70 - The Wedding Planners

“… All right. We can’t have my father ride up on his horse or yours on a bird. They’d either just try to kill each other or the bird would try to eat the horse,” Haraklez said.

“Not our dads…” Kyrus said absently only half hearing her, chewing on his pen. The marriage vows from Lainz were just going to have to be re-written entirely, given that there were only one male set of vows that would be silly if spoken twice. The man to the woman specified a woman’s body parts rather than a man’s. “Maybe they can just say the men’s vows simultaneously. Yeah.”

“No, silly, the riding animals!”

“Um… they can walk up to the Ancestor stones?”

“That works.” She made a note.

The two sat outside the house on a blanket thrown onto the grass, facing one another, legs outstretched. Most of the mud and muck had been cleared away and the flattened houses. Fortunately few people had died in the slide. Kyrus the Elder was at the school speaking to the Zon there about teaching. They’d asked him. Ilax was at the Unity offices working.

Up the hill they could hear the chanting as people worked to clear the last of the mud and rubble from higher up the slope where it still threatened the town, and higher still, if they walked around the house they would have seen the baffles being re-built stronger, thicker.

“It’s going to be more crowded with your dad living in the house rather than up on the mountain,” Haraklez said.

“Yeah. That cave is almost entirely plugged up with mud and it will be a while for it to be cleaned out. Probably one of the last things on the list.”

“The slide scoured away a lot of secrets.”

“Yeah. What are we going to do with the wedding cup problem?” He asked, going down to the next thing in his notes.

In Lainz the glass wedding goblet that the couple drank out of for the first time as a couple was sacred and carefully kept as a symbol of the enduring bond of the marriage, while in Milar they smashed it, to show that they chose to end their single, separate lives.

She leaned back on her elbows, putting her own notebook down. “You know you’re avoiding the really big problem, solving all these little ones.”

Ky put his own notebook down and clutched his hair with both hands. “It’s not like the problems I had showering or bathing communally!  Him having to get up there and strip naked?”

“How is that different from the Enlightened or EnDarkened Priest unveiling them to each other?”

“It’s behind a screen and it’s just to each other! Not in front of anyone who happened to be in town that day and came to the party! Or the whole country if they decide to come because it’s Ilax!”

“It’s not going to be the whole country. And it will only be most of Viltaria… and your grandparents, if they come from Lainz at all.”

“Wonderful. Naser Aetavvar and Nasera Samennaz. Neither of them like me. They aren’t going to be thrilled with their son marrying my father.” He threw his hands over his mouth 

“What am I saying? This is just so crazy. This is madness. At home they’d expose both of them!  Well, they would have.”

“Good thing they aren’t in Lainz then, hmmm?”

Kyrus actually ripped at his hair a little until she reached over and caught his hand. “You stop that. It’s normal here. People fall in love no matter what sex they are and they aren’t treated like bird poop. Look. What if we get both of them to be face-veiled, and then our Eldest can act as priest and remove the veils while they’re facing each other. Then they can take off the fancy clothes, take each other’s hands, walk the circle and step into the fountain together. They can pour water over each other’s heads just like the last part of the Lainz ceremony.”

He stopped yanking on his own hair and put his one hand over hers. “Haraklez… will this marriage make us siblings?” Part of him… part of him really, really didn’t want her as his sister.

“Oh. Well. Yes.”

“Oh shit.” He took her hand down from his head and looked at it.

She stared at him... then smacked him. “What do you mean, ‘oh shit?’ Don’t you want me as a relative?”

He could feel himself blushing all the way to the roots of his hair, as if the skin of his face were on fire. “Um… well… not that kind of relative… I… um…” He put his one hand over hers. “But… I’ve not… I’m not… um…” She smiled though he couldn’t see it, since he was studying their joined hands so intently.

She hitched forward where she sat, so their thighs, parallel though pointing opposite directions, so she was face to face with him, touched. “You Lainz are so sweet, sometimes, but so slow!” Haraklez leaned forward and as he looked up, startled, kissed him.

Her lips were soft and warm and sweet and he found himself leaning in to her. He made himself pull away. Her lips were perfect compared to some of the wrinkled older men he’d sexed and he didn’t have to touch himself to spring up, excited. “I… um… I know how to please men better than young women! And your father is going to kill me if I corrupt his oldest—“

“—Shut up, Lainz. I think I want to find out just how corrupt I can get you to be.”

“—But… if you’re my sister…” he let go her hand, leaned all the way back onto his elbows, his body fighting him, to move closer to her, heart hammering. “This… would be… wrong…” He clenched his eyes shut tight, struggling to seize control of himself. If she’s my sister… this would be very, very wrong.

She grabbed him by the shirt collar, both sides just under the chin, his green eyes popping open to stare into her gray eyes, so like her father’s, pale as her barely tanned skin. “That’s not how it works with heart’s marriages instead of marriages for children. You’d be my heart’s brother and I your heart’s sister, but if we try and decided we wanted to more than just roll in the grass, we could. Not illegal, not immoral, got it?”

He stared into her eyes and began to smile, slowly. His grin broadened whitely as she stared at him nose to nose and she began to blush, finally, so beautifully pink. “I suppose that we should try the kissing again and see if we want to roll in the grass… though maybe not in the middle of town next to your father’s house where all the world can see?”

**

Even before the door closed behind them, Ky’s good sense had come back. “Wait, I shouldn’t have… I mean… what if I get you pregnant… I can’t support a wife, I’ve just begun earning my name I mean… I’ve got my dad but… but… but..”

“Oh for my great-great-great left-handed grandmother’s sake!” Haraklez didn’t stop pulling him into her room by the wrist. “Look, Lainz… Our health ‘cliners have basically blocked us kids when we go through our fertility ceremony… We get ‘unblocked’ when we get married… and then blocked again after we have our kids… I don’t want to get into the politics that goes on in every community, every generation… when people figure out how many kids we need… It’s just polite…”

“What? Blocked? What are you talking about? You mean you can’t get pregnant? What about… ummm… disease?”

“You don’t get checked before?” She raised her eyebrows. 

“You mean you were doing all the sleeping with old men to pay your way here and didn’t get your health checked after?” He sank down on her bed, as if her words had jabbed him in the gut.

“How? How can you just spit out such things without even blushing, naked faced?” He could feel his own face on fire. She sat down next to him on her bed.

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t see it as shameful or embarrassing. And when I think about it, when you started at the school did someone give you a health check?”

“Un-huh.” He was still embarrassed by remembering it. Probably because he had expected it to be more invasive, given the reputation Milar healers had. “It was Zon Witten.”

“Then you’re all right. He wouldn’t let you keep any pet illnesses of any kind to take into the school. And you should ask if he ‘blocked’ you… um--blocked your ability to engender children… probably not without asking you, especially since you’re so allergic to mandery or clinery… but it’s seen as polite to control your semen you know.”

“Errr…. I suppose. At home we just control the whole person, I guess.”

“Or try. That kind of explains a lot.” He found himself staring at her lips. He really, really wanted to kiss them again.

“I like women better than men.”

She grinned. “I understand. So… do you want to test out how sturdy my bed is?”

“I … I’m not sure how to, with a girl. I… might be terribly jealous of other boys who taught you stuff…”

Haraklez put her hand softly against his lightly fuzzed cheek, trailed her fingers down to the edge of his collar and over and up to his bottom lip. “I would love to show you,” she said, smiling. A real smile, not just a grin. Serious. Then she kissed him again, teased his mouth open with her tongue.

Oh, good. Kissing I’m good at.

He kissed back, running his tongue just behind her teeth, tasting her tongue with his as she threw her arms around him and he pulled her close against him. He was aware of her breasts pressed against him, as if they were warmer than the rest of her, even through her shirt.

He daringly slid one hand down her back, hesitating as he got to the waistband of her trousers. She smiled against his mouth and took a deep breath. “You may,” she said teasingly as if he were hesitating to raid a sweets jar. His hand slid down, slowly, to cup the big muscle there, and she wiggled and said, ‘oh, that’s nice.’ His other hand found her other hip then her buttock and he could feel… he hadn’t thought he’d gotten that much bigger this last year but her bottom fit so sweetly in his hands and he couldn’t think, couldn’t think, couldn’t stop.

Haraklez’s hands tugged his shirt up, and he was forced to break off their kiss as the cloth rode up between them and over his head, mussing his hair, leaving him reddened, breathless and bare-chested. “Oh, Zon,” he teased. “I’m going to love these lessons.”

“I like the way your smile is so bright. You don’t smile enough, Ky.”

“I’ll learn. Life’s been getting a lot—” she cut him off again, kissing his neck, just at the soft spot at his throat. “Oh, yessss!” He threw his head back and they somehow ended up tangled together, fallen back against her pillows.

“You have too many clothes on, Hara.”

“Yes. That should be fixed, don’t you think?”