Red Star lurks above; death-pinned like a butterfly: Green Star breaks your heart. Crown & black sceptre-- Infernum Majestika! The Arm is cunning... Thrice Seraphina, & but yourself only once You wash Murder's face. It hides within you, Curled, a comma in your heart. Waiting. Growing. Dead. |
Jigsaw Wall, & gates! Epicure, Sophist, Skeptic, Stoic, Scholastic. Down into the Nine: Wall, Spring, Court, Broad, Canal, Park, Grand, Prospect, First-- THE PIT. |
Among the nobles of Malake, dispossed now & living in the suburbs of the City, courtship is a group activity centered around the Blood Orchard (compare to the Bone Orchard, the graveyard). The Blood Orchard is a place, hosted by a church in the same way that a cemetary is hosted by a church-- often but not always the same one. In the Blood Orchard, each noble bloodline has a grove of fruit trees, the kind depending on the family's preference. When the time comes for Courting, in the first blushes of adolesence, the youths of a generation go to the Blood Orchard: the boys climb into the trees of their family, & the girls wander about. A girl who seeks to avoid a boy, or a family, simply avoids his grove or tree (although their parents may encourage them otherwise), but if a boy wishes to have nothing to do with a girl he picks & hurls fruit at her to keep her away. As couples grow older & more sly, the exchange of fruit from the Blood Orchard can make a potent gift. Such exchanges are full of poetic significance. So too a forlorn lover might become obsessed with the Blood Orchard, in the same way that a person in mourning might become obessed with the Bone Orchard. Upon marriage the man gives the woman a carved figure, made from the wood of the Blood Orchard tree, which she adds to her family inheritance-- these figures are significant in family augury & lineage & luck. The fallen branches of the trees from the Blood Orchard are burned when the couple is trying to concieve; the smoke is considered both an aphrodisiac & an aid to conception.
