"Is there a fancy store? A mail order form?"

"There are social events! Parties and debating societies and fashion shows and lectures and concerts and so on. It's a lot of work."

"I guess that sounds all right."

"How do drow do it?"

"Boys get to go to school, too, not as much as we do but enough that if you're the sort of person who makes childhood friends with boys you can maybe maintain your acquaintanceship long enough to marry one of those. Later on the girls start offering each other their brothers for any of dozens of reasons. All this time one's mom will be talking to her friends about their sons. If you manage to get to about my age single you may run into boys in, like, work contexts, 'cause they're also allowed to work. A deeply unsociable person who wants to get married anyway may in fact mail order but a boy on mail order will tend to have something wrong with him. If you're lucky it's 'his family died and their heirs are bothering to get some gold for him' but it can be anything."

"Huh. I could probably do with not having spoken to her if I knew her family and we'd written letters and I'd seen a portrait but less than that sounds hard."

"Less of a risk if you can murder them if you don't like them."

"I guess that's true."

"If nothing else that gets expensive."

"Most people in Osirion marry family friends, or distant relatives."

"Drow sometimes do relatives, yeah, in the more insular families. Especially if the boy's a sorcerer and they don't need the money too bad."

"The girl's family doesn't get anything for her, in Osirion. Usually they pay to have her married."

"They get to stop feeding her. Are you going to charge your inlaws for the privilege?"

“If her family were short on a dowry for reasons that didn’t reflect poorly on them I would probably be all right with that.”

"Hm."

She preps spells. It doesn't take long; yesterday was a slow day.

The ship changes its flags again midday but is otherwise boring. Fazil doesn't get more instructions from Sothis.

Belmarniss sings to pass the time. She has a fair voice and a decent repertoire in a bunch of languages.

"Didn't know drow were musical."

"We have time to kill. I also found it a decent way to do language practice."

"You're good at it."

Mahdi raises an eyebrow. 

"She's neat but I can't get over her stance on brussels sprouts. And her hostility to crocodiles."

"Those crocodiles know what they did."

" - "

"You'll just encourage them. If we want to get them to cut it out we'll have to start planning their wedding."