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."

"It does seem like which orders are illegal in a marriage would be substantially different than those which are illegal in an army, but I do not know what precedents exist there... It may be a concept that needs developing, especially in a Chelish context."

"I was thinking about that. I feel like in the Cheliax of my day, and in other places, it mostly works to assume that people are in good faith trying to build something together, and surrounded by family and friends who'll intervene if one of them is doing something horrendous, and among Chelish people I have confidence in none of that. Someone should probably do the work. I know everyone associated with the Church has a hundred higher priorities.

...one advantage that we will have is that this will be very high profile, so we can use it to set useful precedents about the vows and get lots of attention and publicity for associated publications for the Chelish people about marriage and how and why to do it. If we want to establish a rule here we absolutely can. But that will be a lot of work, and you're very busy."

"I think we should plan for a wedding some time after the convention has ended, unless it drags on for over a year - Forms of the Monarchy is working on a constitution though, so it is my hope that we'll be done before winter - so I hope there will be time to determine what precedents we wish to set."

"That sounds good to me. Another of my questions was - among my beliefs about marriage is that a woman should not contradict her husband publicly, nor take a stance on important matters where she doesn't know his, which makes Republican speechgiving difficult. The easiest solution is probably to marry after we have done enough Republican speechgiving to last both our lives."

"That seems like an adequate solution, assuming that you'll be content after the Convention; if you wish to take your seat in the senate, whatever form it has, then that might be more of a concern."

"Being your wife is an important demanding political job. It will be my first priority as a political job. I do not think it would make sense for me to pursue a seat in the senate on top of it, at least not now, presuming you'll hold one."

"Well you might be entitled to one automatically, as a duchess in your own right, so no pursuit would be required, only claiming it and exercising it. But - I agree that it would not make sense for us to have separate political careers that might be at cross-purposes."

"I am comfortable with spending my career in your service though if you want that to be 'starting today' it will be difficult in that I've made various commitments in exchange for small favors or to deescalate small arguments over the convention so far and would like you to either inherit those debts or give me time to clear them up."

"No, far more reasonable to start when the convention is over and we're actually married."

"Next on things I expect we agree on but want to clarify explicitly; women should before marriage be chaste, which does not just mean avoiding risking pregnancy but avoiding any kind of intimacy with men. No one considering how women can exercise virtue was considering expectations for petitioners in Axis at all because they're not the same kind of thing." If she just slips that in very blandly maybe he will not feel like it needs detailed contemplation which cannot possibly go well. "Women should after marriage exercise the same care, or more of it if their husband is an important man and the slightest appearance of impropriety important to avoid. Men are in principle held to a symmetrical standard, but they absolutely are not, except maybe in Lastwall they actually are. It is not actually emotionally important to me that you don't have mistresses but it seems spectacularly unlikely somehow."

"In Lastwall as in all places many men have mistresses, or use prostitutes, though that is shameful and dishonorable. I won't have any mistresses." He's quite confident on that point.

Seems like a point one can have justified confidence in if fifty years old and a lifelong celibate. "It is most important for children to be with their mother, when they're young, and no wealth substitutes for her entirely, though we will be doing as much hiring for help as we possibly can, given everything else we are trying to do. When they are older they of course benefit from the involvement and presence of both their parents but their father makes decisions about their education and their marriages though I'll want those where it's relevant to Chelam's heir. If a marriage has fallen apart badly between two nobles the boys younger than five and the girls younger than nine live with their mother and the older ones with their father."

"This seems reasonable though we may wish to make special provisions for some older children to live with you if things fall apart, as it will be hard to cultivate an heir to Chelam from Lladó."

"That makes sense and we can put something appropriate to that situation in the contract language. People should endeavor very seriously not to get divorced, but sometimes do, usually for egregious misconduct by one party. Adultery qualifies for women but not for men. You may ask me under a truth spell but it's rude to do it often and if you have queries about my conduct before marriage you are supposed to ask those before marrying me. Serious criminal conduct qualifies. Neglect qualifies, assuming you've tried to fix it; disobedience qualifies; there's not much else that does, and one really ought to try quite diligently to just solve the problem if there is any prospect it can be solved." She is perhaps slightly overstating the norms of Arodenite Cheliax in the direction she'd prefer them.

He nods. Divorce should not be routine but those are a reasonable list of circumstances where it might be justified. "I will want to check Lastwall's code in case they allow more grounds for divorce that you haven't listed and haven't yet occurred to me might be licit ones, but - I agree in broad strokes that divorce is to be avoided, but not absolutely in cases of serious misconduct."

"In general men should provide for their wives. In marriages where both people hold titles this is approximately irrelevant, unless something goes very wrong somehow, in which case I'd want the resources to hire a substantial staff and not freeze in wintertime but not much else. I don't have extravagant tastes - no, that's not true, I do have extravagant tastes for the Material, but I came back expecting to mostly do without for a century and have not found it more wearing than I expected.

I am in fifty five thousand Absalom pounds of debt right now, because I returned without resources besides the title and with the duchy in terrible shape. I expect to repay it over twenty years without extraordinary difficulty. I got - not Lastwall's terms on the loan, but quite good ones. If we can get better terms we should but I do not expect you to take it over. I did promise I would repay it even if Cheliax does something ill-conceived like a debt holiday." 

He nods, again.

"Men defend their wives' honor. I know the Reclamation bans dueling. I'm ...a little upset by that, honestly, I think mostly because it is one of the parts of my life where it has in the past been most salient that I am without a husband, and because you'd be so outrageously good at it, but - I understand the reasons."

"Yes. Is there some alternate arrangement, which would allow me to defend your honor to your satisfaction...?"

"Not that I'm aware of. I have not had time to look into whether any other cultures that forbid dueling and enforce their rule about that just...have far more bitter long-standing disputes, which is what I would expect, or if they build some other deescalatory pathway instead. If it's the latter it would be good to introduce it here, because here people clearly don't have that other pathway and so are just - being worse to each other, as far as I can tell. But it's not been particularly high among my priorities."

"Well, hopefully we can find something; if we can't, perhaps it will be permissible for you to have a dueling champion who is not your husband. I don't know how Chelish dueling culture is going to develop, with the nobility being so mixed..."

"I really have no idea. Hopefully we will adopt the best of the customs of every place that is joined here but that seems a little optimistic. - anyway when I say that I am nervous of having ten children, or that I am upset that this custom cannot be satisfied, I am not particularly asking that you find some solution. It is fine if the solution is that I am nervous or upset. I mention things in case there's a cheap solution but that doesn't mean that if there isn't we need to find expensive ones."

"Understood. Do you have any more things that seem like they could be important culture gaps?"

"I don't think so, though it can be hard to tell for sure in advance - I keep being unpleasantly surprised by my culture gaps with modern Cheliax. But I cannot think of anything else that was very central to my conception of marriage, growing up. Is there anything missing from my account that is part of yours?"

"I think we might have slightly different assumptions about the economics of a normal household, but as we're separately landed and titled I think those assumptions aren't very applicable. I will defend your person and property, to the extent that I can, and not just your honor - we will act as a political unit, and also typically as a social unit except insofar as distance forbids, or insofar as there are social gatherings exclusive for men or for women -"

"Yes, that's all correct - and I would ordinarily become part of your family and with obligations to your parents but I think that's also not relevant under these circumstances -"

"No, it's not."

Maybe I'll meet them someday, she'd been planning to say, but something in his expression prevents her from saying it.

Not all of her siblings made Axis. 

"Are there - marriages you have witnessed that struck you as particularly desirable, as doing something especially valuable -"

"I - have seen a number of marriages fall short of that, in one way or another.  I think the ideal would be - one where we have time for each other, or make time for each other, even though we are both very busy people. One where we trust each other, like the trust that people in Heaven and Axis have amongst themselves, but more - thorough, and complete. A complementary marriage, where I provide for you with my strengths and you shore up my weaknesses. A loving one, even in thirty years when our children are grown - if I'm still here, then."

"Well. That sounds very challenging but - less challenging than a number of things I know you to have done already. And very nice, if we could pull it off. Let's try."