Wedding by Ann Herendeen

family’s house. An inner wall
enclosed the castle and front and back courtyards. Beyond these was
a large expanse with many smaller buildings, encircled by an outer
wall. Guards controlled gatehouses at the entrances, as farm
laborers and crafts people passed to and from their work in the
fields, the pastures and the villages beyond.
    The place teemed with people, in the
corridors and workrooms, in the outbuildings and gardens, all
streaming into the great hall twice a day for meals. Life went on
in its natural cycles, with or without the master’s presence.
Dominic spent half of every year in the city on Royal Guards and
’Graven Assembly business, and Eleonora returned only for the
occasional visit, but animals and crops must be tended the year
around, land administered, buildings maintained, and the workers
must be housed and fed.
    But for all the autonomous nature of this
community, nobody forgot whose property it was. Dominic was lord,
and as his betrothed, I received the benefit of the allegiance
given to him. Everywhere I went, guardroom or smithy, laundry or
mews, even the hectic kitchen, everyone curtsied or bowed, smiled
and dropped, however briefly, the task at hand, in order to greet
“Lady Amalie.”
    As with Magali, my initial reaction was to
deny the title, to say, “No, I’m only Amelia Herzog, from Terra.”
Luckily I saw before making so gross an error how confusing it
would be, how insulting. Eleonora had introduced me as a Terran, as
if to undermine my admittedly temporary position, but the ploy had
backfired. Most of the staff, born and bred on Aranyi land, their
families settled in Aranyi Realm for generations, had never
traveled farther than a few miles from their home. People from the
other end of the realm were viewed with distrust; those from a
neighboring realm were strangers. City dwellers were a separate
species. A Terran was impossible to imagine, but would certainly be
recognizable, like a giant insect or a two-headed monster.
    I, by contrast, was obviously ’Gravina. Apart
from the short hair, I looked exactly like the sort of bride
Dominic should have chosen, or been shackled to by his parents
years ago, and people made a simple mental adjustment. They assumed
they had misunderstood, that Lady Eleonora had merely meant I had
lived among Terrans, in the city. They knew some ’Graven had done
that, had heard of adventurers who had been to Terra itself. Men,
mostly.
    The household regarded me from the start, as
my coworkers in La Sapienza, with less excuse, had come to do over
time, as the illegitimate daughter of a ’Graven lord. It was easy
to imagine my plight: for some reason unacknowledged, denied the
status of natural-born that my father’s acceptance would have
conferred, I had been unable to claim the rights of ’Gravina that
my looks and my gift obviously merited. Everyone was unfailingly
sympathetic. With the highlanders’ contempt for the lowlands, they
put every peculiarity in me down to a belief that I came from the
south or from Eclipsia City, and had led a strange life, in the
Terran Sector of the city or even off-world. It all worked in my
favor, explaining any unfamiliarity with traditional Eclipsian
ways.
    Without trying, I was becoming the “Lady
Amalie” of Edwige’s invention. It was like my arrival at the
airport, the men at the baggage claim, only here it was the benign
opposite of that ugly reaction. People knew I could read their
minds, and they were delighted not to have to search for the
correct words or find the courage to speak. They had only to
envisage their genuine pleasure in the fact of their lord’s finding
a suitable wife at last, certain that their welcome and good wishes
would be perceived.
    It seemed, for once, that I could not fail.
Even at La Sapienza, where I had been given every benefit of the
doubt, had had every allowance made for me as a beginner and a
foreigner, I had not been able to adapt to the life of a seminary
worker, to conform