The Royal Progress

She came to the mouth of Burring with her father's fleet of tall ships. Palicrovol had a thousand singers meet her at the port. So perfect was their singing that the deafest sailor on the farthest ship heard all the words.

She was rowed up the river on the only galley that her father ever built, but the oarsmen were free, not slaves, and all of them wore robes of flowers. Every day of the voyage, a hundred women sat below deck, winding fresh flowers into new robes, so that every day the robes were new. And when she reached the great city Inwit, a thousand bags of flowers were released upstream, and all of Burring, from shore to shore, was a pond of petals for the coming of the Flower Princess.

Palicrovol himself met her at King's Gate, with the white-robed priests of God surrounding him, and white-robed virgins from the nunnery led the Flower Princess from her father's ship. Palicrovol knelt before her, and the carriage that met her began the Dance of Descent.

The Dance ended in the palace, in the Chamber of Answers, a room not opened for a century because it was too perfect to be used. Ivory and alabaster, amber and jade, marble and obsidian were the walls and floor and ceiling of the Chamber of Answers, and there the Flower Princess chose to wear her ring on the middle finger of the left hand, but high on the finger, to promise fecundity and faithfulness; and lo, of all miracles, Palicrovol also wore his ring on the middle finger of his right hand, high on the finger, to promise worship and unwavering loyalty. The watching hundreds cheered.

And then an imperious woman walked out onto the floor, leading a grotesque black dwarf on a golden chain, and Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin turned to face the woman, and the wedding was broken at that moment.