Epilogue

There is music, but he does not hear it, though not three paces behind him sweat glistens over bow and piping flute. His collar itches, his toes are pinched, and the carpenter's son is glaring at him from the second row, but there is sunlight in her hair and flowers in her arms and she is looking at him and she is smiling.

They are not the same as they were, when she was a child and he was little more. Too are they different from the young man who leaned against a fencepost, terrified to say hello, or the flour-covered woman who ran to greet him. They have grown and they have shifted—together and apart and together. But there is one thing that is the same, from when he turned his soldier's eyes to her on that morning and when he turns his bridegroom's eyes upon her now:

She is still the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.