Post by devilinthedetails on Sept 24, 2018 12:03:56 GMT 10
Title: Closed Doors
Rating: PG-13 for references to suicide and infidelity.
Prompt: Behind Closed Doors
Summary: Behind closed doors, the Conte family begins to unravel after Jon persuades Kalasin not to train as a knight.
Closed Doors
More than any of Jon’s children, Kally took after him. She had his coal black hair and eyes that weren’t just his in color as Roald’s were but also in shape. Her bright blue eyes were gleaming windows into the soul—charismatic and determined to transform her world—that she had inherited from him, but what the world accepted with much grumbling from a king, it would never tolerate from a princess or even a queen. Kally was her father’s daughter, and that was his greatest joy and profoundest sorrow as he gazed somberly at her and began a conversation he had hoped never to have with her—one that duty demanded he have with her but that he knew in his bones he would regret until his dying day.
“You still wish to enter knighthood training at summer’s end?” he asked her although he knew how she would answer and had prepared his response that would crush some of the spirit inside her.
“Yes, of course, Papa.” Kally stared at him, plainly baffled why she had to explain a dream she had described ever since she was old enough to understand he mother riding into battle. “I want to be a knight so I can serve the realm and go on adventures like Mama.”
“Here is a knight, and here is a queen.” Jon lifted two ivory chess pieces—one an imperious queen; the other a valiant knight—from faraway Carthak where he was beginning to believe he could betroth Kally once Emperor Kaddar quelled enough rebellions to feel secure in his rule from the board on the mahogany table before them. He had, he remembered incongruously, been the one to teach her how to play chess at the same time he did Roald. Kally had loved grand, sweeping maneuvers while Roald had preferred subtler, slower strategies. “Which is more powerful, Kally?”
“The queen, Papa.” Kally’s forehead crinkled as if she sensed that his questions weren’t straightforward and simple as they seemed but snares to trap her. “She can go anywhere and do anything.”
“Yes, the queen’s most valuable attribute is that she can go anywhere and do anything.” With a sound that felt too loud even to his own ears, Jon restored the chess pieces to their proper positions on the board. “That’s why Tortall needs you to become queen—or empress—of another country. We’ll need the alliance you can forge with your marriage, and the power you’ll wield as the most influential woman in that land.”
“I was just born to marry then?” Kally’s lip shook as if she wanted to cry but she bit on it to hold the tears in her eyes, which was somehow more painful for Jon to watch than if she had wept.
“No.” He cupped her chin. “You were born to marry and to rule. You’re a princess, and one day you’ll be a queen or empress.”
“But I can’t be a knight is what you’re saying?” Kally frowned, and he could see the same passion burning within her—the desire to have everything—that flamed inside him.”I can’t be both knight and queen or empress. I have to choose.”
“It’ll be difficult to find a royal match for you if you insist on training as a knight, my dear.” Jon tried to be delicate and diplomatic as he broke his daughter’s heart and his own. “If you learn to be a lady, I’ll promise you the power to block any potential marriage as long as you can come up with a reason my nobles won’t regard as ridiculous.”
“I’ll do my duty to Tortall.” Kally’s watery eyes were freezing to ice as they fixed on him. “Why didn’t you tell me I couldn’t be a knight earlier, Papa? Why did you let me hold this dream for so long only to snatch it from me at the last moment?”
“I hoped the world would be a different place by the time you were this age so that we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.” Jon massaged his aching temples with sweaty palms. “The world has changed in many ways since you were small but not enough to embrace a princess training to be a knight. I’m truly sorry, Kally.”
“There’s no need to apologize, Papa. You didn’t create the world. You just live in it and so must I.” She was—Jon could hear in her tone—imitating the distant politeness that Roald with his perfect manners and diction could project in a single sentence. Slamming shut the open door that had connected him with his daughter since her birth, she requested, respectful but remote, “If I’m to be a lady, I’d prefer if you call me by my lady’s name, Kalasin.”
“As you wish, Kalasin.” He yearned to hug her against his chest but knew that she would bolt if he tried to do so he sat motionless on the sofa.
“Do I have your leave to go, Papa?” Kally rose from the couch, pushing herself away from him in the process.
“Of course.” Jon nodded, and, as she fled from the room with a flicker of a curtsy, he added with a term of endearment she hadn’t yet forbidden him, “I love you, my dear.”
She had run far enough away that she could pretend not to hear, and Jon envisioned her seeking Roald’s sturdy shoulder to sob into because her older brother had ever been her rock and comforter.
When Thayet returned from bringing a band of bandits to justice, she was spitting with fury when she discovered that he had taken advantage of her absence to dissuade Kally from pursuing knighthood.
“Kally tells me that you convinced her not to train as a knight while I was hunting outlaws.” Thayet’s hands were planted on her hips, a menacing sign Jon had learned to be wary of even before they were wed.
“You know she can’t train as a knight and marry into royalty.” Jon struggled to find the right balance of firm and placating. He wanted to stand his ground while respecting Thayet’s ire to avoid provoking it further. “Tortall needs her to marry into royalty more than it requires her service as a knight.”
His attempt at deft negotiation had apparently failed since Thayet snapped, “Our daughter isn’t a pawn on your chessboard, Jonathan.”
“No.” Jon stiffened his spine. “She’s a princess who must one day be a queen or empress. That would be impossible if she trained as a knight, and you know it as well as I do, Thayet.”
“All I know is that you only see our daughter’s marriage prospects when you look at her.” Thayet’s accusing finger jabbed into Jon’s heaving chest. “She only matters to you because you can use her to form an alliance with a foreign country.”
“She’s a royal child.” Jon pinched the bridge of his nose in a fleeting effort to cling to a temper he had already lost. “Royal children must marry for the good of the realm. At least I offered Kally veto power. I never granted that to Roald.”
Bringing up Roald proved to be a grave error for Thayet’s jaw clenched. “Kally has as much right to train as a knight as Roald. You issued a proclamation to that effect ten years ago. Will you stand by your own words? Are you a parchment tiger?”
“I’m a realist.” Jon’s vision was tinged read as he glared at his wife. “I can issue all the cursed decrees I want granting girls the chance to train as pages but I can’t make the world accept them. How do you think Lord Wyldon, banner man of the staunch conservatives at court, would react to a princess page?”
“I care about our daughter’s happiness more than I do Lord Wyldon’s.” Thayet shaped each word into a dagger aimed at Jon’s heart. “I used to believe that you were the same way—that you thought women had worth beyond the roles of wife and mother.”
The last sentence was so insulting that Jon chose not to dignify it with a retort, instead attacking the first part of her rant. “How about the happiness and stability of the world? How about Tortall’s place in the world and need for allies within it? Does any of that mean anything to you? If it does, I can assure you that Lord Wyldon’s opposition would only be the beginning of the war waged against Kally’s knighthood. Lord Wyldon likely would be too honorable to impugn her virtue but other conservatives wouldn’t have his scruples. They’d drag her name through the mud with impunity, and that’s just what her enemies in our country would do. The nobles in other lands would doubtlessly revolt outright rather than accept her as queen or empress.”
“My mother was trapped in an unhappy political marriage and threw herself from a tower because of it.” Thayet’s voice trembled whether with anger or grief Jon couldn’t distinguish even after all his years of hearing her darkest fears and deepest insecurities. “You must understand how it distresses me to think of Kally following her namesake into a political marriage without consideration of her happiness.”
“Her happiness is being considered, and you’re being ludicrous,” Jon roared, pushed beyond any capacity he had for courtesy. “My father rode his horse off a cliff, Thayet. Should we never have allowed Roald to mount a horse? That sounds like the sort of silliness you’re suggesting.”
“You have all the sensitivity of an executioner’s ax.” Thayet stared at him with pure scorn that left him breathless. “Of all the men in the world, I don’t know why I consented to have children by you, but since I did, I’ll say only this: my children deserve a better father than you, Jonathan of Conte.”
Before Jon could appeal or argue any further, she had spun on her heel and stormed out of his study. Weak-kneed, he collapsed into his desk chair and buried his head in his hands. Thayet, he thought bitterly, should have sensed that discouraging his daughter from training as a knight was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do in the dreadful name of duty. She should have supported him and been his bedrock instead of challenging him and turning the difficult into the utterly unbearable…
“Papa. May I enter?” Roald was standing in the door Thayet had left ajar when she stalked out, obviously uncertain whether he should approach farther, and Jon mentally berated himself as a terrible father for engaging in another shouting match with his wife that his children could overhear. His parents, he recalled with a surge of shame, never argued in his hearing. He supposed that was because his father was more mild-mannered than him and his gentle mother more likely to accede to his father’s wishes than fiercely independent Thayet was to his. He loved Thayet for her passion and her pride, but there was no denying those traits complicated their marriage.
“Of course, son.” Jon beckoned Roald into his study, striving to sound as inviting as possible. A quiet, serious lad from the moment he came into the world, Roald always benefited from such encouragement. “Come in.”
“Thank you.” Roald stepped over the threshold but waited as if still unsure of his welcome as soon as he entered the room. “I wanted to inform you that I dismissed the servants for the night when I heard you and Mama shouting. I thought that was most proper.”
Dimly, Jon wondered if he was being subtly scolded for his lack of propriety—his gross negligence of the laws of etiquette designed to ensure that servants never overheard royalty arguing amongst themselves—by his son. After all, much as Master Oakbridge would be worrying over matters of precedent until the crack of doom, the world could be ending and Roald would still be fretting about what was proper.
Perhaps Roald—always so attuned to any hint of disapproval—detected Jon’s impatience for he faltered, “I believed that was best, but if I was mistaken, please forgive me.”
“No forgiveness is necessary.” Feeling like an ogre, Jon rose from his chair and strode over to rest a palm on his son’s shoulder. “If you believed it was best, no doubt it was the right thing to do.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Roald’s shoulders swelled at even this single affirmation, and Jon almost cracked a smile at how much his opinion still mattered to his son as he approached the awkwardness of adolescence. “Mama is still out and didn’t say when she’d be back. Lianne and Vania were crying but I got them to stop so I could bathe them and tuck them into bed. Liam and Jasson are also in bed though I had to fight tooth and nail to get them there. Kally isn’t asleep if you want to talk to her.”
The realization of how hard it must have been for Kally to hear him and Thayet arguing over her future rammed into him with the destructive force of a catapult. He would have to speak with her at once if she wasn’t so upset with him that she would refuse his consolation. “Where is she?”
“She’s shut in her room.” Roald’s voice was hushed, and Jon winced at the sad but unsurprising news that his daughter had barricaded herself in her bedchamber.
“You’re a good boy, Roald.” Jon patted his son’s shoulder, pleased with how his heir had assumed responsibility for his servants and siblings while Jon was embroiled in an argument with Thayet. “I’m going to speak with Kally now.”
Taking a deep breath to center himself, he headed down the hallway to Kally’s closed door. Knocking on it gently, he asked just loudly enough to be heard through the door, “May I come in, Kalasin?”
“Yes.” Kally turned the word into a wail, and, when Jon entered, shutting the door softly behind him, he saw Kally curled into her covers, crying into a pillow she clutched against her chest. Up until a year ago, it would have a doll she clung to as she wept, but she had given her dolls away to her younger sisters a year ago when she deemed them too childish for a big girl.
“I’m sorry, Papa.” Kally’s fingers tore at the pillowcase as he sat beside her.
“Why are you sorry, my dear?” Jon gingerly guided her hand away from the pillowcase before she could ruin the brocade, squeezing her fingers softly.
“It’s my fault you and Mama argued.” Kally folded her face into his neck, dampening it with tears. “You and Mama were fighting about me. That means you and Mama wouldn’t have argued if it weren’t for me.”
“That’s not true.” Jon pressed kisses into her hair. “Your mother and I love you very much so we sometimes argue about what’s best for you, but that doesn’t for one moment mean you’re to blame for the disagreement. Your mama and I were arguing before you were born, I promise you.”
“This argument sounded different than any I ever heard between you and Mama.” Kally sniffled, and Jon internally raked himself over a bed of coals for letting her hear so many disagreements between him and Thayet that she could compare the tenor of their fights. How had he become such a flawed father and husband when all he was trying to do was his duty by his family and his kingdom? “It sounded scary and bad.”
“We only get into bad and scary arguments with those we love most.” Jon combed her hair with his fingers until she pulled away to stare up at him skeptically.
“That doesn’t sound right, Papa.” She slid a handkerchief from her pocket and blew into it for punctuation.
“Think about it this way.” Jon struggled to explain family dynamics that flummoxed him almost as much as they did her. “You fight with your siblings, don’t you?”
“Every one of them except Roald.” Kally nodded, and Jon indeed couldn’t remember a battle breaking out between his two oldest children.
“Exactly.” Jon tapped her knee in reassurance. “Yet those fights never stop you from loving your siblings, do they?”
“Of course not.” Kally rolled her red-rimmed eyes. “We’re family no matter what, Papa.”
“Very good. It’s the same way for your mother and me.” Jon kissed her forehead and nudged her toward her pillows. “Dry your eyes now and get some sleep, Kalasin.”
When she tugged the blankets beneath her chin and he was satisfied that she would sleep, he sought out his own bed even if there was a stack of documents for the next morning’s council meeting he should have reviewed instead. His advisors would have to accept that he was mortal who sometimes craved the comforting oblivion of sleep.
Thayet wasn’t in bed when he arrived there, and when he awoke, it was to a curt note informing him that she would be moving to quarters on the other side of the palace and would be having servants help transfer her belongings to her new chambers.
Liam, ever the troublemaker, of the void Thayet’s departure left to yank at Lianne’s ribbons as they sat in the parlor, Jon too preoccupied with responding to monitor his children’s every behavior.
“Ow, Liam!” Lianne squealed, covering her hair as her brother tugged at her ribbons. “My hair is tied into my ribbons so it hurts when you yank at them.”
“That’s the point.” Liam continued to pull at Lianne’s ribbons. “You’re such an idiot, Lianne.”
“Don’t call your sister an idiot, Liam, and let go of her ribbons now.” Jon fought to keep from shouting at his son, who at least had the decency to release Lianne’s ribbons now that Jon had ordered him to do so. Lifting a warning finger, he chided, “A gentleman never pulls on a lady’s hair or ribbons. I don’t ever want to see you doing that again.”
“You won’t.” Liam’s jaw tightened in a way that Jon suspected meant his son would only be more careful about tormenting his sisters when Jon’s attention was elsewhere.
“You’ll be very sorry if I do.” Jon jerked his finger toward Liam’s bedchamber. “Go to your room and work on assignments for your tutor. I don’t want to see hide nor hair of you until dinner.”
Liam, who preferred being burned alive to book learning, groaned at this pronouncement but when Jon shot him his sternest frown, Liam’s hazel eyes sank to the carpet, and his groan faded abruptly into a mumbled, “Yes, Papa.”
When Liam had disappeared to attack his lessons instead of his sister, Lianne, brown eyes warm as cider, climbed onto Jon’s lap, murmuring, “I don’t think Liam truly meant to hurt me when he pulled on my ribbons. I think he was just missing Mama.”
“We’re all missing Mama, Lianne.” Jon retied Lianne’s ribbons into her black hair. “That doesn’t give us permission to hurt each other whether we meant to or not.”
“Yes, Papa.” Lianne’s eyes were wide and plaintive as she gazed up at Jon. “When will Mama live with us again?”
“That’s a question only Mama can answer, sweetheart.” Jon rubbed his daughter’s back as he finished restoring her ribbons to their original places. “You and your siblings can visit her whenever she is in the palace, though. She’ll always be happy to see her children.”
He didn’t add his wry inward observation that Thayet clearly wouldn’t always be happy to see her husband since such a snide remark would be no solace to Lianne.
“That means I can visit her now?” Lianne, eager as a spring butterfly, leapt from his lap. When Jon nodded, she kissed his cheek because she had ever been the gentlest of his children even if Vania was the wildest in her affections. “Thank you, Papa. You’ve made me feel much better.”
With Lianne’s visit to remind her of how her children longed for her, Jon had hoped that Thayet might be reconciled with him swiftly but instead she remained stubbornly absent—only interacting with him behind a coldly courteous mask at government functions that required both their presence, her nearness making it even more unbearable to be unable to touch the woman who had borne him six children—that Vania began to follow Liam’s rebellious lead. When she should have been busy with her lessons, she vanished on her pony.
“Where were you?” he rumbled at her the instant she entered the royal quarters still wearing her riding boots one afternoon after she had kept her tutor waiting an entire bell.
“Riding.” Vania pouted as she always did when trying to charm her way out of punishment.
Irked by her attempt at evading discipline, he arched an eyebrow. “Not toward the palace, obviously.”
When Vania, apparently recognizing that she wouldn’t be able to flatter herself out of trouble this time, stayed silent, Jon continued, banishing her to her room, “You won’t ride your pony again for a week. Go to your tutor now and ask for an extra two hours of work to make up for your tardiness.”
“A week without my pony?” Vania gasped, and Jon remembered how a week could last a century at her age. “How can you be so cruel, Papa?”
“I’ll be even crueler and make it two weeks without riding your pony if you don’t go to your tutor and apologize for your lateness now.” Jon shook his head at the obstinacy of his youngest child, telling himself that it was inherited from Thayet, not him. He was never so disagreeable.
Even Vania’s obstinate pouting was easier to endure than discovering Jasson tucked into an armchair by the hearth in the family library, ivy eyes intent on the code of law governing divorce in Tortall.
“Why are you reading divorce laws, Jasson?” Jon couldn’t suppress the question as he settled into the armchair across from Jasson even though he knew that it was often wiser not to probe Jasson’s peculiar research interests.
“I want to understand divorce laws so I can know what will happen when you and Mama get divorced.” Jasson’s answer was almost offhand as his focus remained riveted on the legal tome.
“Your mama and I aren’t getting divorced.” Jon forced himself to speak calmly when he was rattled to the core that one of his children would believe for even a heartbeat that he and Thayet would divorce. “If you’re worried about what’s happening between your mother and me, you can ask me about it.”
“I don’t want to ask you anything, Papa.” Jasson glanced almost pityingly at him from behind the spine of the divorce law code. Clearly he judged Jon unable to accept the reality that his marriage to Thayet was over. “I can find my own answers with my reading.”
“Very well.” Jon sighed, thinking that Jasson had always sought answers in books the way Roald forever took refuge in rules. As he rose to search for the documents that had driven him to the library in the first place, he added, “If you change your mind, I’m always here to talk, son.”
Swallowed in his tome, Jasson didn’t reply, and uneasiness hounded Jon as he left the library with the records he had come to collect.
If Jasson suspected that Jon and Thayet were soon to be divorced, Roald’s theories were an even darker rabbit hole to jump down as Jon found out when Roald lingered to speak with him after an evening council meeting they had attended—Jon to lead it and his heir to observe it for the day he would be expected to rule in his own right.
“Papa.” Roald waited until the last lord had departed before speaking softly. “I have a personal question.”
Wondering which change mercilessly inflicted upon the body as adolescence neared was concerning his son, Jon smiled slightly. “I’m your father. I’m here to answer all your personal questions, son.”
He considered himself as prepared as a parent could be for such awkward inquiries so he was caught completely off-guard by the one Roald posed.
“Have you”—a flushing Roald fumbled for phrasing—“been intimate with a woman who wasn’t Mama recently?”
“Roald!” Jon’s shock hardened into sharpness. “Where in the name of Mithros did you get that idea?”
“The boys in the pages’ wing say you must be intimate with another woman since you aren’t living with Mama anymore.” Roald fiddled with a splinter in the polished wood of the council table. “I wondered because I’m in the pages’ wing, not the royal quarters.”
“The rumor mill of the pages’ wing, what a bastion of Tortallan truthiness.” Clasping his son’s shoulders, Jon went from sardonic to serious. “How many times do I have to tell you to worry about the truth, Roald, not what people say? If you listen to every tidbit of gossip against our family, it’ll drive you to madness.”
“That’s what I’m asking, Papa.” Roald ducked his head at the reprimand. “I want to hear the truth, and I don’t know who else to ask for it in this case.”
“The truth”—Jon tilted Roald’s chin so their somber blue gazes locked—“is that I love your mother and you children more than my life. I would no more be unfaithful to my family than I would betray my realm. Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes, Papa.” Roald’s response was so hushed it could have been a whisper.
“Good.” Jon released his son’s shoulders and gestured toward the door. “I imagine you’ve studies to finish. Why don’t you do that now?”
“I always have studies to finish,” agreed Roald in a weary manner that implied he had studies sprouting from his ears. With a trace of tentativeness, he apologized as he stood, “Forgive me if I angered you, Papa. That wasn’t my intention.”
“You haven’t angered me.” Jon shepherded his son toward the door. “Lord Wyldon will be angered, however, if you don’t finish those assignments.”
When he and Roald parted, Jon decided that he must attempt to reconcile with Thayet if the court was indeed rife with rumors of him being unfaithful to Thayet. The worst that could happen was that she would reject his apology, and his family would remain divided.
“Thayet.” He bowed deeply to her when he arrived in her parlor and she had dismissed her ladies. “I apologize for not discussing with you my decision to discourage Kally from training as a page before I did it. It was wrong of me not to consult you even if I feared you’d undermine me with our daughter.”
“It was decision of dynastic importance as well as familial significance.” Thayet’s lips were thin with the memory of his slight. “If we’re to succeed as parents and rulers, we need to be partners who consult one another before making major choices, Jon.”
“I realize that, and I promise to do so in the future.” Jon reached for her hand, and, when she didn’t yank it out of his grasp, he guided it to his mouth for a light kiss. “Are you willing to give me that chance?”
“Always.” Thayet’s hand drifted to cup his cheek. “If you’d talked to me about your plans for Kally, I’d have come to agree with them once I’d time to reflect on the diplomatic implications.”
“You can forgive me for putting our country before our daughter’s dreams then?” Jon was amazed by the hope that flared in his chest. He must have been resigned until that moment to Thayet never forgiving him for destroying their daughter’s dream of knighthood.
“I don’t need to forgive you for that since if you didn’t put your duty to your country before everything else, you wouldn’t be the man I married.” Thayet kissed him on the cheek and then, with mounting fervor, on his lips. “The man I fell in love with so many years ago. The man I still love despite his occasional high-handedness when making dynastic decisions.”
“If you still love me”—Jon drew her against his thudding chest—“will you return to the quarters we once shared?”
“Oh, Jon.” Thayet leaned her head against his shoulder. “I thought we’d be old and gray before you humbled yourself enough to ask.”
“We aren’t ever going gray, my dear.” Jon trailed his fingers through her tresses of beautifully black hair. “I also respected you too much to rush your decision to return to me.”
“What an impressive veneer of chivalry you’ve managed to paint over your pride preventing you from apologizing.” Thayet tugged teasingly at his beard, and he laughed at himself for the first time since she had stormed out of his study.
Rating: PG-13 for references to suicide and infidelity.
Prompt: Behind Closed Doors
Summary: Behind closed doors, the Conte family begins to unravel after Jon persuades Kalasin not to train as a knight.
Closed Doors
More than any of Jon’s children, Kally took after him. She had his coal black hair and eyes that weren’t just his in color as Roald’s were but also in shape. Her bright blue eyes were gleaming windows into the soul—charismatic and determined to transform her world—that she had inherited from him, but what the world accepted with much grumbling from a king, it would never tolerate from a princess or even a queen. Kally was her father’s daughter, and that was his greatest joy and profoundest sorrow as he gazed somberly at her and began a conversation he had hoped never to have with her—one that duty demanded he have with her but that he knew in his bones he would regret until his dying day.
“You still wish to enter knighthood training at summer’s end?” he asked her although he knew how she would answer and had prepared his response that would crush some of the spirit inside her.
“Yes, of course, Papa.” Kally stared at him, plainly baffled why she had to explain a dream she had described ever since she was old enough to understand he mother riding into battle. “I want to be a knight so I can serve the realm and go on adventures like Mama.”
“Here is a knight, and here is a queen.” Jon lifted two ivory chess pieces—one an imperious queen; the other a valiant knight—from faraway Carthak where he was beginning to believe he could betroth Kally once Emperor Kaddar quelled enough rebellions to feel secure in his rule from the board on the mahogany table before them. He had, he remembered incongruously, been the one to teach her how to play chess at the same time he did Roald. Kally had loved grand, sweeping maneuvers while Roald had preferred subtler, slower strategies. “Which is more powerful, Kally?”
“The queen, Papa.” Kally’s forehead crinkled as if she sensed that his questions weren’t straightforward and simple as they seemed but snares to trap her. “She can go anywhere and do anything.”
“Yes, the queen’s most valuable attribute is that she can go anywhere and do anything.” With a sound that felt too loud even to his own ears, Jon restored the chess pieces to their proper positions on the board. “That’s why Tortall needs you to become queen—or empress—of another country. We’ll need the alliance you can forge with your marriage, and the power you’ll wield as the most influential woman in that land.”
“I was just born to marry then?” Kally’s lip shook as if she wanted to cry but she bit on it to hold the tears in her eyes, which was somehow more painful for Jon to watch than if she had wept.
“No.” He cupped her chin. “You were born to marry and to rule. You’re a princess, and one day you’ll be a queen or empress.”
“But I can’t be a knight is what you’re saying?” Kally frowned, and he could see the same passion burning within her—the desire to have everything—that flamed inside him.”I can’t be both knight and queen or empress. I have to choose.”
“It’ll be difficult to find a royal match for you if you insist on training as a knight, my dear.” Jon tried to be delicate and diplomatic as he broke his daughter’s heart and his own. “If you learn to be a lady, I’ll promise you the power to block any potential marriage as long as you can come up with a reason my nobles won’t regard as ridiculous.”
“I’ll do my duty to Tortall.” Kally’s watery eyes were freezing to ice as they fixed on him. “Why didn’t you tell me I couldn’t be a knight earlier, Papa? Why did you let me hold this dream for so long only to snatch it from me at the last moment?”
“I hoped the world would be a different place by the time you were this age so that we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.” Jon massaged his aching temples with sweaty palms. “The world has changed in many ways since you were small but not enough to embrace a princess training to be a knight. I’m truly sorry, Kally.”
“There’s no need to apologize, Papa. You didn’t create the world. You just live in it and so must I.” She was—Jon could hear in her tone—imitating the distant politeness that Roald with his perfect manners and diction could project in a single sentence. Slamming shut the open door that had connected him with his daughter since her birth, she requested, respectful but remote, “If I’m to be a lady, I’d prefer if you call me by my lady’s name, Kalasin.”
“As you wish, Kalasin.” He yearned to hug her against his chest but knew that she would bolt if he tried to do so he sat motionless on the sofa.
“Do I have your leave to go, Papa?” Kally rose from the couch, pushing herself away from him in the process.
“Of course.” Jon nodded, and, as she fled from the room with a flicker of a curtsy, he added with a term of endearment she hadn’t yet forbidden him, “I love you, my dear.”
She had run far enough away that she could pretend not to hear, and Jon envisioned her seeking Roald’s sturdy shoulder to sob into because her older brother had ever been her rock and comforter.
When Thayet returned from bringing a band of bandits to justice, she was spitting with fury when she discovered that he had taken advantage of her absence to dissuade Kally from pursuing knighthood.
“Kally tells me that you convinced her not to train as a knight while I was hunting outlaws.” Thayet’s hands were planted on her hips, a menacing sign Jon had learned to be wary of even before they were wed.
“You know she can’t train as a knight and marry into royalty.” Jon struggled to find the right balance of firm and placating. He wanted to stand his ground while respecting Thayet’s ire to avoid provoking it further. “Tortall needs her to marry into royalty more than it requires her service as a knight.”
His attempt at deft negotiation had apparently failed since Thayet snapped, “Our daughter isn’t a pawn on your chessboard, Jonathan.”
“No.” Jon stiffened his spine. “She’s a princess who must one day be a queen or empress. That would be impossible if she trained as a knight, and you know it as well as I do, Thayet.”
“All I know is that you only see our daughter’s marriage prospects when you look at her.” Thayet’s accusing finger jabbed into Jon’s heaving chest. “She only matters to you because you can use her to form an alliance with a foreign country.”
“She’s a royal child.” Jon pinched the bridge of his nose in a fleeting effort to cling to a temper he had already lost. “Royal children must marry for the good of the realm. At least I offered Kally veto power. I never granted that to Roald.”
Bringing up Roald proved to be a grave error for Thayet’s jaw clenched. “Kally has as much right to train as a knight as Roald. You issued a proclamation to that effect ten years ago. Will you stand by your own words? Are you a parchment tiger?”
“I’m a realist.” Jon’s vision was tinged read as he glared at his wife. “I can issue all the cursed decrees I want granting girls the chance to train as pages but I can’t make the world accept them. How do you think Lord Wyldon, banner man of the staunch conservatives at court, would react to a princess page?”
“I care about our daughter’s happiness more than I do Lord Wyldon’s.” Thayet shaped each word into a dagger aimed at Jon’s heart. “I used to believe that you were the same way—that you thought women had worth beyond the roles of wife and mother.”
The last sentence was so insulting that Jon chose not to dignify it with a retort, instead attacking the first part of her rant. “How about the happiness and stability of the world? How about Tortall’s place in the world and need for allies within it? Does any of that mean anything to you? If it does, I can assure you that Lord Wyldon’s opposition would only be the beginning of the war waged against Kally’s knighthood. Lord Wyldon likely would be too honorable to impugn her virtue but other conservatives wouldn’t have his scruples. They’d drag her name through the mud with impunity, and that’s just what her enemies in our country would do. The nobles in other lands would doubtlessly revolt outright rather than accept her as queen or empress.”
“My mother was trapped in an unhappy political marriage and threw herself from a tower because of it.” Thayet’s voice trembled whether with anger or grief Jon couldn’t distinguish even after all his years of hearing her darkest fears and deepest insecurities. “You must understand how it distresses me to think of Kally following her namesake into a political marriage without consideration of her happiness.”
“Her happiness is being considered, and you’re being ludicrous,” Jon roared, pushed beyond any capacity he had for courtesy. “My father rode his horse off a cliff, Thayet. Should we never have allowed Roald to mount a horse? That sounds like the sort of silliness you’re suggesting.”
“You have all the sensitivity of an executioner’s ax.” Thayet stared at him with pure scorn that left him breathless. “Of all the men in the world, I don’t know why I consented to have children by you, but since I did, I’ll say only this: my children deserve a better father than you, Jonathan of Conte.”
Before Jon could appeal or argue any further, she had spun on her heel and stormed out of his study. Weak-kneed, he collapsed into his desk chair and buried his head in his hands. Thayet, he thought bitterly, should have sensed that discouraging his daughter from training as a knight was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do in the dreadful name of duty. She should have supported him and been his bedrock instead of challenging him and turning the difficult into the utterly unbearable…
“Papa. May I enter?” Roald was standing in the door Thayet had left ajar when she stalked out, obviously uncertain whether he should approach farther, and Jon mentally berated himself as a terrible father for engaging in another shouting match with his wife that his children could overhear. His parents, he recalled with a surge of shame, never argued in his hearing. He supposed that was because his father was more mild-mannered than him and his gentle mother more likely to accede to his father’s wishes than fiercely independent Thayet was to his. He loved Thayet for her passion and her pride, but there was no denying those traits complicated their marriage.
“Of course, son.” Jon beckoned Roald into his study, striving to sound as inviting as possible. A quiet, serious lad from the moment he came into the world, Roald always benefited from such encouragement. “Come in.”
“Thank you.” Roald stepped over the threshold but waited as if still unsure of his welcome as soon as he entered the room. “I wanted to inform you that I dismissed the servants for the night when I heard you and Mama shouting. I thought that was most proper.”
Dimly, Jon wondered if he was being subtly scolded for his lack of propriety—his gross negligence of the laws of etiquette designed to ensure that servants never overheard royalty arguing amongst themselves—by his son. After all, much as Master Oakbridge would be worrying over matters of precedent until the crack of doom, the world could be ending and Roald would still be fretting about what was proper.
Perhaps Roald—always so attuned to any hint of disapproval—detected Jon’s impatience for he faltered, “I believed that was best, but if I was mistaken, please forgive me.”
“No forgiveness is necessary.” Feeling like an ogre, Jon rose from his chair and strode over to rest a palm on his son’s shoulder. “If you believed it was best, no doubt it was the right thing to do.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Roald’s shoulders swelled at even this single affirmation, and Jon almost cracked a smile at how much his opinion still mattered to his son as he approached the awkwardness of adolescence. “Mama is still out and didn’t say when she’d be back. Lianne and Vania were crying but I got them to stop so I could bathe them and tuck them into bed. Liam and Jasson are also in bed though I had to fight tooth and nail to get them there. Kally isn’t asleep if you want to talk to her.”
The realization of how hard it must have been for Kally to hear him and Thayet arguing over her future rammed into him with the destructive force of a catapult. He would have to speak with her at once if she wasn’t so upset with him that she would refuse his consolation. “Where is she?”
“She’s shut in her room.” Roald’s voice was hushed, and Jon winced at the sad but unsurprising news that his daughter had barricaded herself in her bedchamber.
“You’re a good boy, Roald.” Jon patted his son’s shoulder, pleased with how his heir had assumed responsibility for his servants and siblings while Jon was embroiled in an argument with Thayet. “I’m going to speak with Kally now.”
Taking a deep breath to center himself, he headed down the hallway to Kally’s closed door. Knocking on it gently, he asked just loudly enough to be heard through the door, “May I come in, Kalasin?”
“Yes.” Kally turned the word into a wail, and, when Jon entered, shutting the door softly behind him, he saw Kally curled into her covers, crying into a pillow she clutched against her chest. Up until a year ago, it would have a doll she clung to as she wept, but she had given her dolls away to her younger sisters a year ago when she deemed them too childish for a big girl.
“I’m sorry, Papa.” Kally’s fingers tore at the pillowcase as he sat beside her.
“Why are you sorry, my dear?” Jon gingerly guided her hand away from the pillowcase before she could ruin the brocade, squeezing her fingers softly.
“It’s my fault you and Mama argued.” Kally folded her face into his neck, dampening it with tears. “You and Mama were fighting about me. That means you and Mama wouldn’t have argued if it weren’t for me.”
“That’s not true.” Jon pressed kisses into her hair. “Your mother and I love you very much so we sometimes argue about what’s best for you, but that doesn’t for one moment mean you’re to blame for the disagreement. Your mama and I were arguing before you were born, I promise you.”
“This argument sounded different than any I ever heard between you and Mama.” Kally sniffled, and Jon internally raked himself over a bed of coals for letting her hear so many disagreements between him and Thayet that she could compare the tenor of their fights. How had he become such a flawed father and husband when all he was trying to do was his duty by his family and his kingdom? “It sounded scary and bad.”
“We only get into bad and scary arguments with those we love most.” Jon combed her hair with his fingers until she pulled away to stare up at him skeptically.
“That doesn’t sound right, Papa.” She slid a handkerchief from her pocket and blew into it for punctuation.
“Think about it this way.” Jon struggled to explain family dynamics that flummoxed him almost as much as they did her. “You fight with your siblings, don’t you?”
“Every one of them except Roald.” Kally nodded, and Jon indeed couldn’t remember a battle breaking out between his two oldest children.
“Exactly.” Jon tapped her knee in reassurance. “Yet those fights never stop you from loving your siblings, do they?”
“Of course not.” Kally rolled her red-rimmed eyes. “We’re family no matter what, Papa.”
“Very good. It’s the same way for your mother and me.” Jon kissed her forehead and nudged her toward her pillows. “Dry your eyes now and get some sleep, Kalasin.”
When she tugged the blankets beneath her chin and he was satisfied that she would sleep, he sought out his own bed even if there was a stack of documents for the next morning’s council meeting he should have reviewed instead. His advisors would have to accept that he was mortal who sometimes craved the comforting oblivion of sleep.
Thayet wasn’t in bed when he arrived there, and when he awoke, it was to a curt note informing him that she would be moving to quarters on the other side of the palace and would be having servants help transfer her belongings to her new chambers.
Liam, ever the troublemaker, of the void Thayet’s departure left to yank at Lianne’s ribbons as they sat in the parlor, Jon too preoccupied with responding to monitor his children’s every behavior.
“Ow, Liam!” Lianne squealed, covering her hair as her brother tugged at her ribbons. “My hair is tied into my ribbons so it hurts when you yank at them.”
“That’s the point.” Liam continued to pull at Lianne’s ribbons. “You’re such an idiot, Lianne.”
“Don’t call your sister an idiot, Liam, and let go of her ribbons now.” Jon fought to keep from shouting at his son, who at least had the decency to release Lianne’s ribbons now that Jon had ordered him to do so. Lifting a warning finger, he chided, “A gentleman never pulls on a lady’s hair or ribbons. I don’t ever want to see you doing that again.”
“You won’t.” Liam’s jaw tightened in a way that Jon suspected meant his son would only be more careful about tormenting his sisters when Jon’s attention was elsewhere.
“You’ll be very sorry if I do.” Jon jerked his finger toward Liam’s bedchamber. “Go to your room and work on assignments for your tutor. I don’t want to see hide nor hair of you until dinner.”
Liam, who preferred being burned alive to book learning, groaned at this pronouncement but when Jon shot him his sternest frown, Liam’s hazel eyes sank to the carpet, and his groan faded abruptly into a mumbled, “Yes, Papa.”
When Liam had disappeared to attack his lessons instead of his sister, Lianne, brown eyes warm as cider, climbed onto Jon’s lap, murmuring, “I don’t think Liam truly meant to hurt me when he pulled on my ribbons. I think he was just missing Mama.”
“We’re all missing Mama, Lianne.” Jon retied Lianne’s ribbons into her black hair. “That doesn’t give us permission to hurt each other whether we meant to or not.”
“Yes, Papa.” Lianne’s eyes were wide and plaintive as she gazed up at Jon. “When will Mama live with us again?”
“That’s a question only Mama can answer, sweetheart.” Jon rubbed his daughter’s back as he finished restoring her ribbons to their original places. “You and your siblings can visit her whenever she is in the palace, though. She’ll always be happy to see her children.”
He didn’t add his wry inward observation that Thayet clearly wouldn’t always be happy to see her husband since such a snide remark would be no solace to Lianne.
“That means I can visit her now?” Lianne, eager as a spring butterfly, leapt from his lap. When Jon nodded, she kissed his cheek because she had ever been the gentlest of his children even if Vania was the wildest in her affections. “Thank you, Papa. You’ve made me feel much better.”
With Lianne’s visit to remind her of how her children longed for her, Jon had hoped that Thayet might be reconciled with him swiftly but instead she remained stubbornly absent—only interacting with him behind a coldly courteous mask at government functions that required both their presence, her nearness making it even more unbearable to be unable to touch the woman who had borne him six children—that Vania began to follow Liam’s rebellious lead. When she should have been busy with her lessons, she vanished on her pony.
“Where were you?” he rumbled at her the instant she entered the royal quarters still wearing her riding boots one afternoon after she had kept her tutor waiting an entire bell.
“Riding.” Vania pouted as she always did when trying to charm her way out of punishment.
Irked by her attempt at evading discipline, he arched an eyebrow. “Not toward the palace, obviously.”
When Vania, apparently recognizing that she wouldn’t be able to flatter herself out of trouble this time, stayed silent, Jon continued, banishing her to her room, “You won’t ride your pony again for a week. Go to your tutor now and ask for an extra two hours of work to make up for your tardiness.”
“A week without my pony?” Vania gasped, and Jon remembered how a week could last a century at her age. “How can you be so cruel, Papa?”
“I’ll be even crueler and make it two weeks without riding your pony if you don’t go to your tutor and apologize for your lateness now.” Jon shook his head at the obstinacy of his youngest child, telling himself that it was inherited from Thayet, not him. He was never so disagreeable.
Even Vania’s obstinate pouting was easier to endure than discovering Jasson tucked into an armchair by the hearth in the family library, ivy eyes intent on the code of law governing divorce in Tortall.
“Why are you reading divorce laws, Jasson?” Jon couldn’t suppress the question as he settled into the armchair across from Jasson even though he knew that it was often wiser not to probe Jasson’s peculiar research interests.
“I want to understand divorce laws so I can know what will happen when you and Mama get divorced.” Jasson’s answer was almost offhand as his focus remained riveted on the legal tome.
“Your mama and I aren’t getting divorced.” Jon forced himself to speak calmly when he was rattled to the core that one of his children would believe for even a heartbeat that he and Thayet would divorce. “If you’re worried about what’s happening between your mother and me, you can ask me about it.”
“I don’t want to ask you anything, Papa.” Jasson glanced almost pityingly at him from behind the spine of the divorce law code. Clearly he judged Jon unable to accept the reality that his marriage to Thayet was over. “I can find my own answers with my reading.”
“Very well.” Jon sighed, thinking that Jasson had always sought answers in books the way Roald forever took refuge in rules. As he rose to search for the documents that had driven him to the library in the first place, he added, “If you change your mind, I’m always here to talk, son.”
Swallowed in his tome, Jasson didn’t reply, and uneasiness hounded Jon as he left the library with the records he had come to collect.
If Jasson suspected that Jon and Thayet were soon to be divorced, Roald’s theories were an even darker rabbit hole to jump down as Jon found out when Roald lingered to speak with him after an evening council meeting they had attended—Jon to lead it and his heir to observe it for the day he would be expected to rule in his own right.
“Papa.” Roald waited until the last lord had departed before speaking softly. “I have a personal question.”
Wondering which change mercilessly inflicted upon the body as adolescence neared was concerning his son, Jon smiled slightly. “I’m your father. I’m here to answer all your personal questions, son.”
He considered himself as prepared as a parent could be for such awkward inquiries so he was caught completely off-guard by the one Roald posed.
“Have you”—a flushing Roald fumbled for phrasing—“been intimate with a woman who wasn’t Mama recently?”
“Roald!” Jon’s shock hardened into sharpness. “Where in the name of Mithros did you get that idea?”
“The boys in the pages’ wing say you must be intimate with another woman since you aren’t living with Mama anymore.” Roald fiddled with a splinter in the polished wood of the council table. “I wondered because I’m in the pages’ wing, not the royal quarters.”
“The rumor mill of the pages’ wing, what a bastion of Tortallan truthiness.” Clasping his son’s shoulders, Jon went from sardonic to serious. “How many times do I have to tell you to worry about the truth, Roald, not what people say? If you listen to every tidbit of gossip against our family, it’ll drive you to madness.”
“That’s what I’m asking, Papa.” Roald ducked his head at the reprimand. “I want to hear the truth, and I don’t know who else to ask for it in this case.”
“The truth”—Jon tilted Roald’s chin so their somber blue gazes locked—“is that I love your mother and you children more than my life. I would no more be unfaithful to my family than I would betray my realm. Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes, Papa.” Roald’s response was so hushed it could have been a whisper.
“Good.” Jon released his son’s shoulders and gestured toward the door. “I imagine you’ve studies to finish. Why don’t you do that now?”
“I always have studies to finish,” agreed Roald in a weary manner that implied he had studies sprouting from his ears. With a trace of tentativeness, he apologized as he stood, “Forgive me if I angered you, Papa. That wasn’t my intention.”
“You haven’t angered me.” Jon shepherded his son toward the door. “Lord Wyldon will be angered, however, if you don’t finish those assignments.”
When he and Roald parted, Jon decided that he must attempt to reconcile with Thayet if the court was indeed rife with rumors of him being unfaithful to Thayet. The worst that could happen was that she would reject his apology, and his family would remain divided.
“Thayet.” He bowed deeply to her when he arrived in her parlor and she had dismissed her ladies. “I apologize for not discussing with you my decision to discourage Kally from training as a page before I did it. It was wrong of me not to consult you even if I feared you’d undermine me with our daughter.”
“It was decision of dynastic importance as well as familial significance.” Thayet’s lips were thin with the memory of his slight. “If we’re to succeed as parents and rulers, we need to be partners who consult one another before making major choices, Jon.”
“I realize that, and I promise to do so in the future.” Jon reached for her hand, and, when she didn’t yank it out of his grasp, he guided it to his mouth for a light kiss. “Are you willing to give me that chance?”
“Always.” Thayet’s hand drifted to cup his cheek. “If you’d talked to me about your plans for Kally, I’d have come to agree with them once I’d time to reflect on the diplomatic implications.”
“You can forgive me for putting our country before our daughter’s dreams then?” Jon was amazed by the hope that flared in his chest. He must have been resigned until that moment to Thayet never forgiving him for destroying their daughter’s dream of knighthood.
“I don’t need to forgive you for that since if you didn’t put your duty to your country before everything else, you wouldn’t be the man I married.” Thayet kissed him on the cheek and then, with mounting fervor, on his lips. “The man I fell in love with so many years ago. The man I still love despite his occasional high-handedness when making dynastic decisions.”
“If you still love me”—Jon drew her against his thudding chest—“will you return to the quarters we once shared?”
“Oh, Jon.” Thayet leaned her head against his shoulder. “I thought we’d be old and gray before you humbled yourself enough to ask.”
“We aren’t ever going gray, my dear.” Jon trailed his fingers through her tresses of beautifully black hair. “I also respected you too much to rush your decision to return to me.”
“What an impressive veneer of chivalry you’ve managed to paint over your pride preventing you from apologizing.” Thayet tugged teasingly at his beard, and he laughed at himself for the first time since she had stormed out of his study.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!