My daughter turns and looks at me in her white gown, so delicate and lovely that for a moment I can scarcely believe she is mine. Her smile is expectant and shy.
"A good fit, is it?" I say, a smile playing at the corners of my own mouth. She is the future, wrapped in a relic. "Your grandmother would be so pleased, to see you in her dress. Looking so beautiful."
The late afternoon light falls in squares on the floor as I cross the room to her, reminding me of the board for the game she and my eldest son are so fond of playing. They taught me how to play chess, once, but I never took to it. It seemed much too clean, all the captures and the deaths, the transformations and shifts of power.
She turns down her eyes and laughs, carefully adjusting the pearl-colored folds of the garment. In a few days she will marry a sweet, clever young man who works as a scrivener in the White City's hall of records; his hands are soft, and perpetually blotched with ink.
"Did you also wear this dress, Mother? At your own wedding?" She looks at me again, her blue eyes large and inquisitive—her father's eyes.
I nod. The clouds must be shifting quickly today, for already the light has changed and the game board is gone. I realize at this moment that neither the sight of this gown, nor the scent of the lovingly-preserved cloth, nor the soft whisper of the hem brushing the floor, stirs to life such vivid memories as it ought to. "Yes," I say, and reach out to stroke my daughter's dark hair, lightly, with the back of my hand. "And now this dress is yours, and your own daughter's, some day."
She smiles again; she will wear it, and walk with flowers in her hands. The most important day in a woman's life, or so they say.
The reason that I do not remember my own wedding particularly well is that its recollection is overshadowed in my mind by that which preceded it. There are things I can recall with perfect clarity: a row of beds, each with a small flag of black cloth knotted to one post; the cool, slender edge of a knife; the mingled smells of blood and smoke, of ash and poppy and chamomile. In the end, I did not truly require a marriage ceremony in order to change my life, or transform me, or make me swear love and honor and allegiance. Nor did my husband. There had already been the War. These children—my daughter, her fiancé—have never known anything but peace, and I am glad of it. I want them to grow old quietly together, smoothing their fingers over their tidy black queens and white pawns.
We talk about her wedding arrangements for a few minutes more, and then she is gone, with a kiss for me and a rustle of clean fabric. I stand at the window, closing my eyes against the thick, honey-colored light so that its afterimage floats on the insides of my lids. I take in the silence and remember the day they brought the dying boy to us.