"I am glad of it. Good luck with everything."

"Thank you."

And he leaves. His polecat scampers after him.

Iobel does some more notebooking and is downright serene the next day.

He comes by right after lunch. "Iobel," he says.

"Hello. This might be a prolonged conversation. Would you like to come up while I have Cricket mind the store so he doesn't constantly interrupt?"

Cricket says something that sounds suitably vicious in his idiolect.

"....sure," he says.

So Iobel murmurs to Cricket and gets a growly yet compliant reply and shows Mitros up the stairs to her apartment and sits him down.

He sits.

"So I assume you are aware that this was really fucked up."

"Yes. I'm really really sorry."

"Do you think you can avoid this class of mistake going forward or is it just a fact about the universe that occasionally Mitros will callously use whoever's convenient to get what he wants?"

"I am sure it's not a fact about the universe."

"That is not as detailed an answer as I was hoping for."

"The thing that you are describing as callously using people to get what I want feels internally like having goals that are screamingly important and not enough understanding of the people around me to get which of them I can trust with something of screaming importance and trying to understand them well enough to answer that and realizing halfway through that I'm hurting people and still not seeing how to tell who will care about the thing of screaming importance. I think having a circle of competent people I trust might make the problem go away entirely. If it doesn't, curing death would do it because then nothing would be screamingly important. I am sure there are other avenues but they're not as straightforward as 'realize you are using people, stop'."

"I'm not sure you thought very hard about alternatives. You could have presented yourself as looking for, say, advisers, instead of dropping hints about wanting a wife, and only brought up that notion later on, more aboveboard and when you knew me better; you could have confessed at literally any point before kissing me and it would have been much less violently upsetting and I do not think I was making myself hard to know..."

"Okay, yes, I should have done that. I'm sorry. I'm really really sorry. I didn't realize that a kiss was kind of way past the 'explain' point until the minute I did it and then I knew right away I'd made a really awful mistake there.

Though looking for advisors adds the problem of getting, you know, happily attached ones or ones who wouldn't want to be Queen or ones who have more important priorities than advising a prince who's not in power and not going to be on initiatives he doesn't have a plan to pass."

"Would've got me fine, just as your actual implementation did, and it would avoid the failure mode 'mark decides you might be too much of a sociopath and considers elaborate plots to enthrone Nistar instead'. Which I did consider but decided against."

"Oooh, how were you going to pull that off?"

"...I didn't have a very detailed approach, I've barely met him and never met his girlfriend," she says, "it would probably have involved trying to find a more liberal priest or something, and at any rate that seems like a distraction from the topic."

"I apologize. 

I can at minimum avoid manipulating you by just telling you whenever I get to the 'I'm hurting people towards this goal but the goal still seems important and I'm stuck' stage where I tend to plunge ahead."

"That'd be nice."

"I promise to do that," he says earnestly.

"Good. Now... Queen consort is a soft-power position, and it gets less soft-powerful if the underlying relationship is fictitious, as well as less appealing for other reasons."