back of the audience, and Sounis turns on a dime, folding and unfolding his hands in front of him. Irene comes gracefully to her feet.

Gowned in ivory, a veritable headdress of multicolored flowers woven into the back of her own silver crown, pooling over her own chocolate curls—Helen has appeared at the far door. She is grinning openly, all queenly dignity reserved for her bearing as she advances down the aisle. Sophos looks equally rhapsodic, face slack with amazement and fixed as if nothing in the world but his lady exists.

Eddis touches down at the head of the aisle, takes her groom's hand, and together they kneel. Irene watches not them, but Eugenides, as he stands before them as Attolis—ironically, she thinks, as the gods' proxy and witness.

Eugenides performs his duty admirably. No thread of his dark predictions weaves its way into his words; he even smiles in a weird echo of the look on the face of the magus, who is standing to the side and beaming happily at the bride and groom.

There is a deafening roar of cheers and a rain of tossed flowers that go up when the new Sounia and Eddis rise from their knees; Sophos' golden hair ripples in tandem with Helen's veil as he pulls it back to kiss her like a dying man given the water that will save him. Attolia is smiling too; though it is not sufficiently fitting to her stateliness to throw flowers, she does approach the radiant newlyweds and kiss them both on the cheek, and then turns into her own husband's arms to hide the tears that are gathering in her eyes.

"Weren't you the one just telling me not to darken others' wedding days with memories of our own?" he remarks astutely, gently flicking the dampness from where it begins to fall on her cheeks.

"I spent a long time envying Eddis for having a nation that adores her. It was wearying in the extreme."

"Ever the pragmatic Attolia," he sighs.

She resists the urge to sigh back. "This day will be over soon enough, Eugenides, and I need not be jealous of Helen's real treasure—a king who loves her."

He pauses, allowing her praise to wash over him for a moment. She watches his dark eyes fold upwards at the edges

"I'm glad to hear it," he says finally, and then: "Shall we dance?"

"My King of kings, what else are we to do?"

"Oh, we have a very great deal to do. But we promised not to talk about it today," he murmurs as he sweeps her into the fray of swirling silk and a crescendoing string quartette. Somewhere, she can hear Sounis laughing out loud, and Eddis trying her hardest not to.

"Later?" She is the one doing most of the guiding, here; agile her Thief may be, but his dancing skills, though admirable for a man in possession of only three-fourths the requisite limbs, have never outmatched her own.

Eugenides' forehead creases, and as he bends in for the last bow of the dance, he gives a slight shake of his head, and a cheeky smirk that makes the blood rise around her bones. "Perhaps. Is pillow talk really the sort of thing people do on wedding nights?"

Irene lets her light grasp on his forearm constrict. "Not when a Queen has as coarse a consort as you."

He winces. "I liked 'King of kings' better."

"Then you should act like one. Have I somehow failed in your estimation, that you feel you must match some illusion of fallen gentility on my part?"

A startled laugh chokes in his throat. "Irene. If anything, I have to compensate for an overabundance of regality on your part. Have you ever tried defrosting an ice queen?"

"It seems to be done a great deal more in secret than in public," she says, by way of her ever-increasing experience watching him do the very same.

"Hm," he grunts noncommittally. "Bit of both."

There comes a stifled chuckle from Chloe, who's taken up her position with her fan behind her Queen again, now that they have returned to the sidelines of the dancing. Irene bites back a sigh, but she cannot quite bring herself to dread the gossip that will be buzzing amongst her attendants by the day's end.

Just then, another servant wafts by with a platter full of punch goblets, turning sideways to maneuver amongst the dancers rearranging themselves for the next set. Before she can open her mouth to claim a drink for herself, Eugenides is holding two goblets in the spread fingers of his left hand; he passes one to his wife.

"I believe," she says acerbically as her fingers wrap around the chalice's golden stem, "that these particular goblets are meant for the bride and groom."

"So they are," says her Thief, as if he hadn't noticed which cups he'd purloined. "Well. Sophos won't miss them."

"Helen will."

"Which is why I left her a wedding present in its place. She has a carefully-guarded fondness for model ships, though now that the servant's carried it all the way through those dancers, it won't be much of a secret anymore." He moistens his lips with the wine and then kisses her. His skin is hot with sunlight and contentment; Irene forgets about the wedding and appearances for a minute.

"She'll forgive me soon enough."

"And I?"

His touch draws back, growing feather-light on her skin, dropping to cover her two good hands. "And you? Do you still choose to love me, my Queen?"

Whatever happens?

She considers the slight tremble of his skin against hers. Eugenides has a way of sometimes speaking a thousand questions in one, layering uncertainty upon uncertainty, burying successively smaller mountains beneath molehills, until he can casually sum up his heart with a few facetious words. She watches his throat bob, and she imagines for a moment that she had married the Medean ambassador from all those long months ago, and her country had already drowned in her folly.

Whatever else he has done or will yet do, this boy from the mountain country has bought her land some time and some dignity, and held her own beating heart in the palm of his hand.

"I do," she answers, and back through all the thousand layers of doubt and rage and terror, it is the truth.

Thanks so much for reading, and do let me know what you think! I hope you're all having a lovely holiday season!