Soon the city opened up into a grassy yard, where a great platform had been erected, a wooden stage held up by columns carved with vines and flowers. Reached by a tall set of stairs, the platform was topped with a smaller central dais on which a man wearing a thorny crown stood waiting amid a ring of torches. A white-robed priestess waited at his side. Alongside her stood a second, younger girl dressed in a muddy gray robe, a Feren priestess of some type.
He elbowed through the crowd, the song growing louder, the mob growing denser, the hymn like a dull pounding in his ears. A long line of slaves, their necks collared, blocked his path. All around them the hymn rang out, but these slaves acted as if they could not hear it, as if they were not present. Why? What was wrong and who were these people? None of them looked up, none of them so much as made eye contact. Women and men, children and babes. He heard them referred to as gifts, these men and women were gifts to the new bride and groom, slaves of exceptional worth, he heard said. What slave could carry such worth?
In the center of the line kneeled a tall boy whose skin was paler than the rest, his body thin and malnourished, his ribs so visible that Ren could count them. His long hair fell into his eyes, but then he raised his head slightly and Ren recognized him. Adin.
33
There was a struggle, jarring her from her stupor, sounds of screaming, battle. Kepi opened her eyes blearily and turned to the girl at her side.
“A slave, my lady.”
“What of him?”
“He has broken his bonds and fled.”
“Fled?”
“It is of no consequence.” The air outside was once more quiet. “There is no escape from the caer, the soldiers will find him. They find everyone.” Kepi was uncertain how to interpret the scuffle.
The slave girl offered her another drink and she gladly accepted.
She’d been drinking since early that morning, trying to calm her nerves. But there was something odd about that last sip. Her head spun as if she had drunk too much amber. Had she had too much? Was the amber here so much stronger than what they served in Harwen?
She peered down and grimaced at the drink. A milky wisp ran through the golden liquid, laced with some opiate, probably. She had thought of running, of fleeing the ceremony, but she was suddenly so weak she could barely stand. She wondered if she would still be conscious when the wedding took place. Her head spun, the opium coursed through her veins, and the tent obscured her view of the gathering outside. Dimly she heard the servants bickering, blaming one another. Didn’t you tell her? said one. No, said another. It’s tradition, said a third. The queen drinks opium before the Night Wedding, didn’t she know?
No. Kepi shook her head as her eyes closed and her head swam.
A low hum broke the stillness. The hymn had started again. Dissonant chords filled her ears as her handmaids carried her out of the tent. Kepi flinched at their touch, at the strange noise and the flickering torches. The hymn was hummed, not sung. It had no words, and its vocalists did not stand in a choir. The men were spread throughout the crowd, as if the song emanated from the forest itself, surrounding her in a single, mighty sound. A sound whose power seemed amplified by the darkness. It occurred to Kepi that the hymn was not quite music but was the sound of the trees themselves, a song of the forest, a rumble like thunder that pounded the listener’s chest, that rattled the earth.
Leaving the tent, Kepi’s thoughts wavered and her ears pounded. She was barefoot and cold, naked from the chest up, a crown of lavender hanging on her brow. Slaves wearing woolen mantles, their hair braided and wreathed with wildflowers, held her arms while she struggled against the opiate, her vision wavering, her head throbbing. The ground was uneven beneath her feet, and she kept stumbling, and when she looked up she saw a priestess in a white robe, a member of the Desouk cult standing alongside what Kepi guessed was a priestess of Llyr, the forest god. The girl wore a gray robe caked in the red mud of the forest floor. It was an ugly gown, a matted, tattered robe. She had heard of the priestesses but never seen one; Roghan had not bothered to find a priestess to seal their union. Now Dagrun, her second husband, peered down on her from atop the wedding platform.
He wore clan stripes, gray and black and green. The Feren crown sat atop his head. The bronze circlet, cast in the image of blackthorn twigs and woven with curling barbs, drew slender shadows across his face. His nose was broken, slightly, at the ridge. In the past, she had not noticed this detail. Perhaps it was the firelight that highlighted the wavering line. The torchlight illuminated the upper half of his face while leaving the rest cloaked in shadow. She could not see if he was smiling or frowning, nervous or angry. His features were masked, an illusion that made him appear all the more intimidating.
She had been dreading another Feren wedding for years, but now there was little she could do to stop it. Memories of her first nuptials returned, of that cottage in the woods, of the fog and murk, the way the guests had stared so sadly at her as they stole food from the small feast and left without bidding her goodbye.
If I had a blade in my hand, I could end this wedding, and Dagrun along with it. But she had no blade and no armor, and she was barely clothed. She shivered, wanting to cover her breasts, but decided that would be seen as a sign of weakness and so she kept her arms held tightly at her sides.
The slaves urged—no, pushed—her forward, their arms locked around hers, Kepi’s feet barely touching the ground. Higher voices joined the hymn, passing the melody through the crowd, echoing the song from side to side, voice to voice. The whole city was in attendance, gathered around the large wedding platform in a grove of trees, a miniature forest in the heart of the caer. The grove’s sloping ground enabled all in attendance to see the king and his new queen, the dazed girl at whom the people were throwing star-shaped white petals, carpeting the forest floor in white like falling snow. They stuck to her made-up face, to her hair and her hands, and Kepi reached up to brush them away with shaking fingers. Let this be over soon. The beauty of the forest and the white flowers made the ceremony somehow all the more terrible.
The people were gathered in circles around the platform, Feren warlords nearest in their colored mantles, sworn men at their sides. The freemen of Rifka next, then vast rows of slaves, bare chests and knotted hair, everywhere that the eye could see, and all the while the hymn grew louder and less intelligible. How can they all just stand and watch as I’m forced to marry against my will? She wondered how they could smile at this misery. Kepi wanted to hear beauty in the song, but she couldn’t: it sounded like a dirge, like grief, like a slave’s song. Appropriate, perhaps—but no less painful.