She wanted, very much wanted, to slap away the hand that reached toward her. Rosmerta was so irritated with the entire process and how she'd ended up in in the middle of it, and most of all that she couldn't find a reasonable way to extricate herself from it, that she just wanted to bite something. Maybe a little bit of violence would purge her bad mood, but she had no way of venting it at the moment. Everyone was watching.
So she took his hand. The hand she would have her own tied to. Bound. Trapped. Stuck. She struggled to keep her breathing even, to not inhale too much too fast. The last thing she wanted was to get lightheaded and end up passing out.
Wouldn't that just tickle her soon-to-be husband. He could play hero to the damsel in distress, and then next year, all the blushing, tittering maidens would be falling all over themselves to be presented as his bride. How conveniently they forgot that he did this every year. How could they continue to just be led like lambs to the slaughter knowing he was going to set them aside once he was done having his fun? Why did they let him keep doing this? There were better ways to symbolize fertility, surely, and she knew first hand that the symbolism wasn't even necessary to gift abundance to the land and animals. She did it all the time, and she didn't run around marrying up all the village boys.
Rosmerta finally took the time to actually look at her groom and couldn't help but roll her eyes. He had flowers all but dripping off of his horns. They decorated his horns. What was with these people and the flowers? It was ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the idea of this marriage all together. And if he thought he was going to treat her like every other little trollop that he “married,” he had another thing coming.
Leaning in close, she whispered, just a bare hint of sound that she intended only for his ears, “I. Am. Not. Consummating. Anything. With. You.”