I've been at Oakenshade Hall for seven hours, and in all that time, Torgan Oakenshade has said exactly five words to me (welcome to the Hall, dressmaker).
Now he is standing at my shoulder at the edge of the wedding festivities with two glasses of champagne in his hands.
"I'm — no," I manage. "I'm not."
He hands me one of the glasses. Doesn't look at me, but he keeps his eyes on the dance floor.
On the floor of the great hall, the dancing is at a full roar.
Orc dancing, I have learned tonight, is what happens when a battle and a party crash into a wondrous cacophony of cheering, hands clapping, and boots stomping. It is glorious and terrifying, and there is no version of it that ends with me untrampled.
Probably why I’ve been hiding here on the fringes for the better part of an hour.
I down the champagne to give me something to do with my time.
It has been — I don't have the word for what this day has been.
I'd braced myself for a fortress, war banners and maybe a skull or two on spikes. Instead the gates stood open with garlands wound through the hinges, and strung between the watchtowers — where the war banners must live the rest of the year — hung line after line of dried summer flowers. Ysolde insisted, Brynna told me.
Then the dressing, in the tower room, went exactly like every bridal dressing I've ever attended — Ysolde wringing her hands, everyone with opinions about hair, her mother Lady Ishara crying and denying it and crying again — right up until the moment Ysolde turned from the mirror in the finished gown. Instead of the awed silence I have seen at every other wedding, everyone in the room stamped. From their grandmother to Mirelle, one boot each against the stone, a single crack of thunder in a tower room.
And Ysolde looked at herself and straightened up.
"Well," she said, thick. "All right, then. Let’s have a wedding."
I understood perhaps a third of the ceremony and cried through the rest. Vows in orcish, which rumbled the walls. Vows in the minotaur language, which tolled like bells. At one point bride and groom each laid a blade against the other's open palm and did not cut each other.
“That's the vow,” Brynna murmured beside me, “the laying of your hand along an edge and trusting your partner, and your partner trusting that you don’t need a blood oath.”
Then the feast.
I learned that there is no seating plan at an orc wedding, only seating conquest. It is an insult of the highest order to let a guest's plate sit empty, and I ate an entire pheasant by myself. And my goblet was never empty.
All of which is to say: I am several cups and one pheasant into the strangest, warmest night of my life.
And Torgan Oakenshade has just appeared beside me with a cup and an observation.
"Your family dances like a cavalry charge," I tell him, bringing my mind back to the dancing. "I don't know the steps, and I'd be trampled. It would ruin the party."
Then he says something that catches me entirely off guard.
"I know the human ones."
I look up at him. "The human what?"
"Steps. Court dances." His jaw does the thing it does. "I was taught it as a young orc. It seemed like something you should know is available."
It seemed like something you should know is available. I will take that sentence home and keep it in the drawer. But for now, all I can do is laugh. Something at the corner of his mouth surrenders half an inch, which for him is a cheek-to-cheek grin.
"My lord," I say, "are you asking me to dance?"
"I'm informing you of your options."
"Ask me, then."
And the music turns over — right then, into something with an actual melody line. Torgan sets down his cup. Turns to me, and holds out his hand.
"Dance with me," he says. And then, a beat late, gravel dragged over the word: "Please."
