Oh. She had not been expecting - no, that's not quite right. She had been giving herself good odds of achieving this eventually. In months. Not yet. She is delighted and surprised (and she does not find surprise pleasant at all) and suddenly quite frightened.

"I - I think that I probably want to accept," she says, because not answering immediately in this specific case would be much worse than giving a messy sort of answer that anyway he is required to be all right with, he told her to dispense with being polite. "Almost certainly, really, but if you don't mind if I take a moment -" Why is she frightened. She intended this and wanted this and - it is actually a more romantic proposal than she would have imagined, if she had imagined that Alexeara had decided he wanted to marry her. He really combines being a maximally romantic man in all on-paper qualities with being a maximally tired and distant one in all actual interactions. He does not seem tired right now. He seems very earnest. And he mentioned several specific achievements she is sincerely quite proud of! That's the kind of thing you can tell your children about and they'll be impressed, that you asked him to fight a lich and he was impressed you organized the lich-hunt...

Right. Logistics. This is a logistics conversation. "It is important to me to rule Chelam in my own right, and to leave it to one of our children presuming any of them are capable."

He nods. "Chelam for the eldest or most capable, Lladó for the next. Presumably."

Actually quite probably Molthune for the most capable but she does not really want to derail this conversation with that conversation. What if he wants fourteen children - no, she'd still marry him then. What if he wants her to quit the convention - no, she'd still marry him then. What if it bothers him that she has had an entire life in Axis - no, she can really be fairly confident that's a selling point. What if he is too busy saving the world - Carlota. Stop.

  "In that case I have lots of - topics of discussion - but none which are going to be dispositive. I - yes. I would be honored to marry you."

"Oh! Good." He unbuckles his sword and offers it to her. "I don't mean any offense, just -"

She is bewilderedly searching through her memories for Molthuni marriage traditions and coming up empty. Nowhere would possibly have 'sparring' as a marriage tradition. She showed potential as a wizard and is a girl and was never taught to wield a sword. "You have not offered any offense but possibly only because I do not understand what you are offering or why."

"- Right. It's the Lastwall tradtion that the woman keeps the man's sword for the engagement period. But - well the legal custody and logistical situations would be dreadful if I loaned you Heart's Edge so - this is my backup sword… I suppose you should also not rely on the implicit promise that I won't do anything dangerous until we're married."

She blinks. Several times. She is pretty sure somehow that this is sufficiently absurd and impossible that she is not, in fact, nervous any more; one is nervous on finding oneself in a good spot for an ambush on an unfamiliar trail but not really on finding oneself inexplicably in Elysium. She takes the sword. "Thank you. I have no desire for you to be without Heart's Edge nor to have to figure out whether it is safe in the mansion without you here with it…nor, really, for you to not do anything dangerous until we're married. I - most of the discussion topics, though, were related to the fact that we are in fact of two different cultures, and that it seems important to notice where we mean different things by marriage, if we do. But it's not going to be dispositive because - I trust you."

"I endeavor to be trustworthy in this as in all things. Thank you."

"I am going to go through the discussion topics, in brief, in the hope we'll notice if any are worth lingering on.

I have been betrothed twice before. I did not meet either of my intended husbands." Which is only worth mentioning because it's a suitably indirect way of assuring him she didn't sleep with them; if she had met them she'd pick a less indirect way to say it. "This was during the civil war, and it wasn't about - it was about politics, but not my ability to do them. The first man I was supposed to marry, the Duke of Anfarita at the time, had been - I don't know how much of all this survived in the histories - he'd been thrown bodily into some plane of torment, somehow, early in the war, and emerged hardly a man at all and wholly obsessed with destroying the Thrunes. He kept murdering people, for having Hell in their hearts. I was greatly afraid of him. I was greatly afraid to promise to obey him, and told myself it probably didn't matter, because probably no one would want to risk my doing anything. Someone assassinated him, so it didn't happen, and I am sure Hell celebrated, but -"

"But a man can be an enemy to Hell and still a bad husband. A man can be a great enemy to Hell and still an evil man, for that matter - It's not surprising if you felt relieved."

"I felt relieved, and when there were chances later to pick up pieces of that alliance I did not take them, and - I spent a while dwelling on all this, but it was decades ago, and eventually it had gone a solid year without producing the slightest new productive insight, and so I let it go. But when I came back the thing that I was most nervous of was marriage.

They don't have it in Axis, right - or, they have lots of people falling in love and making customized promises to people they love, usually time-bounded as a pragmatic measure because you wouldn't want to plan on not changing, but - it has always seemed to me that the most essential characteristic of marriage is that we will have children, and that - my mother had ten, and spent about half her time incapacitated with it."

Ten is rather a lot of children. His parents did not have ten.

"How many would you prefer?"

"No, no, I think ten's a good idea, especially with two lands that will need heirs. It is not a difficulty I think it makes sense to solve by trying to make it less of one. She was a good mother, and I think I can be a good mother to ten children….I guess you are a very busy man and your time competes with many other things and perhaps you don't want ten."

"I have no objections to ten, for my sake, though I had fewer siblings than that and ten seems unusually large, to me, but it sounded like you were - worried about that? Worried about being laid low by it? I think how incapacitating it is varies, though obviously there are some things it doesn't make sense to do when you are with child - I would not recommend the archmage Naima's example -"

"It is a - cost I have been anticipating paying, but which I think is the right thing to do, for Chelam and Lladó and the country as a whole. And for the children. If there's two that's an enormous amount of pressure on them. If there's ten then the ones who feel a heritable calling to go be celibate paladins can."

"Oh, two would be too few, of course, and - you're right, I think, that ten is right for two lands. Though I've never particularly hoped that my sons would be paladins - perhaps mostly because I have spent most of my life not hoping for sons."

"Mmhmm. I was raised for this duty, setting some details aside. You have spent a very long time wholly given to a different one. I imagine it's - strange."

"Yes, I - knew I should get married now, but had not really adjusted to it. The timing of this proposal was driven in part by my difficulties finding a wife being cited in the Church's failure analysis for the third."

"I would be interested in reading that, at some point. I actually used to write those….not for important things. I worked at a museum and we'd do them for damage to artifacts we had in storage."

"I will get you a copy of the public version once that's complete."

"I tried to look up what the Iomedaen teachings on marriage were these days, in case they are different than the ones I was raised with, but perhaps even if I'd succeeded at that it wouldn't actually give me - what you are working from in your own expectations about marriage - because that wasn't your course."

"Yes. I know what features of the situation I'd consider for a young man under my command seeking my permission, but - that's really a different question."

"Right. Well in that case I am going to list a great many things I was taught about marriage which I mostly cannot imagine we disagree on but where I would really want to discover it promptly if we did. A woman should obey her husband; a man should exercise this authority gently; if they are both of them aspiring to have the other on the whole more advantaged by the marriage it generally works out. ...no one has put anywhere near as much thought into the theory of obedience in marriage as into paladin oaths and I have not been able to find anybody contemplating the possibility of illegal orders in marriages but this is a purely academic concern of mine because you can't issue any such even if it's deeply unclear what I'd be supposed to do about them."

"Complain to my superior, of course!"

"Oh, I complain to Her all the time. Not about you. ....mostly not about you."