Wedding of Pentandra and Arborn

The wedding of Lady Pentandra anna Benurvial — Remeran sex-magic adept, future Court Wizard of Alshar, future Baroness of Vanador — to Captain Arborn of the Kasari Rangers took place at a sacred waterfall deep in the Castali Wilderlands, in the Bransei homeland. It was conducted under full Kasari rites by a consecrated priestess of Trygg, with the kerchief-binding ceremony that claims a Kasari bride. It produced triplets the following year and what Minalan would later call one of the most important political alliances of his life.

The match

Pentandra and Arborn were on the surface a wildly improbable pairing:

• Pentandra: Remeran nobility, professional sex-magic adept, the leading authority in the Five Duchies on her speciality, libertine by reputation, accustomed to a multitude of muscular servants and casual dalliances.
• Arborn: Kasari ranger captain, devout, abstinent before marriage by tribal custom, refused to sleep with Pentandra during the long courtship even when she made it explicit, lived in the wilderness, declined gold gifts, owned almost nothing.

The reason Pentandra wanted him was precisely the disjunction. Arborn was, in Minalan's description, the kind of man that makes every man in the room want to aspire to be: utterly competent, in absolute control, with the moral certainty of a man whose status derived entirely from competence rather than from money, title, or breeding. Pentandra, who had spent her professional life cataloguing the magical mechanics of desire, found herself transformed by exposure to a man immune to all the levers she normally pulled.

The Kasari rites and the witchstone surrender

Kasari marriage required full ritual qualification by the bride. The rites included tests of domestic skill, ranger-craft, navigation, and survival. The Kasari conception of marital sex was domestic and child-focused; the elaborate Imperial sex-magic vocabulary Pentandra had built her career around did not apply.

Minalan made one demand before letting her go to the rites: she had to compete without her witchstone. He took her torus-shaped piece of irionite into custody and held it for the duration of the trials. Pentandra would have to land Arborn by her own wits, not by any magical augmentation:

Just before we had said goodbye a month ago in Kasar, I had taken her torus-shaped piece of irionite into custody, forcing her to compete for her light o'love with just her considerable wits to guide her.

— Minalan, on his condition

The condition was both Minalan's ribbing of his old friend and a sincere insistence that the marriage be founded on something Pentandra could keep without irionite's help. Pentandra accepted. Whatever happened in the Kasari rites earned her the lifelong loyalty of Arborn's comrades, who praised her wisdom and devotion at the wedding feast in tones that surprised even her closest friends.

The ceremony at the waterfall

The wedding itself was held at a sacred Bransei waterfall, witnessed by Arborn's clan, his fellow rangers, and a small humani party that Pentandra had been allowed to invite. The Kasari priestess of Trygg consecrated the union. Arborn placed his kerchief around Pentandra's neck and fastened it with the traditional Kasari binding-knot, claiming her as his bride before the gods and the Kasari animal spirits.

When Arborn had placed his kerchief around her neck and fastened it in the traditional Kasari ritual, claiming her as his bride, there had been no hint of doubt in her. She had enthusiastically and blissfully consented to wed him in front of the gods and Kasari animal spirits.

— Of Pentandra's wedding

The union was duly registered at the Trygg temple in Kasar, making it as legally Narasi-binding as any noblewoman's wedding in Castabriel. Pentandra was, formally, Pentandra of the Bransei tribe by Kasari custom and Pentandra anna Benurvial of House Benurvial by Remeran custom. Her family was duly horrified.

The reception at Sevendor

A second, separate wedding reception was held at Sevendor during the great Magical Fair, hosted by Planus at his cousin's expense. The Kasari rites had been austere, intimate, and tribal. The Sevendor reception was Imperial: a grand fete with dancing girls, philoxenic enchantment displays by every High Mage who could one-up another, the entire Arcane Orders senior staff in attendance, an extended Remeran delegation including Pentandra's father and cousin Planus, and the unmistakable signal to the political-magical world that Pentandra had a husband and that her husband was not to be trifled with.

Dranus' performance at the reception — a sustained spectacular fireworks display of philoxenic magical enchantments — began the tradition of competitive magical entertainment at the Magical Fair that became its annual hallmark.

The Remeran scandal

Pentandra's mother in Remere learned of the wedding only after the Kasari rites were complete and only because cousin Planus could not resist gossip that juicy. The Remeran aristocratic horror at the marriage — a barbarian, no rajira, no land, no title, no income — was immediate and durable. Pentandra's mother spent the next several years still waiting to be persuaded. Pentandra's father Orisorio, himself a Remeran professional mage, was disappointed only that Arborn was not Talented; he respected his daughter as a brilliant theoretician and recognised that a competent mage could support herself without aristocratic ratification.

What the marriage produced

• Triplet daughters in the year that followed: Daran, Anyalla, and Mirleen, born by Kasari ritual and Remeran obstetrics in the Tower of Sorcery at Falas.
• Pentandra's appointment as Court Wizard of Alshar under Anguin, made conditional on having a Kasari husband whose people could secure the duchy's forests; the marriage made Arborn the natural Master of Wood of Alshar.
• Arborn's eventual elevation to Baron of Lotanz, with a Kasari ranger garrison and the formal recognition of the Kasari as a vassal-people of the Alshari crown.
• One of the few cross-cultural alliances of the post-Restoration kingdom that worked, in part because both partners had to give up the things they were most attached to.

Minalan returned the torus-shaped witchstone after the wedding feast. Pentandra's career as a sex-magic adept resumed, recalibrated for marriage; her professional output of the next decade includes both the Falas Tower of Sorcery work on Nemovort countermeasures and a quiet body of marital research conducted for personal interest only.