a mind to marry. These three queens hold a unique place in Echon’s history. So many women have never held such power simultaneously, Dmitri. None of them are willing to cede it. She’ll reject a marriage offer, or dance around it like Rodrigo and Lorraine have done for twenty years.” He exhales, explosive sound, and the line of horses down the stables responds in kind, shaking themselves, stomping feet, huffing and puffing. “Do you know where Seolfor is?”
“I don’t” is Dmitri’s eventual answer. “Are you losing control, Robert?” There’s interest in his eyes, flashing, bordering on avarice. Robert nearly allows himself to seize Dmitri’s arm again, more intentionally threatening.
The truth is there are moments when Robert loses sight of his goal. Moments when the politics of Echon and Khazar overwhelm the end game. Moments when it’s difficult to remember his queen’s face, her image replaced by an aging redhead whose power is blunt and worldly and the centre of his everyday existence. He has spent thirty years guiding Aulun and her regent, coaxing reluctant love and desire out of a woman determined to stand alone. He has never threatened her, never shown interest in stealing her power for his own, and this is why she trusts him. It’s as well she has no need to understand that her power is transitory and unappealing to him. She is a vessel, and she has long since done her part in ensuring the downfall of her world.
There may yet be one thing left for her to do, though, and until that thing is done, he will love, honour, and manipulate her, and regret none of it. When it’s done, he knows he might find that frail human emotion has gotten the better of him, and that he might love the Titian Queen until the end of her days.
Robert has no objections to that. She’s a formidable opponent, all the more so for being a female regent to a society that believes women to be weak and inferior. How they can stand before Lorraine, before Sandalia, before Irina, and retain that conviction is beyond him, though he’s heard it said many times that all of those women are unnaturally masculine. The idea that they are wholly feminine and wholly capable doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone, or if it has, they’ve found it such an appalling and frightening thought as to put it away again and never let it see the light of day. There are moments when Robert has wanted to smack courtiers alongside the skull, not to defend Lorraine, but out of simple exasperation at their determined thick-headedness.
He wonders, briefly, if Dmitri might suffer the same loss of focus if the invasion were his to conduct.
“No,” he says, and makes it light, refusing to allow himself the luxury of physically threatening the slighter man. It’s a closer match than it might look, anyway: Robert has bulk, but Dmitri’s slenderness holds wiry strength. They were always well-matched, even before. It’s why they were selected.
Seolfor, though…Seolfor is their third, waiting, and Robert has no doubts of his loyalty. No one would: breaking faith with the queen is a concept that has only slowly become even conceivable, and that only through long years of watching human betrayals. The idea turns Robert’s stomach, makes him physically sick, and Seolfor is no less staunchly the queen’s own than he. But Seolfor is a renegade, if any of them are; Robert believes, though he’d never ask, that this is why the queen sent him on this one-way journey. Because of that, Robert has preferred to keep him off the playing field until his participation is critical. “But with kings and queens playing at pieces as if their lives were their own to direct, it may be time to activate him. Seolfor can be a charming bastard when he wants to be, and there’ll be no taint of foreign courts to him.”
Curiosity darts across Dmitri’s angular face. “Is that why you’ve kept him out for so long? Where will you send him?”
“Essandia,” Robert says drily, “to plant a woman on Rodrigo’s cock long enough to make the child she bears seem reasonably his. I’ll never understand the hold Cordula has on these men. The women are more pragmatic. I only wish Sandalia’d given in to you soon enough to make her son seem Charles’s, instead of catching by that foppish Louis.”
“So does she.” Dmitri lowers his eyes, oddly womanish in his apology, then looks up again, all sharp