Chapter 22: The Mating Ceremony

They set up the ceremony in the square where I was sold.

The cart was gone, and the dry fountain had been scrubbed.

A plain stone platform stood in the middle with no throne on it.

By noon the square was full.

Forty thousand had filled the arena.

This crowd was bigger, because no one had to buy a seat.

The lanterns of the Full Moon Festival still hung over every street.

I stood at the edge of the platform in a white dress with my sleeves short and my brand bare.

Lysander stood across from me, in plain black, with no ring on his hand.

"Last chance," he said quietly. "Nobody would think less of you."

"I would think less of me."

His mouth twitched.

Maud came up the platform steps with a bandage on her throat and a green scarf, new, tied over her gray hair.

She carried a small cushion, and on it lay a ring of dull iron.

"The ones you freed in the courtyard made it," she said. "They melted their cuffs together."

My breath stopped.

It was not a ring, I saw.

It was a wide band, made to wrap once around a wrist.

"Put it where the brand is," Maud said gently. "That's what they asked."

I held out my left arm, and she closed the band around the ring of letters.

It was warm from the forge and fit exactly, covering the number from edge to edge.

In the crowd, a gray-haired man in a laborer's coat lifted his own bare wrist in the air.

Then another did, and another, hundreds of them, all along the edge of the square.

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