Fantasyland 02 The Golden Dynasty by Kristen Ashley

Right.
    Whatever.
    Then out we went into the camp.
    And it was, mostly, a camp. A bunch of tents
with firepits out front, some had tables at the side of the tent
with primitive looking cooking stuff on it, big buckets resting
beside them and other tools like axes and hatchets and the like.
Some had smaller tents around them which Diandra told me were where
slaves slept or where food and supplies were kept and meals
prepared (around my tent, we had one of both).
    There were a lot of torches stuck in the
ground on the pathways which I knew from the night of the parade
but also from seeing it hit the side of the king’s tent were lit at
night. The only official area, as it were, was the dais which I
noticed now was roughly carved from a huge, wide, long, cream slab
of stone, the area in front of it deep and wide, made up of the
same stone. A firepit did, indeed, run the length of the back with
two pits at the top, though while we wandered the camp, these were
not lit mostly, I guessed, because it was sunny and, I knew, it was
stinking hot. The drums, incidentally, the big ones and small ones,
were still set up.
    And there were people. Lots of them. All of
them looked at me and many of them smiled, many of them nodded,
many of them looked happy to see me. Some of them, however, looked
at me with interest or intensity, not exactly happy – cautious, I
figured, undecided. And a few avoided my eyes.
    This, I didn’t get. I also didn’t dwell. I
had enough to dwell on.
    Diandra chattered on and she tucked my
hand in her elbow and kept me close as we walked. She informed me
this was only a camp, not a settlement, The Horde was nomadic. They
came to this location for the Wife Hunt every two years and the
warrior selections, three times a year. They had homes, of sorts,
in some Korwahk city but they visited them infrequently during
their roaming although, she explained, they did settle in them for
two months over the winter.
    She told me tents were called chams . She told
me shahsha was
thank you. She told me poyah was hello.
    “ What does me ahnoo mean?” I asked after the words the king had spoken to the
cruel warrior and she looked at me, her brows up.
    “Me ahnoo?” she asked back.
    “The king said, ‘Kah Dahksahna me ahnoo,’ to
that warrior he threw off the dais during the wedding rite. What
does that mean?”
    She patted my hand in the crook of her
elbow, looked forward and smiled. “It means, my dear, ‘my queen
does not like’.”
    “What?” I asked.
    She looked back at me. “He told Dortak
that you do not like… in other words, you did not like what he was
doing to his bride. And, I will add, not many of us did. Definitely
not the peasants, merchants, slaves or wives and, I’m certain, many
of the warriors.” She bobbed her head at me. “You made that clear,
even though you do not speak their tongue, it was plain for all to
see you didn’t like what he was doing. He was challenging you by
continuing to do it even though you told him not to. It is, in
truth, not a woman’s place to command a warrior, even if that woman
is queen.” She looked forward and I got the sense she was avoiding
my eyes when she went on. “Sometimes,” she paused, “I will admit,
the wedding rite can get lewd, the warriors get wound-up, if a
battle is mightily fought to claim a bride, they need to expend
some energy and sometimes do so in…” she paused again then finished
cautiously, “ unsavory ways.”
    Fabulous.
    Diandra carried on after looking at me
again. “But you are not just
any queen. You are King Lahn’s Lahnahsahna. But more, you are the
Dax’s golden warrior queen. You made a command. It went unheeded.
The king acted to make Dortak adhere to your command.” Her fingers
squeezed mine. “It was a bold statement. This is not done. In
saying simply that you do not like, but in punishing Dortak before
all, he was telling his people you rule at his side.” She grinned
at me. “It was very sweet and very