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Marriage in the Reaches is a household matter, a temple matter, and a practical matter, and the three are not always in agreement. The working compromise — the one most reach-clusters have arrived at over the four centuries of the Reckoning — is that the household decides, the temple blesses, and the practical realities are arranged before either is asked. This works most of the time.
The temple of the Seven blesses marriages of any pairing of adult reach-folk who present themselves at the altar. Same-sex marriages have been temple-blessed for as long as anyone can find records; the formal marriage rite has, in its surviving liturgical text, been gender-neutral as far back as the temple’s own scribes have looked. Polyamorous households — three or more partners forming a single household — are accepted in some clusters and not others; the Quiet Reach and most Veiled-folk villages recognize them, the Copper Ring treats them as a contractual rather than a temple matter, and Ironvale has historically not. The temple does not push the issue in any direction. It records what is brought to it.
What reach-folk do discuss, at length and without much temple involvement, are the three classic forms of reach-marriage. The forms are not formal categories; they are working terms used by matchmakers, parents, and the partners themselves to organize the practical conversation. They are:
Stone-and-stone
The marriage of two land-bound partners, neither of whom skyfares. This is the most common reach-marriage and the one the temple’s liturgy assumes. The partners share a household, divide labour as they choose, and travel together (or separately) by the rhythms of land-life. Stone-and-stone marriages are typically organized by fixed responsibilities — who manages the household ledger, who handles the field or the workshop, who tends the children, who cares for ageing parents. The conversations about these responsibilities are had before the rite. A stone-and-stone marriage in which the responsibilities have not been settled is, in old reach-judgement, not yet a marriage; the rite is simply a ceremony.
Sky-and-stone
The marriage of a skyfarer to a land-bound partner. Common in port towns and around the Copper Ring; less common in the Veiled-folk villages, where skyfaring is rarer. Sky-and-stone marriages have particular conventions, because the skyfarer is away for long stretches — sometimes a season, sometimes longer — and the land-bound partner runs the household alone during those stretches. The trade has worked out, over generations, a working set of agreements:
- The long-absence rule: what the household-partner does during the skyfarer’s absences is, by working tradition, the household-partner’s business. This includes the management of the home, the children’s education, the household’s social arrangements, and (in most reach-clusters’ working understanding) the household-partner’s intimate life. The convention is not permission for unfaithfulness; it is recognition that a marriage in which one partner is gone six months a year cannot be governed by the same rules as a marriage in which both partners are home. The specific terms — what is permitted, what is not — are negotiated by the partners themselves, before the rite, and are often revisited every few years
- The return-rite: when the skyfarer makes landing after a long crossing, the household-partner traditionally meets them at the dock with a meal already prepared at home. The meal is not eaten at the dock. The meal is eaten in the home, after the skyfarer has sat in the household’s main chair for at least a quarter-hour without being asked anything. The convention is older than any reach-cluster will admit and is observed in most homes almost without thought
- The shared-letter custom: a skyfarer on a long crossing traditionally writes home once per crossing, regardless of the crossing’s length, and the household-partner writes back once per port-call. The letters are not always intimate. Most are practical — household news, harbour news, requests for items — and the intimacy is in the fact of the letter, not its content
Sky-and-stone marriages have, by reach-statistics, the highest divorce-rate of the three forms. They also have, by the same statistics, the highest re-marriage-rate. Most divorced sky-and-stones, the harbour records suggest, marry again — sometimes each other.
Sky-and-sky
The marriage of two skyfarers to one another. Less common than sky-and-stone and complicated in different ways. Sky-and-sky marriages have two main forms:
- Same-ship: both partners crew on the same vessel. Common when the marriage forms aboard, as marriages sometimes do. The trade has practical conventions — the partners typically do not stand the same watch, and the captain (if not one of them) keeps a particular eye on the ship’s working dynamics. A same-ship sky-and-sky is considered, by most working captains, either the strongest or the worst arrangement on the ship, depending on the partners
- Different-ship: each partner crews on a different vessel. Practical for the marriage; difficult for the household. Children, if any, are typically raised by one partner’s land-family or by a shared third household member. The sky-and-sky’s children are often, in trade-tradition, first-named to their parents’ first hands — meaning the first hand of each parent’s ship is, by custom, an honorary aunt or uncle. This convention has produced some unusual extended families
The sky-and-sky post-mortem rite is distinct from other reach- marriages: when one partner is lost to a fall, the surviving partner keeps the lost one’s bell-rope — the small length of cord used to ring the ship’s bell — for one year, and on the anniversary of the fall, rings the home-isle’s harbour-bell once, at sundown, without speaking. The harbour-master understands. The harbour does not pretend it has not heard.
The release-rite
The temple does not bless divorce — but does not forbid it. When a reach-marriage ends, the partners typically perform a release-rite at home, without temple involvement. The rite is simple: the household altar’s seventh seat (see The Seventh Altar) is dressed with a single piece of grey cloth for one full month after the parting. During that month, neither partner is expected to remarry, neither is expected to attend public festivals, and the household itself is, by reach-custom, quiet. At month’s end, the grey cloth is removed. The marriage is, by the working understanding of the community, ended. The temple records the change of household when informed.
The release-rite has no scriptural basis. The temple has tried, at intervals, to either codify or discourage it. Both efforts have been reasonably ignored.
Widowhood
A reach-spouse whose partner has died — at sea, at home, or in any other way — keeps the empty chair (see Vessen of the Hearth) for one full year. The bread laid at the place each evening is given to a child the next morning, by old custom. The widow is, during this year, not expected to make any major household decisions; trade-partners and family members will, by long convention, make them on the widow’s behalf, returning the authority at year’s end without fuss.
A reach-widow who chooses to remarry within the year of mourning is, by old reach-judgement, fast-walking. The phrase is not necessarily condemnatory. Some widows fast-walk for good reasons — children to care for, debts to settle, the simple intolerable weight of the year itself. The temple does not interfere. The neighbours notice. The neighbours always notice.
The empty chair, when the year ends, is, in most reach-households, not removed. It is moved one seat down. It becomes, simply, the chair the dead used to sit in. It will be set, on most evenings, for as long as the household lasts. This is not unique to widowhood; the practice extends to children lost too soon, to siblings, to old parents. Most reach-households of any age have at least one such chair. The chairs are, by long tradition, the most-loved chairs in the house, and the visitors who are seated in them are the visitors the household most trusts.
“We were sky-and-sky for nineteen years. Different-ship. Our boy was first-named to my first hand and her first hand both, and grew up calling them by their given names, which was unusual but not wrong. She took a fall in the autumn of his fourteenth year. I rang the harbour bell at sundown. I did this for eleven years without missing once. The harbour-master never charged me for the bell-keep. He had been first-named to her, before me. I learned this from her funeral notice. We were married at the same temple as her parents had been. The chair she used to sit in is still set for dinner. My son will inherit it. He will know what to do.”
— from the funeral notice of First Hand Toll of the Quiet Star, Crescent Market record-rolls, 411 AU