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No one could be more different from Sasni than Suord. Sasni had known she and Duun would make a Day marriage since they were children learning to sail. Suord, a cousin from the Third Sedoretu, son of the Evening wife's younger sister, had been her enemy when they were young, but they had made peace one night, drinking salty broth together out of old flasks, making a joke of the Discussions lesson they'd had that day. Their laughter dying down, they'd grown thoughtful and relaxed with one another, and began to speak of what was in their hearts.
"Duun is tending to her mother, and I wanted to help. But she sent me away," Sasni had sighed.
"You are lucky," Suord had said wistfully, gulping broth between sentences. "I will never fall in love."
Which was when Sasni realized they were opposites: she had always been in love, and Suord never. She was the sea, ever following the moon, while he was the immovable land. If he was going to fall in love with one of the Morning boys or girls of the household, he would already sense the connection, Sasni thought, or if he was blind to it, she would be able to see it, and she hadn't. And the girls, well, they all liked him well enough. But that wasn't love. It wasn't like what Sasni and Duun had. Sasni felt sorry for him.
Even though they were still rivals, after that, it was a friendly kind of thing. She liked him more and more. Maybe, she had decided one night, Duun could find a Morning boy and the four of them could marry. The decision became a plan, and as she settled from adolescence into adulthood, the plan became something that would happen in Sasni's mind, even if not in reality. Which was only because Duun was being stubborn and wouldn't choose a man yet.
Sasni had thought that there was plenty of time for Duun to get around to making up her mind. She hadn't really wanted to push, because once it happened, it would mean sharing Duun with whoever it was. That did have to happen eventually, but it could wait. It kept seeming to Sasni like it could wait however long it would take.
And then one day Sasni woke up to discover that Suord had destroyed all her hopes. He had brought home a Morning lover who was a farmer. An outsider who had no place in Meruo -- he didn't even know how to sail! She refused to talk to the intruder, or even, most of the time, deign to take note of his existence. She tried by all her will to erase him, but it didn't have the slightest effect other than to make Hadri aware she disliked him. Which Sasni didn't, not really, since she didn't know him at all. But she knew he believed she did.
"Where did you find him," Sasni asked Suord while they were working together on accounts. It was one of the few times he didn't keep his hazel-eyed, curly-haired obsession by his side.
"Sadahun, of course," Suord said. "The village meeting about the salt marshes. Three of the farmholds wanted to pay less for grazing their yama, said there wasn't as much profit for them anymore so our share should be lower, too. I saw him and all the arguments I'd had lined up for why stable rents were more fair, that we hadn't been paid extra when their profits rose, went right out of my head. He asked me what breed of yama tolerated the high salt diet best. I couldn't tell him to ask the farmholders, because then they'd be talking to him, and I wouldn't."
Sasni thought immediately of how Suord had told her, when they were children, that he would never fall in love. They were so, so different, she thought: he saw a stranger and immediately felt ardent desire, swept away as if by the tide. Sasni had had devotion seep into her over years like an aquifer filling itself slowly, water disappearing into it, filtered through solid-looking earth, deep and unseen until someone tries to drill a well.
"How did that turn into bringing him home with you?" she asked, knowing it wouldn't take much to keep him talking about his incomprehensible obsession. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Hadri, as a morning man from a distant town he was entirely unremarkable, and that was itself the puzzling thing.
"I surprised myself how much about various sorts of yama and their diets I knew, after all, since I'd dealt so often with the farmers renting from our hold. And then he told me about his home, and I fell into the light in his eyes, the honey of his voice, and began the most wonderful drowning. It was as if seeing him again was the only air I could breathe anymore. So I came back, and took him out to the marshes where he could look at the yama grazing for himself."
"To think," Sasni said tartly, forgetting herself, "we both thought you'd never fall in love."
"I can't imagine living without him," Suord said, either ignoring Sasni's interruption or answering it, she wasn't quite sure. She said nothing, trying to give him an opening to go back to telling her about falling in love with Hadri, knowing she might have been the current pushing that conversation-boat irretrievably off course.
"I was thinking," Suord continued after he seemed to realize she wasn't going to reply, "that you and Duun, and he and I..." his voice trailed off. But Sasni knew what he meant by that, of course she did.
"Duun will never," Sasni said, finding herself disappointed by that, but knowing it had to be true. Duun wanted to choose someone herself. She had Sasni, and that was never going to change, but her husband was supposed to be someone she chose. Not someone random Suord happened to be so unexpectedly in love with.
"She will love him if she gives him a chance," Suord said passionately. He dove headfirst into an inexhaustible list of what was lovable about Hadri. Sasni tuned it out, having heard it before and it being no more interesting than the first time.
Still, maybe he was right. Maybe Duun only disliked Hadri because of how Sasni felt about him. Duun often seemed to pick up on Sasni's feelings about things and adopt them as her own, Sasni had noticed. Maybe she even did the same, she considered. She hadn't noticed, but it seemed reasonable to expect such things to be both ways. So maybe if she started being nicer to Hadri, Duun would follow suit?
But Sasni was already in the habit of pretending Hadri wasn't there, and she was a person who found it hard to change a habit. So she didn't even notice that, over the next month or so, Hadri and Duun were becoming friends.
It came as a complete surprise to her when the two of them met Suord and Sasni on their return from the latest negotiation with the yama herders who rented the westmost of Meruo's salt marsh land, to a very welcome proposal.