The second the masked person vanished with Sarisa, the entire ceremony broke into a fresh wave of screaming.
One moment the stranger had Sarisa by the wrist, all bad intent and nightmare aura and impossible speed.
The next there was a twist of magic, a violent folding of air, and they were gone. No flash pretty enough to be ceremonial.
No trace neat enough to be followed. Just absence. A ripped hole in the middle of the wedding and a princess no longer standing in it.
Malvoria hit the ground on one knee and swore hard enough to curdle wine.
Her jaw throbbed where Lara had struck her, and the inside of her mouth tasted like blood and humiliation.
Across the ruined aisle, Raveth was hauling herself upright with the expression of a woman who had just been informed the world no longer respected effort.
Vaelen was on the ground looking like a decorative corpse in an expensive suit. The priest had disappeared entirely, which Malvoria privately respected.
Then the queen found her voice.
"Find the princess!"
The order cracked through the garden like a whip.
Guards scrambled at once, though Malvoria wanted to shake each of them by the throat and ask how exactly they planned to find someone taken by teleportation in the middle of magical chaos.
Search the hedges? Interrogate the roses? Ask the fucking chairs if they'd seen anything?
Still, they ran.
Some toward the shattered edge of the garden wall where the explosion had torn through stone, some out toward the outer courtyards, others barking useless orders.
The healers arrived almost as quickly.
White-robed, pale-faced, efficient in the way Celestians always were when they were reacting to disaster they should have prevented.
They swept over the remains of the ceremony, tending to bruised nobles, stunned attendants, guards clutching broken wrists and throats.
One poor woman had fainted directly into a rosebush and had to be lifted out with leaves in her hair and no dignity left at all.
Malvoria stood slowly, one hand pressed to the side of her face, and watched the ruin with a grim, almost admiring satisfaction.
The ceremony decorations were wrecked. The aisle was torn apart. Half the flowers had been crushed under panicked feet. Vaelen's perfect wedding suit was bloodstained and ash-dusted, which improved it immensely.
Then the queen came toward her.
Ah.
There it was.
The queen moved through the wreckage like winter given bones, her silver gown untouched by the chaos around her because apparently the woman had made a pact with filth itself.
Her face was carved into cold fury, and the moment her eyes landed on Malvoria, Malvoria knew exactly where this was going.
"How," the queen said, voice low and lethal, "could you be beaten so easily?"
Malvoria stared at her.
Then she laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because the alternative was setting the woman on fire in front of half the realm.
"Well, look at my face," she snapped, spreading both arms in invitation to the obvious. "That person was fucking strong. Look at your Vaelen. He was crushed. And you thought we had a chance?"
Across the garden, Vaelen was indeed being propped into a sitting position by two healers while trying not to look as though every bone in his body had been introduced to regret. Blood still streaked his mouth.
One eye was swelling shut. Malvoria felt, under the circumstances, that he was taking it rather well.
The queen did not appreciate perspective.
Her gaze sharpened. "I'm sure it was Lara."
Malvoria's amusement vanished instantly.
"No," she said.
The queen's mouth thinned. "Do not insult me. That style of violence, that focus on Sarisa, the timing, the recklessness. It reeks of her."
Malvoria stepped forward before she even thought better of it, black silk whispering around her boots, rage bright and clean in her chest. "It is not Lara."
The queen's eyes flickered. Good. Let her see that this was not a game.
"Lara is in my realm," Malvoria said. "And Lara would never hit her own family. She might be reckless. She might be dramatic. She might do something very stupid and very illegal for love." Her mouth curled, just slightly.
"But she would never hit her family."
Raveth arrived at her side at just the right moment, lip split and one sleeve torn, looking like the sort of woman who might cheerfully continue this argument with her fists if rhetoric failed.
The queen did not back down.
"I want proof."
Malvoria almost smiled.
Because the queen thought that demand cornered her. Thought that if she pressed hard enough, if she named Lara often enough, the world would obediently provide guilt.
Instead Malvoria folded her arms and said, with all the boredom of a woman asked to prove the sky existed, "Fine. If you want that, let me teleport Lara here."
The queen stilled.
Around them, the surviving ceremony was trying and failing to become orderly again. Healers moved. Guards hovered.
Nobles whispered behind gloved hands. The whole garden strained toward this conversation like a body listening for the next blow.
The queen nodded once. "Do it."
Malvoria did not even need to fake hesitation.
She lifted one hand, and her black-orange flame bloomed in her palm with a hiss.
Inside her chest, under the heat of the performance, her mind was already admiring Lara's clone work.
It had been Elysia's suggestion, Veylira's refinement, and Lara's magic that made it possible.
Lara's fire clones had always been cleaner than Malvoria's, more precise, more stable, better at carrying the full shape of a person instead of just a clever imitation. You could not tell it was a clone.
Which was deeply irritating as a sisterly fact and very useful as a criminal one.
The flame twisted.
A body stepped out of it.
Lara.
Or rather, Lara as far as anyone here could tell.
She looked solid. Whole. Untouched. No bruised jaw. No split lip. No ceremonial smoke or wedding ash.
Her shirt was different. Her expression was immediate fury. Even her scent would have been right if the queen had been close enough to test it. Malvoria almost applauded.
The clone blinked once, took in the wrecked ceremony, the blood, the guards, the queen, and said, with beautifully convincing outrage, "What the heck, little sis?"
Malvoria would have kissed Lara on the mouth for that if the whole court had not been watching.
Instead she pointed dramatically at the devastation. "Sarisa was kidnapped."
The clone went still.
Then she did exactly what was needed.
Anger hit her face like a blade pulled free. Not theatrical. Not broad. Focused. Personal. A woman seeing ruin and immediately deciding who to hate for it.
She looked toward the queen, and in that single glance Malvoria saw half the nearby guards tense like they'd just remembered why Lara had a reputation.
"Kidnapped," the clone repeated.
The queen watched with narrowed eyes.
Good, Malvoria thought. Watch all you like. See how clean the magic is. See how uninjured she is. See how much of an idiot you're being.
The clone took one step forward. "How?"
The word cracked.
Malvoria did not have to answer. The wreckage did it for her.
The queen, however, was not prepared to surrender suspicion so easily. "Your timing is convenient."
The clone turned to look at her fully. Gods, Lara was good at angry silence, and even her copies knew it.
Then, low and dangerous: "Are you implying something?"
Malvoria nearly purred.
The queen held that stare for one moment too long, then decided, wisely or not, to abandon this line for now.
"Get her back to your realm," she said to Malvoria. "If she is innocent, she will be safer there until this is resolved."
Malvoria had to work not to grin.
"Yes, Your Majesty," she said, far too sweetly.
She reached out, let flame curl once more around the clone, and drew "Lara" back into the fire as neatly as she had arrived. The illusion vanished without a trace.
There.
Proof, if one was stupid enough to want visible proof more than logic. Lara was "elsewhere." Lara was "uninjured."
Lara had not just teleported from a wedding with smoke in her hair and blood in her mouth.
The queen looked unsatisfied anyway.
Naturally.
That was the problem with paranoid women. When reality contradicted them, they often took it as insult rather than correction.
Before she could speak again, Veylira and Raveth closed the distance together.
Raveth looked barely patched together and very much in the mood to worsen someone else's day. Veylira looked far calmer, which meant she was in fact far more dangerous.
They stopped just short of the queen.
Raveth's eyes moved once over the wrecked altar, the scattered petals, the healers, the absent bride.
Then she said, almost conversationally, "The masked person seemed to have something against you, Queen."
Veylira tilted her head, silver gaze cold and exact. "What have you done?"