A red cord circled each right wrist.
That small mark was the only bright color on them. It tied them to the rite more clearly than their white robes did, naming each of them chosen before the court, the temple, and the crown.
Most were grown. Some looked barely past eighteen. Others were men and women in their thirties and forties, old enough to have waited years for the temple to call their names.
Metheea's gaze moved over them.
There were nobles among them, but not only nobles. A soldier stood near the left of the receiving ring with his jaw set tight. A woman with roughened hands kept rubbing her thumb over the red cord on her wrist. A broad-shouldered man with sun-darkened skin stared at the black basin as though afraid it might disappear before the blessing began.
They came from different ranks, different provinces, different lives.
Today, all of them knelt in the same white.
That was the part the people loved.
