Page 43 of The Boy Bride

“No! You wouldn’t have heard of these places in the lowlands, these hostels where girls and sometimes boys, too, if you pay the landlord discreetly⁠—”

“I know about that, you silly man. Do you know that he worked in such a place?”

“I, uh⁠—”

“It doesn’t matter. If he got his living doing favours for men, he’ll know what needs doing. I’ll be right back.”

So she set down her bundle of clothes and went out, and Lill sat waiting, pretending that he didn’t know what this was all about, with the words the husband’s seed flows … flows into the wife’s body … the back door … flows … rattling around in his mind. She came back with a device made of a reed and a small inflated bladder and made Tirtu explain to him how to use it, and Lill pretended that he did know what this was about—which, by this time, to his chagrin, he did—and he went resolutely out to the privy and used it, and for good measure retched over the privy hole, though because he’d eaten no breakfast, nothing came up. He couldn’t imagine he looked very good when he came back into the house.

“Upstairs now,” said Tirtu in Zashian, herding Lill toward the stairs. “Time to get ready.”

“Tirtu!” Halza burst through the front door. “What did we do with the saffron cord for the ceremony?”

“Saffron what? I haven’t touched any of your things, not since your friend the shaman bit my head off over those spices the other day!”

“Oh, come, don’t tell me you are still bitter about that, it was nothing. And we need that cord—Padunu doesn’t understand how important it is to the ceremony.”

Gurti caught Lill’s eye and tipped her head toward the stairs. He nodded and followed her.

Of all the odd things that had happened in the past week, the friendship flowering between Halza and Padunu, and then between Halza and Tirtu—while Tirtu and Padunu were, as far as Lill could tell, firm enemies—was perhaps the oddest. But perhaps Lill just thought that because he did not know much about friendship. Maybe planning a wedding in captivity in an isolated mountain stronghold was exactly the sort of situation that normally made people into friends.

He followed Gurti upstairs to the room he had been sharing with Halza. Their bedding had been folded up and put away. Presumably Halza’s would be put out again tonight, but Lill would not be sleeping there again.

Gurti set down her burdens on top of the clothes chest and unfolded the first layer of Lill’s clothing, a filmy white tunic that crossed over the front and was closed with a narrow red sash. She held it out and looked at Lill doubtfully.

In Radush, when they’d been able to talk about it beforehand, the landlady had helped Lill put everything on, and then he’d shimmied out of his trousers under cover of the skirts. He wished he hadn’t trapped himself into a situation where he couldn’t explain this to Gurti. But hopefully she would figure out that he wasn’t going to strip naked in front of her. He pulled off his black shirt and put an arm into the tunic she was holding out for him.

She hesitated over tying the sash, and their eyes met. They smiled ruefully at each other.

“I don’t know how it’s supposed to go, either,” he said in Zashian.

She seemed to understand well enough. She looped the sash around his waist several times and tied it with a sturdy knot at the front, the way the Hawa men all tied their sashes. Looking at it, he remembered now that the landlady in Radush had tied a bow in the back. It didn’t matter.

There was a second layer, pale blue and nearly as flimsy as the first, but longer, with a button at the throat to hold it more or less closed. This time they each had a different idea about where the button and the opening of the garment should go. He thought he remembered it going in the back; she seemed adamant that it should go in the front. Finally he recalled that she had been the one to undress him when he was brought back semi-conscious to the round house. She probably remembered how his clothes had been arranged. He found himself laughing a little as he let her put the tunic on him right way round.

The final layer of his wedding attire was the heavy blue silk gown, its torn skirt now expertly repaired. The sleeves had deep cuffs of silver and turquoise embroidery, the pattern echoed around the hem and down the front where the gown closed like a coat. There were buttons at the throat and a long turquoise sash, which Gurti tied in the same way as she had done the inner one. Then she picked up a wooden box that she had brought with her and opened it to show him the contents. A necklace of fat, luscious-looking amber beads, with a silver medallion, lay coiled inside, between thick silver bracelets and heavy earrings with amber and silver pendants. All very Hawa style, nothing that a woman of Akramarra would wear.

“Yours?” said Lill, pointing at Gurti. Was she offering him the use of her jewellery because he had come without any?

She shook her head. “From Lord Vanu. For you.”

That made sense. Urártu had seen that Lill had come without jewellery and thought his bride ought to be properly adorned. Or maybe it was a custom of the mountains for the groom to give jewels. They had presumably been stolen from somewhere, because that was how these people acquired things.

Lill lifted out the necklace and settled it around his neck. It was heavy against his chest. There was a second, longer necklace, double strands of something white and faintly iridescent, which Gurti put on him and settled so it hung below the amber and silver one. He slipped on the bracelets, which were sized properly for his thin wrists. He pointed to the earrings and to his own unpierced ears and shook his head apologetically.

She picked up one of the things he had thought were earrings and showed him that they were actually ornaments meant to attach to braided hair. She undid the single braid that he had put his hair into the night before and combed it with a gentleness that the landlady in Radush had lacked when she’d done his braids before. This, he gathered, was because Gurti was unused to hair like his. “It’s so thick,” she remarked to herself as she slid the comb through it. “It will braid beautifully.”

But she only made two small braids on the sides, to hang the silver ornaments from, and pulled them back to join with a ribbon behind his head. She left the rest of his hair hanging loose. She said, and tried to explain with gestures, that this was a traditional bridal hairstyle in the mountains, and he nodded and smiled and tried to convey that he understood, although if he’d had to rely on the gestures, he didn’t think he would have.

They fussed with the bridal headdress together, adjusting the braids and the hair ornaments so that it all went together properly, the pins holding the crown in place (none of them grazing his scalp so as to deliver poison, he couldn’t help noticing). They arranged the veil and flipped it back so that he could see to go down the stairs. Finally, Gurti took out a small round mirror from her sash and offered it to Lill to look at himself. He hesitated. The landlady in Radush had not had a mirror, and he hadn’t seen what he looked like in this costume before.

Gurti smiled encouragingly and put the mirror in his hand. He looked at his reflection.

Yes, that was him, the pale oval of his face looking gravely out from between the strings of beads and the silver ornaments, the black and white curtains of loose hair and diaphanous veil. He’d seen his reflection a couple of times before, though never in such a high-quality mirror. They had nice things up here, these bandits.

He could have been a girl or a boy or anything in between, he thought, with this face. His features were very symmetrical, his eyes narrow and dark, his lips and eyebrows forming spare, pleasing curves.

He smiled at his reflection, to show Gurti that he was pleased by what she’d done—she had put a lot of work into repairing his clothes and dressing him up—and he realized with shock that this, his own smile, was something he’d never seen before. Maybe this was what people meant when they said he was pretty: not just the symmetry and the unmarked skin, but the way the corners of his lips and his eyes lifted, the tiny hollow that appeared in his left cheek. It was pretty.