Maynya gritted her teeth and accepted her role yet again. She could never leave the brides abandoned without a champion. She scoured all fantasies of flight from her mind and focused on her immediate goals. Get through this ceremony. Play the gracious bride to the masses. Find some way to avoid sex with her horrid husband without getting herself beaten to death in retribution.
Her pudgy fiancé, warlord of a pitiful state, stood flanked by his soldiers at the tent’s opening. He stared at her with brooding eyes. No hint of warmth, even on their wedding day.
She flinched.
The king broke eye contact and went inside. Guests followed him in, few of whom she recognized. Slaves didn’t mingle with royalty. After the wedding she might come to know some of these people, but she doubted for very long. She had no delusions about the length of her remaining life.
She shifted her attention to a soldier lingering outside the tent flap. Unlike her despicable groom, this man held kindness in his eyes. They’d met ever so briefly when he came to her aide with a pitcher of water during her trial up the hill.
She’d rejected him. Had she made a mistake? Her temples pounded.
Something about this man summoned the faintest whisper of a memory, from another life, perhaps, one most certainly brighter than this one, but…ending in darkness? Yes, that was the sense his return gaze inspired, and then something else, recognition so overpowering her legs trembled to the point of collapse. She loved this man. He’d provided shelter at his home, frolicked with her in the snow, and told his life story in the quiet of his bedroom.
What was his name? Surely he’d find a way to stop this wedding.
Oh Lord, what was the man’s name?
Hers came to mind, instead. “I am Carla!”
The soldier’s face became a mask of confusion.
A blow to her face came hard and swift. “You speak in tongues now, you fool?” The maiden on her left, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman glared at her the way a mother might scold a wayward child. “You Mystic witches bring your own troubles down on your heads with your foolhardiness.”
Maynya saw stars. Her cheekbone throbbed. “I am not a witch.” And she said so in the correct language this time. “Ego sum non a veneficus.” What dialect did she babble before? What came over her?
“Woe betide any witches in this kingdom,” the matron said.
Two of the bridal pool women began crying. Maynya met their eyes and tried to smile reassurance. The effort might have failed. Elsewhere, angry peasants muttered behind their hands. She avoided their gazes so as not to encourage a rebellion, one the capital’s heavily armed soldiers would surely put down in an instant. Finally, she settled her attention on the gentry, not one of whom seemed bothered that the king’s bride had been slapped hard enough to bring tears. These wealthy women despised her, and the men no doubt wished they had fresh brides of their own to beat.
She scanned the crowd for the soldier again. Couldn’t find him. He must have gone into the tent with the others.
Maynya’s disorientation intensified. The sun seemed to pale. The ground wobbled beneath her feet.
Another man caught her attention. Deeply tanned, dark-haired, and handsome, he stood taller than any in the gathering. She tried to gauge his age, at first thought him young, but recalculated upon studying his eyes. This man was well advanced in years despite his vigor. She had trouble unlocking her gaze from his until he did it for her by ducking into the tent.
A flutist began a wedding ballad, and the matrons led Maynya inside. One of them released her arm, freeing her to slip a hand into a slit pocket of her gown. She touched a few possessions she’d brought for luck—a goose feather, a tiny doll whittled from wood, and a quatrant—the two-faced coin serving as currency in Virtus.
Guests crowded on either side of the aisle, a mishmash of indistinguishable faces, too many in such a small space, sucking the air out of it. She struggled to breathe, her temples pulsed, and a gust of wind pounded against the tent as if in response. She tried to focus on the groom waiting twenty paces ahead, but her blood ran cold at the sight of the bound sacrifice on the altar behind him. Not the traditional pig or goat. No, far worse than that. A young, red-haired woman in a white shift twisted against her bindings. A gag muffled her cries.
“Abelia!” Her stomach lurched. She’d helped this poor girl escape two days earlier. Maynya shot desperate glances around the tent. Surely someone would put a stop to this. Then she saw the soldier who teased her memory outside, the man named… “Brewster!”
The soldier froze. He stared at her with as perplexed a gaze as anyone could summon—the same tortured confusion she must have reflected back to him from her own eyes.
A blow came hard across her face again. “Be still, woman, and thank the gods you aren’t the one on the altar.”
The matron’s tone threatened greater violence. She wielded a bamboo cane in her free hand.
The soldier clenched his fists and stepped forward, clearly ready to do battle with matrons large and small. But another cry from Abelia distracted his attention to the king, Maynya’s groom, who stood several feet to his left. The glare he cast in Albus’s direction seemed capable of destroying the man on the spot.
She could only hope.
The king pulled a long, curved dagger from a scabbard at his waist and approached the bound victim. Maynya opened her mouth to shout again, but the cry caught in her throat when she noticed the soldier gripping a knife in his hand as well. He took a step toward Albus with murder in his eyes.
None of the onlookers made a move to stop him. Perhaps they thought the soldier and the
