Page 179 of Swordheart
Halla considered this. “Well. I suppose you are stuck with me, now that I’m the wielder again.”
He smiled up at the ceiling. “So I am.”
“And as I am now a wealthy enough widow to be automatically respectable, I do not need to worry about having a very handsome lover lurking around the house.”
“I’ll kill him,” said Sarkis.
“I meantyou,wretch.”
“I am not very handsome. I am scarred and irritable and, unfortunately, immortal.”
“Yes, but you carry it well.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “I mean it, though. The neighbors will gossip, but… well, it’s not fair, but there you are. I will be eccentric instead of a pariah.”
He scowled at her, clearly deep in thought, then said, “Marry me.”
Halla blinked at him, not sure if she’d heard correctly.
“If you marry me, you won’t be eccentric. No, dammit, this iscoming out wrong. Marry me to marry me, not because of your neighbors. I’ll kill your neighbors.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Halla, focusing on the one bit that she could make sense of. “I like most of them.”
“Fine, then I will glare at them. But you should still marry me anyway. I mean, you shouldn’t, really, you can do much better, although given what I’ve seen of the men in your land…” He trailed off, muttering something under his breath, in which Halla caught only the wordsdecadentandtorch.
“Are youaskingme to marry you?”
He gave her an exasperated look. “Yes. Of course. Because—oh, great god’s balls, I don’t even know how to marry you in this country.”
Halla felt her lips twitching. He sounded so distraught, she didn’t want to laugh at him. “Well, we go before a priest… Zale would probably be happy to perform it… and say vows and then…”
Sarkis shook his head. “But you have no family to set your price. And even if you did, I could not pay it.”
“Price?”
“The marriage price. What your husband pays your household, to make up for your loss.”
Halla raised her eyebrows. “We do it the other way around. The woman provides a dowry so that the husband will take her.”
The resulting mutter was louder and sounded a bit like Silas’s bird. “How barbaric.”
“Well, I haven’t got a family and you haven’t got any money, so can’t we just ignore that?”
He bristled. “I will not steal you!”
“Err… but I’m agreeing to it?” Halla did not know whether to laugh or cry. “Sarkis, I’ve chased you from pillar to post and then you had to fall on your sword and—and—can’t this all just cancel out?”
She could tell by his scowl that it did not, in fact, cancel out.He got to his feet and stomped around the bedroom, dragging his hands through his hair.
This is just my luck. I worry that he’ll hate me, but instead he wants to marry me except that he can’t because…because…
“All right,” she said, tucking her feet up under her on the bed. “Explain this to me so I understand.”
It was, she had to admit, rather fascinating. It made sense, in a land where you lived and died by social standing.Not like this one,Halla thought wryly,where if you have no standing, you go work as someone’s housekeeper, and if there’s a hint of scandal, he turns you out and you end up scrubbing floors in a nunnery. Hmm, yes. Wildly different, those.
Hell, maybe Sarkis’s people have the right idea. Put a material price on people so everybody knows what they’re worth.
“Why does somebody need a high price? Aren’t you just bankrupting your husband before you marry him?”
“No, no. A high marriage price means higher standing for both husband and wife. The wife because her family values her highly, the husband because he can afford to meet it. Most of the goods will go with the couple. If land is offered, they may live on it, or it will be held in trust for their children.” He shook his head. “If it isn’t… well, we have fought clan wars over less.”
