Swapped Bride: Awakening of the True Princess novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Old Words
A clan chief calls her a lowland spy; she speaks the old-tongue vow her mother taught her.
They married her at dusk on the great stone ring in the courtyard, with torches burning in iron cressets all the way around.
Hild had dressed her in a wool gown the color of ripe wheat, because her Lowmarch silk had been splashed with road mud.
The old woman's hands had shaken on every lace.
She had said nothing, and Marit had not asked, though the question sat in her throat.
Now she stood across from the king, with two hundred clansfolk watching from the steps.
He had changed his coat for a black one trimmed in wolf fur.
His hair was damp, and a drop of water ran down the scar in his eyebrow.
She looked away from it quickly.
"By the old custom, a bride is asked three questions," the priest said. "Will you stand with this man?"
"I will."
"Will you hold his hearth?"
"I will."
"Will you give him your oath, here, in the sight of the stones?"
"I will."
A huge man in a bearskin cloak stepped out of the front row.
He was the chief of the Red Ridge clan, with a white beard braided in iron rings and a face like a split boulder.
"The king wed a lowlander," he said loudly. "A girl of the same blood that burned our valleys twenty-one years ago."
A rumble went through the crowd.
"Chief," the king said, in a tone like a closing door. "Stand down."
"I'll stand down when she gives the oath we give, King."
The chief pointed at her.
"The old oath, in the old tongue. Let her say it, or let her go home."
No lowland bride ever learned it.
Marit knew that from the treaty papers.
The Wildlands kept the old words for the High Kings' house, and the High Kings' house was ash.
Someone in the crowd snorted.
Someone else laughed, a short mean sound.
The king's jaw flexed, and for the first time she saw that he was about to give in to his chief to keep the peace.
She would be shipped home before the morning.
Casimir would be waiting on the road.
Her chest went cold, and then, in the cold, a voice rose from somewhere deep and old.
Not a voice from the last life.
A voice from before she could read.
A woman humming in a dim bedroom while rain ran down the window, sitting on the edge of a bed, brushing her hair.
Her mother.
She had died when Marit was three.
Marit remembered almost nothing of her, but she remembered the lullaby that had no lowland words.
Marit took one step forward on the stone.
"Ash an dorran, hal vey."
The chief's face went slack.
She kept going, her voice carrying across the hush of the yard.
She did not know the meaning, only the sounds.
She had always thought it was a lullaby, and it poured out of her mouth like water.
"Vey an mor, hal Greymark. Ash an tir, ash an sul."
The crowd had stopped breathing.
Behind the priest, Hild had fallen to her knees on the stones with both hands clapped over her mouth.
In the front row a very old man wept without a sound.
The last line rang off the walls.
When it ended, no one moved.
Marit stood in the torchlight with her heart slamming against her ribs.
She had no idea what she had said.
Torren Greymark looked at her.
The chief lowered his massive head.
"Forgive me, lady," he said, in a voice gone hoarse. "I did not know."
"Know what?" the priest breathed.
Nobody answered him.
The king recovered first.
His hand closed around hers, hot and rough, and he turned to his clans.
"She has given the oath," he said.
"She is my wife and queen of this hall. Anyone who doubts it can say so now, to my face."
Nobody did.
The crowd roared, and wild pipes broke out across the yard.
Marit let herself be led up the steps through a tunnel of cheering strangers, with her husband's hand tight around her own.
He did not speak to her once.
The feast went by in a blur.
She ate a little roast meat and drank half a cup of hot spiced wine.
He sat at her side in the high seat, and every time she turned, his eyes were on her, dark and considering and very still.
She was twenty years old.
He was twenty-nine, a king who had held a mountain country together by his teeth.
He looked at her as if she were the one puzzle he had never expected.
Her pulse tripped every time.
It was an arranged marriage.
She had chosen it with open eyes, and she had chosen well.
She knew that now, watching his hand around the cup.
It was a good hand, scarred across the knuckles, steady.
Late in the night, Hild took her up a narrow stair to a round room at the top of the east tower.
A huge bed stood against the wall, piled with furs, with a fire burning in the hearth.
Hild touched her cheek once, hard and fast, with a wet and trembling hand.
Then she left.
The door opened again before Marit had finished taking the pins from her hair.
Torren shut it behind him.
He stood with his back against the wood, still in his wedding coat, and he did not come any nearer.
"Marit," he said, and it was the first time he had said her name.
"Yes."
"Who taught you those words?"
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