The wedding feast lasted four hours.
I know this because I counted.
Four hours of sitting at the head of an enormous banquet table beside a man who spoke approximately eleven words to me across the entire duration, all of them logistical.
Four hours of smiling at faces I didn’t know and eating food I couldn’t name and lifting a goblet of something dark and potent every time the table toasted, which was often, because apparently this culture expressed joy primarily through collective drinking.
Four hours of trying to keep up appearances like someone performing a role in a play they had not been given the script for.
By the time the feast ended I was so tired I could kill for a bed.
Rita was waiting for me when the guards brought me back to what was supposedly the newlyweds’ chambers
