It was the first day of the Feast of Lights, the shortest day of the year, the last day of the year, and the city celebrated in ways Perrin could never have imagined. There would be dancing in the Two Rivers, but this . . . ! The Cairhienin seemed determined to make up for a year of staid reserve in the two days of the feast. Propriety had gone down the well and with it every barrier between common and noble, in public at least. Perspiring women in plain rough wool seized sweaty men in color-striped dark silks and pulled them into the dance; men in carters’ coats and stablemen’s vests whirled women whose dresses bore slashes of color sometimes to the waist. Bare-chested men poured wine over themselves and anyone else close to them. Apparently any man could kiss any woman, any woman kiss any man, and they were doing so with great abandon everywhere Perrin looked. He tried not to look too closely. Some of the noblewomen with their hair in elaborate towers of curls were bare to the waist beneath light cloaks that they made little effort to keep closed. Among the commoners, few women who had abandoned blouses bothered with any sort of covering beyond their hair, and that seldom near long enough; they flung wine over themselves and everyone else as wildly as any man. Boisterous laughter warred with a thousand different tunes from flutes and drums and horns, zithers and bitterns and dulcimers.