Then Dag and Fawn, coached by Shep, said their promises. There had been a bit of a debate about them, yesterday. Dag had shied at the wording, all the farmer pledges to plow and plant and harvest in due season, since he said he wasn’t likely to be doing any of those things and for a wedding vow he ought to be speaking strict truth if ever he did. And as for guarding the land for his children, he’d been doing that all his life for everybody’s children. But Nattie had explained the declarations as a poetical way of talking about a couple taking care of each other and having babies and growing old together, and he’d calmed right down. The words did sound odd in his mouth, here in this hot, crowded parlor, but his deep, careful voice somehow gave them such weight it felt as if they might be used to anchor ships in a thunderstorm. They seemed to linger in the air, and all the married adults looked queerly introspective, as if hearing them resonating in their own memories. Fawn’s own voice seemed faint and gruff in her ears by comparison, as though she were a silly little girl playing at being a grown-up, convincing no one.

At this point in the usual ceremony it would be time to kiss each other and go eat, but now came the string-binding, about which most everyone had been warned in carefully casual terms. Something to please Fawn’s patroller, and in case that seemed too alarming, Nattie will be doing it for them. Papa brought out a chair and set it in the middle of the room, and Dag sat in it with a nod of thanks. Fawn rolled up Dag’s left sleeve; she wondered what was going through his head that he chose to so expose his arm harness to view. But the dark cord with the copper glints was revealed, circling his biceps, Fawn’s own cord having been out in plain sight all along.

Papa then escorted Nattie up, and she felt along and found everything, cords and arm and wrist. She pulled loose the bow knots and collected both cords in her hands, winding them about one another, murmuring half-voiced blessings of her own devising. She then rewrapped the combined cords in a figure eight around Dag’s arm and Fawn’s, and tied them with a single bow. She held her hand on it, and chanted:

“Side by side or far apart,

intertwined may these hearts

walk together.”

Which were the words Dag had given Nattie to say, and reminded Fawn disturbingly of the words on Kauneo’s thighbone-knife that Dag had carried for so long aimed at his own heart. Possibly the burned script had been meant to recall just such a wedding chant, or charm.