“She should have thought more exactingly of the timing involved when she goaded you into eating the surka in the first place.”
Aerin laughed.
Tor said ruefully, “I almost wish I’d had the forethought to eat a tree myself.” Perlith had asked Tor to stand behind him at the ceremony. The first companion was supposed to hold a sola’s badge of rank during his wedding; but in this particular case there were some interesting politics going on. Perlith was required by tradition to ask the king and the first sola to stand by him for the ceremony, and the king and the first sola by tradition were required to accept the invitation. The first companion’s place was, as attendants go, the most important, but it was also the most attentive; the slang for the first companion’s position was rude, and referred to the companion’s location near his sola’s backside. Asking Tor to stand first companion was a token of Perlith’s unrivaled esteem for his first sola, as the first companion’s place should go to Perlith’s dearest friend. It would also be Perlith’s only chance ever to have the first sola waiting on him.
“You should drop the badge with a clatter just as the chant gets to the bit about family loyalty and the unending bliss of being a member of a family. Ugh,” said Aerin.
“Don’t tempt me,” Tor said.
Fortunately Galanna did not have her future husband’s sense of humor, and she was glad to excuse Aerin from participation on the grounds of the continuing unreliability of the first sol’s health. Galanna was incapable of plotting much of anything over a year in advance, and the surka incident had had nothing to do with the predictable approach of her wedding day. It had had to do with the loss of her eyelashes just when she knew Perlith had decided to offer for her—which offer had then had to be put off till they were long enough again for her to look up at him through them. (She had actually been weak enough to wonder if Aerin was Gifted after all, her timing in this case being no less than diabolical.) But it had occurred to her lately that it would be a boon to find a way to keep Aerin out of the ceremony itself, without giving visible public offense (and since the surka hadn’t killed her off, which, to give Galanna what little credit she deserves, she had not been attempting). Galanna understood as well as Perlith did why Tor had been asked, and would stand as first companion; but Tor was reliable, for all his disgusting sympathy for his youngest cousin. He believed in his first sola’s place as Aerin had no reason to believe in her place as first sol; and Aerin, if dragooned into performing some ceremonial role, would by fair means or foul mess things up. Nothing was going to spoil Galanna’s wedding day. She and Aerin understood each other very well when Aerin, formal and smiling, offered her apologies and regrets, and Galanna, formal and smiling, accepted them.
Galanna and Perlith’s wedding was the first great state event since the celebration of Tor’s coming to manhood, and thus his taking his full place at his uncle’s right hand, less than two years after his own father died. Aerin had been a part of that ceremony, and she had been determined to perform her role with both dignity and accuracy, that Tor would not be embarrassed in front of all the people who had told him not to ask her to be in it. The result was that she remembered very little of the day-long rites. She did remember frantically running her responses through her mind (which she had so firmly committed to memory that she remembered them all her life). When the priests finished naming the three hundred and ten sovereigns before Arlbeth (not that all of them had ruled quite the same country, but the sonorous recitation of all the then-who-came-afters had an impressive ring to it), she had to rename the last seven of them, seven being the perfect number because of the Seven Perfect Gods, and name their Honored Wives or queens (there hadn’t been a ruling queen in a very long time) and any full brothers or sisters. The finish was: And then who came after was Tor, son of Thomar, own brother to Arlbeth; Tor came next. And she had to not squeak, and she had to not squeak three times, for they went through it all once at dawn, once at midday, and once at sunset. She also had to hold his swordbelt, and by the evening she had blisters across both palms from gripping it too hard. But she had done everything right.
Tor had been busier since then, often away from the City, showing himself to the Hillfolk who came rarely or never to the City, that they might one and all know the face and voice of the man who would be their king someday; and it had also been soon after Tor’s coming of age that Aerin had eaten the surka. While it lay heavily on her she had not wished to see much of him even when he was at home, though he had come often to sit by her when she was too sick to protest and even, without her knowledge, put off one or two trips that he might stay near her. But as she got enough better to be surly about not being well, and as his absences of necessity increased, a barrier began to grow up between them, and they were no longer quite the friends they had once been. She missed him, for she had been accustomed to talking to him nearly every day, but she never said she missed him, and she told herself that it was as well, since the surka had proved Galanna three-quarters right about her, that the first sola not contaminate himself with her company too often. When she did see him, she was painstakingly bright and offhand.
A few days after Talat had trotted halfway round his pasture with Aerin on his back, she asked Hornmar what had become of Talat’s tack. She knew that each of the court horses had its own, and Kethtaz would never be insulted by wearing bits of his predecessor’s gear; but she was afraid that Talat’s might have been destroyed when his leg had doomed him. Hornmar, who had seen Talat jogging around his field with Aerin at attention on his back, brought out saddle and girth and bridle, for while he had thought they would never be used again, he had not had the heart to get rid of them. If Aerin noticed that they appeared to have been freshly cleaned and oiled, she said nothing but “Thank you.” The same day that she carried Talat’s gear up to her room and hid it in her wardrobe (where Teka, finding it later, also found that it had left oil spots on Aerin’s best court dress), she saw from her window Tor riding in from one of his rounds of political visits; and she decided it was time to waylay him.
“Aerin,” he said, and hugged her gladly. “I have not seen you in weeks. Have you your dress made yet for the wedding of the century? Who won, you or Teka?”
She pulled a face. “Teka has won more ground than I, but I refused to wear it in yellow at all, so at least it’s going to be a sort of leaf green, and there’s less lace. It’s still quite awful.”