"We said thirty gold, when we were considering it. I might go a little higher, but not more than fifty. And two or three years of agricultural indenture for anyone who can't pay, so possibly we should attempt to determine what that's usually worth. Not that prices for anything are behaving, right now. We were a little more divided on where in particular the money should go; you could have a system where it always goes to the woman who bore the child, or a system where it goes to whoever is actually raising the child, if the woman in question is not."

"That's outright encouragement to have a child by a rich man, not that plenty of such encouragement doesn't already exist, and not that it seems like a bad thing necessarily."

Marit had been assuming the fine was paid out to the Crown. He nods at the first part of the Countess de Seguer's remark.

"I wouldn't say we want to encourage rich men to have more children, but certainly we do for men who are intelligent, virtuous and talented, and these are things that often make men rich. We have more baronies today than we have able barons, and even in normal times every nobleman wishes to have enough sons to have a lord and a priest and a hero among them." Even after time has thinned the ranks. "If the hero and the priest are the children of a mistress instead of of the lord's wife his wife may be disappointed, but the realm will not."

"It seems to me that three or four sons are not that difficult to have within a marriage, and of course if there are fewer than that it may be that some of the daughters are suited for rulership, or the priesthood, or even adventuring. Conflict among the ruling family is bad for a realm, and more common between half-brothers than full-. Moreso, I think, when one is nominally illegitimate, but has a couple of circles or a great deal of martial skill on their legitimate half-siblings."

"It's a recipe for extremely messy claims and extremely messy claims are a recipe for civil war. The old fashion - before my time - was to effectively oblige bastard sons to take vows but Iomedae's not going to cooperate with that, even if Aroden would."

Did the Duchess just say that Cheliax used to require bastards to take religious vows? Marit is not entirely confident he understood her correctly but he is not entirely managing to keep an expression of faint horror off his face.

Yes, Iomedaens are very Iomedaen. She's most of the way to switching the internal lever that finds it exasperating of them towards fondness. Because it is part of what she owes her husband, to try to see the beauty he sees in the things that are important to him. Or if you'd rather, because otherwise she's going to spend the next decades in a state of simmering irritation and she'd prefer not to.

'Iomedaens are incredibly predictable' is in fact not a weakness and is a deep and hard-won strength. It should not be that hard to appreciate.

"The land passes to the eldest son," Xavier says, seemingly mildly surprised. "His half-brothers have no claim unless the legitimate line is extinct, in spite of any martial skill they may have. Molthune has never been troubled by militant usurping bastards."

Well, Archduke, 'make the legitimate line extinct' isn't that hard, is it. She is not going to say that.

Very, very extinct? That's hard.

"I worry that three or four is not reliably enough to produce a ruler, let alone extras, in dangerous territory. My second wife had three, and none of those are alive now. The only conflict I've had was her murdering the only son of my first wife, who died of a seizure following childbirth. I would certainly have loved to avoid that, but I still don't see that not having mistresses prevents it, or that the situation would have been improved by having no surviving sons at all. But I've seen very few noble households without any conflict between siblings, and I may be missing something."

"Does Molthune's law and custom encourage your approach, Xavier? It does seem... less than optimal with a half-infernal culture where skullduggery is practically required by custom, if often now forbidden by law as it ought. Menador had a reputation for avoiding it, and yet..."

"I suppose so," he says, "any nobleman who didn't keep a mistress was certainly considered, ah, somewhat odd -"

"Any titled nobleman," says someone somewhat odd.

"Certainly. But any man with a gentleman's education could seek to become an officer, regardless of birth, and any man of duty or ambition would."

" - it is a side note from the main point, but I wonder if birth rates were lower in Infernal Cheliax than in other places and times. The conventional wisdom long ago was that a woman trying to conceive should get a channel every day; my mother bore ten children and my grandmother fourteen, and this was the diligent performance of their duty but not the deeply unusual performance of it."

"Fourteen? I'd rather my husband have a mistress."

"He also had a mistress."

Eulàlia would poison the fuck out of that husband. She should definitely not say that.

"...I don't know anyone who got that high, at least with children who made it to their first birthday, but I'm not sure I know anyone who tried, past seven or eight. Might be another casualty of duty?"

Strong argument against duty, all told.

"My mother had eight in Taldor, counting the one who was born dead, but only three sons. I've heard it said that children conceived under the new moon are more likely to be boys, but I don't know if there's any truth to it."

"In my grandmother's day if a Minor Prophecy said the baby'd be born dead they'd cut it out while it was still alive. ...if you were the Duchess of Chelam. I assume most babies born dead still were."

"I will count mine for the sake of information, but do please remember where I come from. Let's see. First mistress had six, but we were only together ten years. Second was an orc, and not very relevant to the question. First wife had one, because she died in the process. Second wife had twelve, but almost all girls. One other woman who only bore one. Current mistress bore seven, but she is a wizard, and didn't want more. And my current wife has borne eleven."