Guinevere was trying very hard not to think about the fact that she’d been in this man’s bath eight hours ago when she woke, and was now marrying him.

She was succeeding. Mostly.

"We begin with the Dragon Code initiation," Master Mage Jaxon Valerios intoned. "Do you swear fealty to the crown of Drakencrest?"

"I do."

"Do you swear to honor the flame, the sky, and the house you enter this night, and to uphold the laws of Velkaris above all others?"

"I do."

"The code receives you."

Maddox turned to face her with a gold dagger in hand. He lifted her bruised hand gently, turning it palm-up.

He pricked the pad of her index finger, and guided it over the stone bowl. One drop fell.

The flame roared.

It doubled in height, turned a deeper gold, and settled into a signature pattern the elders along the east wall recognized on sight. The pattern was his. Exactly his. The bowl was burning, to the last flicker, in the High King’s personal signature.

Stunned faces along the wall.

Maddox’s lips twitched. He looked at the faces of his elders, and the specific quality of stunned silence he found there was, apparently, funny enough to crack his composure for the first time all evening.

Guinevere made a mental note to ask him later what exactly the flame was supposed to have done and why it had clearly done something else.

Jaxon cleared his throat. "Place your hand in the flame for pack judgment, my lady."

The elders winced as one, bracing for her scream. Three of them actually closed their eyes.

The flame judgment burned anything non-dragon blood including Fae, Mages, and half-bloods. It was still done for initiation, but that usually meant someone comes out screaming.

Maddox had mentioned zero of this to her.

She felt warmth. Familiar warmth. The same warmth that had rolled over her fur the night she had run through his column of flame in her escape.

Her skin glowed gold for a full second under the fire. She looked up at Maddox and caught his pleased expression.

More than pleased, Maddox was flat out smiling. The one she had seen exactly once, in the bath, when she had told him he smelled good.

Along the east wall, Cassia opened her eyes, registered Guinevere’s hand unburned inside the flame, and sat back in her chair with the expression of a woman whose scholarship had just updated itself in writing.

She pulled her hand from the flame.

"By the dragon code. By the First Accord. By the flame that witnessed the founding of this house and every house that answers to it. We gather tonight to bind King Maddox Drakencrest of Velkaris to Princess Guinevere Lunaris of Nyros as one."

Maddox went down on one knee.

Every person in the room exhaled at the same time. A small, stunned sound that moved through the witnesses like wind across dry grass. Guinevere understood the temperature of the room well enough to know that Maddox Drakencrest kneeling in front of a woman was zero on the list of things Maddox Drakencrest did on a regular afternoon.

He lifted his face to her, gold eyes steady, and spoke in a language she had never heard before.

Jaxon translated after each line.

"I shield."

"I burn."

"I carry."

"I return."

"I claim."

"I keep."

Maddox rose.

Six lines. Short enough to sit inside her ribs. Long enough that by the last one, Guinevere’s throat had tightened.

Jaxon produced two rings from a velvet cloth on the stone.

Maddox took the smaller one.

The scale was inside the band. He had pulled it from his own dragon form two hours ago in a small private ritual in the eastern courtyard, and the smith had forged it into the gold by sundown. She had no idea about any of this. He had chosen to not mention it. Some surprises were worth keeping.

He slid the ring onto her good hand.

The ring glowed.

A soft gold, low and alive, under her finger. Her eyes went wide.

Guinevere blinked down at it because she had not known rings were supposed to do that.

Maddox lifted his own hand. She took the second ring. It was heavier than she expected, and her fingers were shaking by the time she slid it onto him. Her left hand was steady. It was the circumstances that were shaking.

His ring glowed too.

Then the jolt hit.

It ran up her arm, through her chest, and settled somewhere behind her sternum where her wolf lived. Her breath caught. Her knees almost did not. She steadied herself on his arm without thinking about it, and his free hand caught her elbow and held her, and she looked up at him.

He had felt it too. She could see it in his face. What she could not see was that he had been braced for it and it had still hit him harder than he had expected, and the hand at her elbow was the only thing keeping his composure from cracking publicly.

The runes in the hall lit up.

Every wall, arch, and line of carving that had been dormant in the obsidian since the Keep was built came alive. Soft gold, raced along the stone in patterns, and the entire hall was suddenly lit from the inside out.

Gasps moved through the elders along both walls.

The mage Jaxon recovered first. He lifted his hands one final time.

"Under flame. Under scale. Under the gods of Velkaris. You may seal it."

Maddox leaned down.

He had been thinking about her mouth since the cave. Since the moment she had come out of the water with ice in her hair and had told him to hide. Since the auction, since the flight, since the bath, since every hour he had spent with his hand in her hair while she was fevered and unconscious. He had kissed every part of her head by now except for this.

He kissed her.

The jolt hit him the second their mouths met, like something locking into place.

He had been aware it was coming. He had not been aware it would feel like this. Every rune in the ceremony hall lit under them at the same moment, a cascade of gold fire tracing from the flame bowl outward to every corner of the obsidian floor.

The rings flared on their hands, and through the matebond he felt her pulse slam into his like a second heart.

She made a small, stunned sound against his mouth.

It was the sound of a woman who had zero warning, zero context, and had just been told by her own nervous system that the man kissing her was somehow inside her ribs now.

She leaned into him by an inch and his hand came up to the back of her neck, and the kiss deepened before either of them had actually decided.

Gasps fell along the east wall.

His mouth was warm. His hand was at her jaw. His other arm had come around her back and was holding her upright, which was good because her legs had a different plan, and the glow running under her skin was pulsing now in time with something she could only assume was his heartbeat.

It was getting less ceremonial by the second.

She pulled back.

Her face was on fire. Her skin was still glowing. She was a lit candle of embarrassment, and her first kiss had just happened in front of forty people, all of whom had known her name for less than a week.

Maddox’s eyes were molten.

He caught the blush on her cheeks and the glow under her skin in the same glance, and she watched him fight a laugh. He lost. Not out loud. Just at the corners of his mouth, and in the specific crinkle of his eyes that said he was finding her adorable in a way he was not going to apologize for.

She looked down at her hands.

Maddox’s hand did move from the back of her neck. His forehead rested against hers. His gold eyes were blown wide.

Glowing. Under the skin. Soft. Alive.

He watched her register it, watched her eyes go wide, watched her mouth open and close once in the specific way her mouth did when she was trying to assemble a polite sentence and had landed on zero vocabulary for it.

"Yeah. I have no clue why we are glowing."

A laugh slipped out of her before she could catch it. Small. Real. The third one in two days.

He pressed his lips to the top of her head, lingered there for exactly one second longer than he meant to, and the runes along the floor dimmed by slow degrees around them until the ceremony hall was lit only by the flame bowl and the gold still settling under their skin.

Blair, from the front row, let out a whoop that was deeply inappropriate for a sacred ritual. Not one elder moved to correct it.

Jaxon raised his voice. "From this flame forward, Guinevere Lunaris is now Guinevere Drakencrest. Wife of the king, of House Drakencrest, under the protection of the gold flame."

Something in her chest went very still.