The soldiers led her across a great yard, to a fountain where slaves dressed in homespun wool greeted Kepi with sober eyes and folded hands. Their thin woolens, open at the chest and neck, revealed scrawny torsos and protruding ribs. Over the left breast of one she saw a scar in the shape of a tree. She had heard the Feren soldiers, on their journey, refer to these slaves as plodders and drudges. From what she knew, most Feren slaves were neither property nor prisoners, though now and then a few were culled from the prison ranks. Instead, servitude was a station they inherited and kept for life—the lowest caste in the kingdom, and hence the whole empire. Barbarous. Even in Harkana, where life was rough, people were not bound to one class.
In the yard, the servants and slaves came out to watch Kepi’s arrival. A whisper echoed among them and grew and grew until it was all that she could hear—words like “captured” and “survivor” and “fugitive.” Perhaps they had heard of the night she had spent in the Cragwood, the sacred forest. During the long ride from the Rift valley to the High City of Rifka she had heard that Dagrun had not suffered the Waking Rite. She knew he had taken his kingdom by force, but she had not known that he had neglected to complete the Feren custom. More than one soldier had muttered that the king of the Ferens was cursed for not having undergone the ritual. She hoped the soldiers’ words were true, she hoped the man who had once held a sword to her throat was cursed, but doubted the truth of what the soldiers said.
She spent a restless afternoon alone in a vast, drafty bedroom of the caer, a room with a single well-guarded door. A great fire roared at one end of the chamber. She pulled the feather-stuffed bed toward the flames and basked in their warmth. Feren was said to have great stores of wood, forests packed with birds and small animals. She hoped she would find more wealth in Rifka than she had found in Roghan’s hovel. She hoped the forest’s abundance was not just one more lie told by the men of the Gray Wood.
The fire was warm and its constant crackle rattled in her ear, but it was Seth who kept her feeling uneasy, or rather thoughts of Seth. She remembered the way he had come to the carriage window and begged for her to speak with him.
A knock at the door startled her. She stood up, expecting to see Dagrun, or at least one of his sworn men, perhaps even her sister, but instead a group of slave girls, their faces unfamiliar, stepped inside. “Where are my waiting women?” Kepi asked. The girls had accompanied her from Harwen.
“Gone,” murmured one of the slave girls. “Taken by the San,” said another.
No one had bothered to tell Kepi. Shocked, she bowed her head as the Feren girls filled the room. Her waiting women had been servants, not slaves. They were free women and her friends, but the Ferens acted as if they were nothing, as if their loss was of no importance. Kepi blinked back tears as the slaves surrounded her. They carried a simple dress, its white fabric a textured linen woven from flax and sewn into a single long piece of cloth. It appeared simple to her eyes, severely plain even, but she’d noticed almost every other woman she had seen in Feren wore little more than a rag at her waist or neck and a necklace of wooden beads, so she supposed she should have been grateful.
The girls unrolled the dress; they held it up for Kepi to inspect.
“What is it?” she asked, and the girls told her. “Your wedding dress, mistress. The king had it made specially for you.”
“Wedding?”
“Yes, mistress,” said the eldest girl, a dark little sprite not much older than Kepi herself.
This is my wedding dress? She sighed and took the slip of linen in her hands. The fabric snagged on her bitten-down nails. She had lost her friends, her waiting women, her possessions. And now she must marry a man she hardly knows? She thought of her father—he had been with her the first time she came to Feren—and longed for his companionship. She wondered if he still lived, if he had met the emperor yet. Would she ever know what had become of him? Or was her father just gone, without a funeral, without closure, without the courtesy of a day on which she could mourn the end of his life?
“Shall we dress you, my lady?” the sprite was asking.
“Now? It’s nearly night.”
“Don’t worry. We’re just going to fit the dress. It won’t take long. But we’ll need to scrub you clean first. Come,” said the slave girl. “We’ve got work to do. We need to get you ready for the wedding. The king has felled his tree, and the construction of your chamber is under way.” In fact, Kepi could hear the sounds of sawing and nailing taking place somewhere in the distance, but she could not see the chamber. She saw only a little bailey, the stone wall around the caer, a thin, dirty-looking trench, and the poor, scrubby burg surrounding it all.
I won’t marry Dagrun. I won’t stay here.
She knew she told herself lies, if only to comfort her nerves. And yet, she wondered how the people of Feren could stand to have as their queen a woman who disliked them all, their king especially? Once again, she longed for a blade, for the feel of cold iron in her fist.
“Come now, step into the tub, my pretty lady,” said one of the slave girls as the others bustled around her chamber, setting out pots of ointment, filling the tub with water, unaware of the struggle that raged in her heart, in her trembling hands.
“I’ve brought you something to eat. The queen mustn’t be hungry. No, no,” said the black-haired sprite. She offered chips of salted quail and a crock of amber.
“Thank you,” Kepi said as she took the cup and drank.
The slaves stoked the fire and pushed her bed into a corner.
“Take off your clothes—hurry, hurry,” the sprite told her, but the others were already stripping Kepi bare, motioning for her to her stand in the wooden tub as they readied themselves to pour water over her shoulders. They washed her with a yellow cream that smelled of salt, and rubbed her skin with a sweet oil. All the while they chatted with her about the king, their silly girlish voices joking about the wedding night, about how fine-looking Dagrun was. “A man like that,” the sprite said, “could keep any woman happy.”
Kepi could not hide the bitterness from her face. “If he’s such a prize,” she said, “perhaps you would like to marry him.”
The girl gave a slow, curling smile. “Perhaps I would,” she said, “if I were a king’s daughter from a far-away land.”
A kind but clumsy girl, with one eye brown and the other gray, gazed at Kepi with sympathy and changed the topic, “But anyway, you’d have to deal with his temper, he’s a difficult man, they say. Moody, angry at times, and … violent, some say.”
“Shut up,” hissed the sprite, but Kepi told the gray-eyed girl to continue. “Violent?” she asked.
The gray-eyed girl frowned at the sprite—clearly there was some old tension between these two.
“Nonsense,” said the sprite.
“It’s not nonsense,” the gray-eyed girl said. “I heard you telling old Halsie about it last month.”
The sprite shook her head. “It was not the king but the guards who beat those girls. When the king found out, he put the guards in shackles.”