Traded for a Scar, I Carried His Heir and Took His Table novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Asking
At her brother's engagement supper Levan Kapanadze calls the oath and asks for Keti and a child, her father toasts her away, and she takes the horn, drinks it dry and walks out beside him.
Levan Kapanadze stood up in the middle of my brother's engagement supper and said he was calling in the oath.
Sixty people were eating at four long tables in our restaurant by the bay, and every fork stopped.
My father was the toastmaster that night, so he held the wine horn, and he held it very still.
I stood by the kitchen door with a tray of hot khachapuri.
That is where I had stood at every Beridze supper since I was twelve.
Levan was thirty-six, broad through the shoulders, with a wrestler's neck and gray coming in at his temples.
A white scar ran from his left eyebrow through the lid to the bone of his cheek.
The eye under it was clouded and blind.
"Eleven years ago," he said, "the man who owns this restaurant swore at my father's table that his house owed mine one asking."
He did not raise his voice.
"Before four elders and a priest. On bread. Whatever the asking was."
At the head table four old men set down their glasses.
My brother Besik sat beside his fiancée with a gold chain at his throat.
He put his glass down so carefully it made no sound.
Salome looked at Besik, then at the scar, then at Besik again.
"Ask," my father said, and his gray mustache moved. "A Beridze pays what he swears."
"I ask for your daughter," Levan said.
The room went completely silent.
"In my house, for a year. A child with my name, from her body."
He turned his head and found me at the kitchen door.
He had to turn his whole head to do it.
"I'll have her in my bed every night until there is one," he said. "I'm saying it here so nobody can tell it later as a quiet thing."
Salome's mother put her hand over her mouth.
My father looked at me.
He did not look at Besik, who was looking at the tablecloth.
My father lifted the horn.
"She is yours," he said, in the voice he used for the toast to our dead. "May God give you a son."
Somebody at the back said gaumarjos out of habit.
Then nobody did.
I put my tray down on the nearest chair, because I was raised to put down a tray before anything else.
I walked the length of the room with sixty people turning their heads to follow me.
I walked straight up to my father's chair.
I took the horn out of his hand.
He let go, because a Georgian man does not fight his daughter over a horn in front of the Janelidze family.
I filled it myself from the pitcher.
No woman had ever held the horn at a Beridze table, and the old men sat up as I poured.
"I am not a toast, Papa," I said. "You don't give me away. I go."
My father's face went dark red.
I turned to Levan across the cloth and the plates.
"I'll come on my own feet," I said. "I keep my name. The child carries it beside yours."
His one good eye held on my face and did not move.
"Done," he said.
A full horn can't be set down. It has to be drunk.
I drank it to the bottom, cold qvevri wine, amber and bitter.
It ran down my chin onto my good blouse.
I turned the horn over on the cloth, which is how a Georgian says the toast is finished.
"Besik," Salome said, very low. "What is he talking about?"
"An old fight," my brother said. "It's paid."
She watched him not look at her.
I did not wait to see what she did next.
Levan held the front door and I walked through it first, past the piers and the string of lights across the avenue.
A black car idled at the curb with a driver at the wheel.
I got into the back seat and Levan got in beside me, and the car pulled out.
Neither of us spoke until the restaurant sign went by in the rear window.
"You didn't have to take the horn," he said.
"I know."
"Your father will not forgive it."
"My father gave me away in a toast," I said. "I wasn't asking him."
He sat with his right side toward me, his good eye on my face, his big hands open on his knees.
He smelled of cold air and clean wool and a little of wine.
I had hated the name Kapanadze for eleven years.
I had never once let myself remember how tall he was.
"Your house," I said. "Your bed. Every night, you told them."
"I did."
"You said it as a debt."
"It is one," he said.
"Then say it to me," I said, "and see if you can say it into my mouth."
I leaned across the seat and kissed him.
His mouth was warm and still for a moment.
Then it moved against mine, slow and hungry, and his hand came up under my braid and closed on the back of my neck.
He pulled back an inch.
"You kiss like a woman who was told to," he said.
"Nobody told me."
"That was not in the oath."
"No," I said.
I took his big hand off my neck and laid it on my knee, under the edge of my skirt, and held it there.
"That one's mine."
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