Wedding of Duke Anguin and Princess Rardine

The wedding of Duke Anguin II and Princess Rardine took place at Falas just after Midsummer, on a minor religious festival, in the year following the Restoration of Enultramar. It was the first major state ceremony at the Coral Seat under restored Alshari rule and the great political marriage of the post-Restoration kingdom.

The complicated couple

By any conventional standard the match should have been impossible. Rardine had personally sponsored the assassinations of Anguin's parents Duke Lenguin and Duchess Enora; Anguin had nearly exposed Rardine's mother Queen Grendine's illegitimacy. Rardine had spent months in Korbal's captivity at Olum Seheri and had been freed by Anguin's personal hand at the Battle of Olum Seheri. The cousins had emerged from those events with a working political alliance and, by all reports, a real personal partnership.

Pentandra, who had a closer view than anyone else, summarised the couple plainly to Minalan:

That woman understands power like no one I've ever seen. She has been the force behind Anguin's consolidation of the remaining high nobility. Rardine managed to broker an alliance between the remaining Sea Lords, secured the allegiance of the bulk of the fleet and the got the Vale Lords to firmly support our lad.

— Pentandra, on Rardine

Anguin is no puppet! He's overruled Rardine a dozen times in matters of policy. In open court. . . . She seems to welcome the correction, and she supports her intended husband all the more forcefully. It matters not what Anguin does. Where Rardine is concerned, his word is law, and she is the enforcer of that law.

— Pentandra, on the partnership

The dowry

Negotiations had dragged on all winter. Anguin's ministers and the Royal Family's representatives took four scrolls to set out the terms of the dowry agreement. The political stake was significant. Rardine's personal dowry returned nearly every parcel of land in southern Alshar that House Bimin had quietly annexed during Anguin's exile back to House Terine. Lands Queen Grendine had coveted since girlhood went back to the Coral Seat overnight. The only Alshari holding House Bimin retained was the marginal coastal domain of Maidenpool — the only place that Tavard's ill-fated invasion attempt had reached and the only place Anguin would later "gift" to his cousin Tavard at Yule, as a calculated insult.

The week of festivities

Anguin used the wedding as a tangible sign of his rule over the once-rebellious capital. The week of festivities included:

• A boar hunt the day before the ceremony, where a slip of his heel sent Anguin within striking distance of a seven-inch tusker; he killed it himself with the field-spear and earned the gentlemen's open respect.
• A banquet at Foxdale Hall the night of the hunt, with the Alshari gentlemen filling the hall with ribald jests at their duke's expense.
• The Pentandra-hosted reception at the Tower of Sorcery, with Pentandra's magical manifestations over the lake at sunset becoming the talk of Alshar.
• A formal banquet at the palace hosted for King Rard and Queen Grendine, including Tavard, who attended without Princess Armandra (she pleaded advanced pregnancy and her mistrust of wizards) and complained continuously through every event.
• The wedding ceremony itself in the Temple of Trygg in the Duke's Quarter.
• A Briga's-Day-style street celebration through Falas afterward.

The wedding ceremony

The bride wore Alshari blue and green:

Princess Rardine handled the meeting with grace and poise I was unsure she possessed. She was wearing the colors of Alshar, blue and green, with a newly-wrought crown befitting her rank. . . . She looked almost a wife to Anguin, already, a duchess-to-be and bride.

— Minalan, on Rardine in Alshari colours

The choice was a deliberate signal to Queen Grendine that Rardine had chosen Alshar over Castal. The crown Rardine wore was newly wrought, in Alshari style. Her gown, cut in Alshari court fashion, drew attention from the Castali delegation who recognised the visual rebuke for what it was.

The ceremony itself was abysmally long, full of religious invocations, vows, sermons, hymns, and uniquely Alshari customs that left even the patient bored. The veil was lifted at the close. Alshar had a duchess for the first time in six years.

The draugen attack

The reception itself was attacked. Korbal — or one of his lieutenants, in retaliation for Olum Seheri — sent a wave of combat draugen into the wedding feast through hoxters smuggled in by a guest. Pratanik the Emissary was the suspected commander; the actual mechanism was a hoxter wand carried by a knight whose family had Four Counts' rebel sympathies, who had attended the wedding to demonstrate his "loyalty."

The attack killed thirty-four guests and wounded hundreds. The defence was led by the wedding's own warmagi: Pentandra with an antique scimitar, Rondal with mageblade, Gatina the Kitten of Night and her father Lord Furitus, Atopol, several Alshari palace guards with Sentry Rods, and Minalan personally with Blizzard. Some thirty draugen entered the palace and twice as many were active outside on the lake-side balcony.

The wedded couple were unharmed. Anguin had been moved to a secured antechamber off the main hall by the time the attack manifested. The political message of the attack — that Korbal-Sheruel were not bound by the post-Olum-Seheri lull — reached Castabriel and Vanador the same night.

The court Rardine built

The marriage produced what Pentandra and Minalan came to call the Falas court: a coalition government in which Anguin handled the public face of rule, Rardine handled the intelligence portfolio and the consolidation of internal political enemies, Pentandra handled magic and external diplomacy, Count Salgo handled war, Count Angrial handled prime-ministerial business, and Father Amus handled court chaplaincy and ducal legitimacy. The court ran for the rest of the series.

Rardine became, by Pentandra's description in Preceptor, "a very clever wife who shares much of the power and understanding of Queen Grendine". The line was both compliment and warning. Rardine's post-marriage career — the Caramas anti-Nemovort campaign, the suppression of the Rat brotherhood, the slave-trade liquidation in the Shallow Sea, the eventual elevation of Minalan to Count Palatine of the Magelaw — ran on the political logic of a Family-trained operator now operating on her own behalf.

The Magelaw

The single most consequential post-wedding act was Anguin's formal investiture of Minalan as Count Palatine of the Magelaw. The ceremony took place at the Coral Seat days after the wedding feast, with the entire restored Alshari court in attendance. The legal foundation it laid — an autonomous magical palatinate within the Alshari ducal frame, sovereign in its own internal affairs and answerable only to the Coral Seat — produced Vanador, the Magelaw economy, the Tera Alon enclave, and the eventual seat from which Minalan would conduct the Vundel snowstone trade and, in time, become Doge of Farise.

Everything that the Magelaw became, in the books that followed, traces back to the elevation that closed the wedding week.