There were only about ten women present, and about twice that number of men; they were mostly servants and bodyguards, as far as Miriam could tell. A couple of heads turned as she walked in, including one formidable-looking lady. “Wer ind’she?”
“Excuse me, I am Helge. Kara asks me to, to come,” she managed in her halting hochsprache.
“Ah.” The woman frowned. She wasn’t much older than Miriam, but her attitude and the deference the others showed her suggested she was important. And there was a family resemblance. Mother? Aunt? Miriam dipped her head. The frown vanished. “I am . . . please? You are here,” she said in heavily accented English. “I am Countess Frea. My daughter . . .” She shrugged, reaching the limits of her linguistic ability, and muttered something apologetic-sounding in hochsprache, too fast for Miriam to catch.
Miriam smiled and nodded. Some of the younger women were whispering, but then one of them moved aside and gestured to her. A seat at the back. Yes, well. Miriam accepted it silently, annoyed that her grasp of the language was insufficient to tell whether she was being snubbed or honored. I’ve been depending on Kara too much. And Brill, she told herself. Wherever she’s gotten to. Brilliana’s other duties made guessing at her whereabouts much less easy than dealing with Kara.
Another knot of women arrived, with much bowing and nodding and kissing of cheeks on both sides: an old lady with her daughters—both older than Kara’s mother, Frea—and their attendants. A brief introduction: Miriam bobbed her head and was happy enough to be ignored. At the front a couple of priests in odd vestments had begun chanting something in what might have been a mutant dialect of Latin, filtered through many generations of hochsprache-speaking colonials. A young lad swung an incense censer, spilling fumes across the altar as they continued. To Miriam’s uneducated eye (she’d been raised by her mother and her agnostic Jewish foster-father, and churchgoing hadn’t been on the agenda) it looked vaguely Catholic—until a third priest emerged from the not-a-vestry at the back, clutching an indignant white chicken and a silver knife. At which point Miriam was grateful for her place at the rear, which meant nobody was in a position to notice the way she closed her eyes until the squawking and gurgling stopped. It wasn’t that she was particularly squeamish herself, but she found the idea of killing an animal in cold blood as part of a religious ritual rather disturbing. I got the impression from Olga that they didn’t do that anymore, she pondered. What else did I get wrong?
Things speeded up after the sacrifice, which the priests dedicated to the Lady of Domestic Harmony, the Lord of the Household, and sundry other parties of the hearth who were contractually obliged to bless familial alliances, as far as Miriam could tell, or who at least had to be bought off in order for the whole enterprise not to end in a messy annulment some hours later. Two men walked up to the altar, neither of them particularly young: Frea’s eyes lingered on the older one, making Miriam suspect he might be a relative. Kara’s father? The priests asked him a whole bunch of questions, the answers to which seemed to boil down to “Yes, she’s my daughter to give away.” The other man waited patiently. Miriam couldn’t see him clearly because of the screen, but she had an impression that he was in his thirties, balding, and stockily built. And there was a sword at his belt. A sword? In church? I don’t understand these people . . . Now it was his turn to answer questions. They sounded a lot like “How much are you willing to pay for this guy’s daughter?” to Miriam, but she was barely catching one word in four. It could have been anything from “Will you take her as your wife and love her and cherish her?” to “That’ll be three pounds of silver and sixteen goats, and make sure you keep her away from the wine.” The questioning went on and on, until Miriam’s eyes began to glaze over with a curious mixture of boredom and anxiety.
Some sort of resolution seemed to be reached. One of the priests turned and marched into the back room. A few seconds later he reappeared, followed by a subdued-looking Kara. They didn’t go in for frothy white wedding dresses and veils, it seemed. Kara was wearing a rich gown, but nothing significantly different from what she might have worn for any other public event. The bald guy with the sword asked her something, and she nodded: and a moment later the other priest offered them both a cup containing some kind of fluid. I hope that’s wine, Miriam thought with a sinking feeling as they sipped from it. She couldn’t see the chicken anymore. Somehow I don’t think these guys hold with abstractions like transubstantiation.
Conversation started up on the bench ahead of her almost immediately. “It’s done,” or “That’s that,” if she understood it correctly. Two of the younger maids (daughters? nieces? servants?) stood up, and one of them giggled quietly. Up front, the men were already rising and filing out of the side door. “You will with us, come?” asked the old woman in front of Miriam, and it took her a moment to realize she was being spoken to.
“Yes,” she said uncertainly.
“Good.” The old lady reached out and grabbed Miriam’s wrist, leaning on it as she levered herself up off the wooden bench. “You’ve got strong bones,” she said, and cackled quietly.
“I have?”
“Your babies will need that.” She let go of Miriam’s arm, oblivious to her expression. “Come.”
There didn’t seem to be any alternative. They filed upstairs, into a chilly ballroom where servants with trays circulated, keeping everyone sufficiently lubricated with wine to ensure a smooth occasion. Miriam ended up with her back to a wall, observing the knots of chattering women, the puff-chested clump of young men, the elders circulating and talking to one another. The menfolk mostly had swords, which took her aback slightly. It wasn’t something she’d seen in a social setting before—but then, too many of her social encounters had been in the royal court, or with other senior members of the nobility present. Carrying ironwork in the presence of the monarch was a faux pas of the kind that could get you executed. I’ve been sheltered, she decided. Or I just had too small and too skewed a sample to see much of how things really work here.
Kara and the bald guy had been installed on two stools on a raised platform, and had much larger cups than anyone else. Miriam tried to establish eye contact, but the bride was so focused on the floorboards that it would probably take a two-by-four to get her attention. A happy occasion indeed, she thought ironically, and drained her glass. How long until I can get away from this?
A hand clutching a bottle appeared in front of her and tilted it over her glass. “A drop more, perhaps?”
“Um.” Startled, Miriam looked sideways. “Yes, please.” He was in his late twenties, as far as she could tell, and he looked as if he had southeast Asian ancestry, which made him stand out in this crowd as effectively as if he’d had green skin and eyes on stalks. He was dressed like most of the men hereabouts, in loose-cut trousers and a tunic, but unlike the others he didn’t have a sword, or even a dagger, on his belt. “Do I know you?”
“I think not.” His English was oddly accented, but it wasn’t a hochsprache accent—there was something familiar about it. “Allow me to introduce myself? I am James, second son of Ang, of family Lee.” He looked slightly amused at her reaction. “I see you have heard of me.”