***
Bonnie steps into the roundhouse, her foster mother's fingers digging into her shoulders from behind. A feeling of melancholy washes over her as it always does stepping through the wooden door. Roundhouses are all built more or less along the same lines. A big circle shaped house with walls made of mud and straw, and a carefully thatched roof. Opposite the door there's a large wooden cabinet that holds various relics from the family's ancestors, to the sides are the beds, and in the middle is the hearth where long winters are spent around the fire.
It reminds her of her own roundhouse that she shared with her parents long ago.
By the cold hearth, two men talk. One is Mr Moore, a short man with skin more sun browned than his wife or son, and a wiry build, full of taut muscle that speaks of a life of much work and little reward. The other is taller, and unusually for a villager has a stomach that protrudes over a belt made from real leather. She knows him vaguely from trips to the market in Porthdon, a town where most of the villagers around here take their excess wares to sell. He's a pig farmer she thinks, from the larger village made up of nearly twenty roundhouses not a mile from where their village ends.
The men look up when they enter. A frown settles on both their faces.
"I'm so sorry for her state, Mr Drust," Mrs Moore says, her voice containing a panicked quality. Her fingers press hard enough into Bonnie's shoulders to hurt. "The poor girl wanted to help our son with his chores and slipped in the mud. She was ever so distressed after making such an effort to look nice for your meeting."
Bonnie shifts her bare feet. Mr Drust looks old, forty, maybe even fifty. His face holds the severe expression her foster parents had when they were about to tell her off, but she gets the impression this is how he looks all of the time. He certainly doesn't look like the kind of husband who would practice sword fighting with her, or let her go away to slay dragons.
"How old is she?" Mr Drust asks, his voice little more than a grunt. Perhaps all the time he spent with his pigs made his voice sound like that. Bonnie has to fight to bury a grin at the thought.
"Fourteen winters," Mr Moore says as he walks over to stand next to his wife. "I know she doesn't look like much, but she'll grow to give fine children."
The thought makes her nauseous. She still thinks of herself as a child. She doesn't want to have children of her own, and certainly not with an old man who looks as likely to give her the back of his hand as look at her. She'd heard only whispered rumours about what a girl had to do to have a child, but that's enough to decide that she NEVER EVER wants to be a mother.
The pig farmer steps so close that the scent of pigs rolls over her, making her dizzy. He glares down at her with his squinty little eyes, and reaches out to take a few strands of her golden hair between his pudgy fingers. Then he turns her chin this way and that, like he's examining a piece of livestock.
Something stubborn takes over her, and she fixes her eyes on his, not looking away like a good woman should. Never take your eyes off your enemy, her dad had always told her. Potential husband or not, her gut tells her this man is an enemy.
"Girl!" Mr Moore shouts, giving her a swat to the back of the head that makes her eyes water. She stumbles and then dropped her eyes to the dirt floor. Her heart thuds, angry in her chest, and her hand clutches the handle of a non-existent sword.
"She has potential," Mr Drust says in his grunting voice. His squinty eyes are still locked on her hair. Golden hair is rare this far south, and Bonnie knows that her hair, long to her waist and fussed over by Mrs Moore daily is a rare beauty. Under Mr Drust's gaze she doesn't feel beautiful. She feels like a slab of meat set out at market. "But she doesn't know a woman's place."
"Her father was from the far north," Mr Moore says, his tone apologetic. He sends Bonnie a sharp look. "She's picked up some of his barbarian ways, but she's bright enough. I'm sure she'll learn."
Bonnie's heart gives a twist. People so rarely talk about her family except behind her back. She feels a certain sense of pride at being compared to her father, but she wants to scream that he wasn't a barbarian. Barbarians are horrible blood-thirsty creatures little better than the dragons they share their mountains with. They kill men, women, and children, and that's if the victims were lucky. They're rumoured to eat people and leave any remains out for the dragons to take back to their nests.
Her father was a good and kind man. A man with a shock of bright blond hair who was always ready with a grin and a joke, and yes, even a hug, though that wasn't a man's place. He fought for the King and died in the bravest of ways. She knows of no person less like a barbarian than him.
She bites down on her tongue to hold it still. Mr Moore, while a fair man, doesn't stand for nonsense in front of strangers. Her aching head is proof enough of that.
"One pig," Mr Drust says, still staring at her. "Pick of the litter. Take it once it's weaned and feed it up yourself."
Mr Moore's face breaks into a rare smile. Mrs Moore's hands relax around Bonnie's shoulders. Bonnie barely notices. Her whole life seems to flash before her eyes in an instant. Her father showing her how to use a sword, her mother looking on with disapproval. Red scales smooth under her fingers, and eyes as dark as night staring up at her. Countless days playing with Neven by the river. All gone.
As a wife there will be no more games, no swords, no dragons. A wife exists only to serve their husband.
"We'll marry in the morning," Mr Drust says, the words addressed to Bonnie's foster father, not her. "A small ceremony at my farm. Bring her over at first light. You can choose your pig then."
"So soon?" Mr Moore asks. Bonnie thinks she hears a note of regret in his voice, but that might be wishful thinking. As much as she wants to hate them, she can't. They'd taken her in when everyone else had turned their backs, a strange girl from the King’s City with an odd story following her. They had treated her fairly, even occasionally with love. Even this marriage isn't cruelty, no matter how much she wishes to think that way to justify the anger burning inside her.
For her, the foster daughter of a poor farmer who shares his land and crop with many others, being married to a rich pig farmer should be beyond her wildest dreams. She will never want for food for the rest of her life, and that's more than most in her village could ever get. It's more than Neven will get, destined to take over his father's house and farm.
But, she thinks, feeling the pig farmer's eyes rake over her body before resting on her hair. It isn't what she wants.
She sees Mr Drust nod out of the edge of her vision. "Yes," he says in that grunting voice. "I have a lot to teach her."
Bonnie shivers. No, it isn't what she wants at all.