Alanna's ears were throbbing to the ceaseless shouts of the crowd below when eventually Xanir withdrew his arm from her shoulders and with a last wave, turned to lift and carry her back up the steps to the terrace. She balked in a moment of rigid refusal, pulling away from his reaching hands, and one foot landed outside the carefully cooled area on blistering hot mosaic. Her breath hissed inward on a gritted refusal to yelp. The next second her new husband was carrying her back up the steps.
Her skin squirmed under his grasp, but Alanna kept her face calm, proud. This was a moment for dignity.
The four lords standing to attention on the wide terrace and pedestals were gazing directly ahead, focus beyond the Tahl and his bride. Despite the rapidity of her glance, their features seemed etched into her mind. Her skin was running cold despite the scorching sun, tightening over bones and muscle, every pore clenching in shame while Xanir bore her past the one standing aloft on the nearest plinth. The one who had also stood nearest her head, panting as he had watched.
Dignity?
With her back now to the public, Alanna allowed her eyes to snap closed. All four had watched.
Head swimming, she recalled her grandmother's warning that Tahl'mese marital customs would be different.
How different?
she thought in rising trepidation.
What would he do now?
More - what might
they
do?
Dread began to tighten down her spine.
Be strong.
Alanna wrenched her mind away, and forced it to stumble through the mantra she had learned to recite as a child, standing endlessly to attention through interminable parades.
Hjuortmark, Hjarnland, Kjellund, Vik...
the names of the provinces of her home evoked stunning memories of sharp, high mountains bounding lush valleys. Shoulders burning under the merciless sun, Alanna felt her brittle equilibrium lurch again sideways, tears stinging, and drew a sharp breath, thrusting the longing away. Xanir stepped into the shade of the doorway.
He stopped in the relaxation area immediately inside, at the foot of the dais, and lowered her to her feet. Heavy carved wooden seats scattered with colourful cushions encircled a beautiful pattern of tiling on the cool floor. In the centre of the area, two bathtubs had appeared, each gently steaming, and a high pile of blue towels bordered a variety of dishes and small tubs on a low table to the right. The ointments and liquids in the tubs smelt of soap and exotic flowers.
A light breath escaped Alanna as the slightly singed sole of her foot met the blessed cool of the floor tiles. The carving on the heavy wooden shutters for the doorway to the terrace was exquisite, delicate reliefs of trees and flowers and fruit and beasts all gambolling together in a riotous whole. Her eyes were fixed on a carven outline of long-legged, long-billed birds standing in a river when the footsteps of the four lords entered the room behind her, and stopped.
She could not halt the trembling, although anger was rising in her. She didn't have words for this: her father had taught her a series of code phrases so that she could let him know if the Tahl was violent, or sadistic. But not this. She could not tell him this. A memories of her own pleading, begging the Tahl, tied to the bedpost and then splayed across the bed
in front of these four
flashed across her mind. She flung it away.
Frozen, she watched a richly-clothed arm of one of the lords reach into her field of vision. An arrow of thought stabbed her: a Kjeldahl would not submit to this.
Not again.
Alanna felt the anger that had been steadily growing under the fear surge toward the surface, ripping a shudder through her.
But there were five of them.
