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My troublesome fiance wasn’t beside himself for long. He stopped once I grabbed his wrists (thus taking control of the hands currently gripping my shoulders) and hissed under my breath, “Your Highness, my maids are present!”
My lady’s maid Genette had been watching with polite amusement– she was already acquainted with my emotional fiancé– but the two chamber maids with her were both gawking at the Royal Prince with open mouths.
He’s impulsive, but he does have sense, after a fashion. Taking a glance toward them, he got a grip on himself right away, although his hands remained clamped where they were.
Turning back to me with a dire glare, he instructed in a firm voice, “Just… tell me you didn’t go north, Ti.”
He was calm, but still called me ‘Ti’. I wasn’t sure how to interpret that.
“I told you that already, Your Highness,” I stated, maintaining a patient tone, “and I already agreed not to go there. I would not break my promise to you.”
He stared into my eyes a bit longer, then scowled and finally let go. Straightening up, he said, “Dilorè and Serera are currently flying into the Highlands, looking for you.”
“What?” I yelped. “I told Amana I wasn’t going that direction!”
“We believed her, at first, but Dilorè kept calling you and not getting any answer. They couldn’t stand it anymore and took off after you.”
“They kept calling me?” I was puzzled, then a memory came to me of Fan Li instructing Lucy to ignore incoming calls on the way to my mountain. I rolled my eyes with sigh, then touched the little spirit stone pendant.
“Lucy, Dear…” I said, and she appeared.
“Out!”
“Huh?” Kiki blurted out, audibly puzzled. “Little pixie?”
Lucy turned toward the speaker as Kiki came flying right up to her and said, “Sniff, sniff!”
I’ve mentioned this before, but she is not sniffing when she does this. She says the words, ‘Sniff, sniff.’
As Rod stared in bewilderment at the pixie who had just appeared, she leaned back with her arms folded, then held her chin as she mused, “Mmmmm.”
Looking at me, she asked, confused, “Not pixie?”
“She’s not a pixie, Kiki,” I assured her, then turned back to Lucy. “Lucy, you can cancel the request to not take incoming calls now. And please call Dilorè, right away.”
“Call!” she declared.
After a moment, Dilorè’s voice rang out, “Your Highness!! Where are you?!”
I sighed. “I’m standing in my suite in Narses Castle.”
“You’re what?!”
“Please come back immediately.”
“Why did you run off?”
“I had someone to go see. I told Amana.”
“You weren’t responding!”
“Yeah… sorry, that was… a slight error on my part.”
We ended the call and Lucy returned to her stone the normal way (by just disappearing.) Kiki still looked genuinely puzzled.
“She’s here,” I told her, pointing at the stone. “What you saw was a sort of spirit proxy she sends out.”
Kiki gave a little frown, then flew right up to it, staring deeply into the gem.
“Leave her alone, I told her, using my fingertips against her body to move her away. “You’re probably scaring her. She’s just a poor little spirit.”
“Spirit?” The pixie looked up at me, surprised, then said “Oh!”
Given what an ancient being she is, I was a little surprised she hadn’t realized Lucy’s nature from the start, but like I’ve mentioned before, I’m not actually clear on how smart she is.
But the big mystery was solved for her, so she wandered off again.
Rod had continued standing there, waiting through it all, with his eye still on me.
I deflected the topic for a moment by indicating the departing Kiki. “That’s Kiki. She’s… well, she’s a pixie. And a friend of mine.”
His eyebrow went up and his mouth quirked sideways. “I gathered that much.”
I sighed. “Everything is fine now, Your Highness. I did not go anywhere dangerous, and I’m here now, safe and sound. Is there anything else you need from me?”
“Yes,” he stated flatly. “I need you to tell me. Who did you have to go see, so badly it was worth scaring us all to death like that?”
I pursed my lips, then told the maids, “Leave. This is not for your ears.”
Genette hesitated, but I gave her a nod to confirm I was including her. Once they were out of the room, I told him quietly, “I flew to my mountain, Rod.”
He frowned. “You flew… Can you seriously fly that far and back in such a short time?”
“I can,” I stated, plainly. “And that’s what I did. In my mountain, there is a place where I can meet immortal beings, so I went there to meet with Gaia and… well, my original mother. The Immortal that gave birth to Senhion.”
It would have been nice if that were sufficient, but I then had to spend a few minutes explaining what I meant in more detail. But once Rod understood, he returned to his original question.
“Why?” he asked. “What was so important that it was worth scaring us all half to death?”
“I didn’t think it would!” I protested. “I told Amana I wasn’t going to look for Mother!”
“There is danger out there in all directions!” he fumed. “That… thing that hurt you before. It was specifically going after you!”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Your Highness. It was their aim to take out the Royal Family.”
“They were aiming for you, not me,” he insisted. “Right after you did so much in Hamagaar to stop their plans, they aimed for you in Langram. You were clearly the target of that weapon, whatever it was.”
“I’m calling it a demonic proxy,” I answered. “And so what? If they target me where I don’t have anything to stay and defend, I can just fly away from them.”
“You can’t assume that! And you had someone to defend!”
Catching me by surprise, he reached up and covered Gaia’s amulet with his palm, pressing his hand against my breastbone.
“Ti, our children were with you, right? They’re right here, right?”
I pressed my lips together. That was a mean card to play, calling them ‘our children’ like that…
He continued, “Whether you think you can outrun any enemy or not, you shouldn’t be bringing them into danger in the first place!”
I looked down at his hand, and he recognized at that point that he was being a little too intimate. He drew away from me slightly while taking his hand away.
His words had my ears burning, just a little bit. After all, I had indeed blithely gone into a theoretically dangerous situation on my way back. Which reminded me, I needed to talk to Amana before the Viscount reported to the castle about the warehouse full of slaves.
“So, why did you go so suddenly?” he asked again, pulling my attention back to the present.
“I needed to clarify some things,” I said. “Especially… in my own head. It’s all been getting very confusing. And overwhelming. And it was a good thing I went, because…”
I broke off before saying, It turns out the goddess was wrong about what we need to do to have the babies.
A lot of people would become very upset, maybe angry, if you suggested the gods could be wrong.
So I changed to a different tack. “Rod, Gaia told me something very important about you, so I need to start by telling you, I’m not angry. I’m not going to forgive you because there is nothing to forgive. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
The sudden shift from my guilt to his guilt caught him very much off-guard. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Mireia’s magic. The spell that Diurhimath broke, that Parna’s people were making her cast without her being aware of it. You know what it did to you and her, right?”
His eyes slid off to the side. “Ti, I…”
“I just said you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said before guilt made him deny it. I wanted to stop him before he told any lies. “I am very aware of how horribly powerful that magic was. In a world where the gods were regulating it, making their priests control it and keep it from getting out of hand, she could not have had such a dramatic effect. It would have been stopped. But here, the gods purged that magic and got rid of all knowledge of it. It was possible for Mireia to cast it without limits, and with nobody using spells to prevent or counteract it. We were defenseless.”
His eyebrows were bunched up as he listened. He wasn’t rejecting me but he didn’t want to hear it.
“Mireia forced you to fall in love with her, and forced herself to fall in love with you,” I stated, just to make it clear what happened.
He was ready to protest, so I rushed ahead while grabbing his hands. “It wasn’t her fault. Her masters wanted her to cast a grand spell that would drive me to exile and ruin without anyone detecting the magic doing it. She wasn’t consciously choosing the exact method, but a model for her to follow happened to exist in her memory from her old world, and she followed it.”
Then I said, “I’m pretty sure you already know about it. You’ve been protecting her, right? You didn’t have to keep her by your side. There were plenty of other options. But you couldn’t bring yourself to send her away. And despite the fact that she is obviously feeling guilty about it, she couldn’t bring herself to leave.”
“That’s because she needs me to free her,” he told me. “And I’m going to do it, as soon as we can take over the Parna civil administration and have the slavery annulled.”
“Just free her, Your Highness.”
“But then she’s just a manumitted slave. I need to annul it so she’ll be a commoner like she was born to be.”
Religiously and socially, a manumitted slave is the same social status as an owned slave. They have their freedom, but they aren’t on the same level as commoners.
“That would only matter if she were on her own.”
“She will be!” he insisted. “She’ll be free to do whatever she wants!”
“She wants to be with you, Your Highness,” I told him with a smile. “She’s in love with you. I want you to forget about waiting until you can annul her bondage. Just free her and make her your concubine. Once she’s a royal concubine, the fact she used to be a slave won’t mean a thing.”
The position of Royal Concubine has certain perks and a certain degree of status regardless of whether the position holder is a royal, a noble, a commoner, or a freedwoman or slave. And it completely short-circuits the Ostish religious rules against consorting with persons of more than one level of status difference. That law only applies to the legal wife, not the concubines.
He grew an anxious look while staring at me, so I shook my head. “I’m not choosing this unwillingly, Your Highness. I want it. I need her to do something very important for me. Doing it as your concubine would be eminently better.”
“Doing what?”
“I want her to agree to it before I tell you, Your Highness. And I don’t want her to think it’s a transaction, and that she gets to be with you only if she helps me. I want you to make her your concubine whether she agrees to help me or not, so let’s please have her agree to that first, before I ask my favor.”
“It won’t happen before we’re married,” he stated clearly.
“We can make it official later, but I want you to ask her for her agreement to be your concubine before we marry. Or maybe we should talk to her together,” I suggested. “With me right there, assuring her I want you to do it, she’ll have no reason to decline.”
I could see all kinds of conflicted thoughts flickering in his eyes. I didn’t need the power of an Immortal to guess the things he was thinking.
“I’m not putting on a brave face, Your Highness,” I said. “I can’t make heirs for the duchy, and my husband’s child is the best choice for an adopted heir. I would much rather their mother be someone I like. Mireia is perfect for it.”
He heaved a deep breath and put his hands on my shoulders again, then stared down at the floor, muttering, “Can I really believe you, Ti? You’re the worst when it comes to sacrificing yourself.”
“You can,” I answered, plainly.
Looking back up at me, he commanded, “Tell me directly, are you truly okay with the idea?”
Fortunately, that was a question I had spent about a day contemplating in the Lotus Pavilion, while Curator kept the time compression cranked up for me. You see, I had been gone for several hours from Rod’s point of view, but it had been several days for me. Which is why I had forgotten about Lucy’s radio silence.
“I’m truly okay with the idea, Your Highness,” I repeated, staring him in the eye. “I want Mireia to become your concubine. I want her to become part of my family and give birth to my heir. Let’s go together and ask her.”
