"Have you found anything soothing?"

"Your grace." She stands. They're in private and her mother has in fact never asked her to stand on ceremony but it's not the sort of thing one can afford to get careless about when one is about to get married. " - I was not looking for comfort. I will have that in paradise."

Her mother winces. 

She wishes she'd stop doing that. 

"I wanted to talk to you about - what to expect. Which - isn't mostly a matter of what the theology books say, right. In peacetime perhaps we'd have tried to find you the kind of young man who reads them."

Carlota doesn't think it is particularly important to her that her husband reads theology. He would ideally be pious and wise but it seems very easy, if you are pious and wise, to apply your piety and wisdom and notice that reading theology books is not the best use of time and therefore stop doing it. 

"This would be a good match even in peacetime," she says instead, neutrally. "I remember you discussed him for Halia, when we were small." Admittedly that was before His Grace Demetri, Duke of Crownbay, credible claimant to the throne, got trapped for five years in some horrendous Outer Plane and came back wrong, violent and vicious and merciless and lawless. But still. On paper it's an excellent match. One with a chance of making her Queen, though she has very mixed feelings about it because it'd involve the King being a man who is, as mentioned, violent and vicious and merciless and lawless -

- but whether or not he should be King it does not serve Chelam to be at war with him, and the marriage buys an important alliance. If that is all it buys it will be a great deal more good than Carlota could have expected her life to buy, and if he does become King she will just have to be a good influence.

"Right. Firstly - if a husband is frequently away at war it does not do for him to come home to a tide of troubles there too. Of course there are matters that will require his review, but it is very unwise, to try when he comes home to get him to look at them. Home is a man's respite from war; it ought to be a place of happiness for him, and comfort, and love and acceptance. A marriage can grow very bad for both parties if they start seeing it as an obligation to resentfully show up to. You want him to be happy to see you, and so you have to be happy to see him, and set aside things that need to happen so that home can be restful for him. Especially in wartime."

"Of course."

"A husband who is frequently away at war might also struggle with - gentleness and patience. A lot of husbands struggle with that, really, but I think the war makes it worse, as does the tragic - surrounding situation. You might find marital relations painful, and frightening, and it is again your duty to make your home and your marital bed a place of happiness and not a place of cares for him. If you cry or complain you are - making him feel that if he exercises his marital rights his wife will silently accuse him of wrongdoing. - it gets less painful after you've borne the first child."

There are probably less reassuring strings of sentences but she isn't actually generating any. 


Is it going to be terrible because he's demon-touched or is it going to be terrible because it's just always like that, she wants to ask, but can't think to - "was it so for you?"

"Your father and I did not actually succeed at consummating our marriage on our wedding night, because I was in pain and he felt terribly. I would really ordinarily advise you not try on your wedding night, that you wait until you know him a bit better and his touch is not upsetting, but - I do not think I would be doing you any service by giving you any advice that you'd need your husband's blessing to follow and that might surprise him, or offend him, or start your marriage off on a bad foot. Many couples do fine on their wedding night. I would have been fine if I hadn't been surprised. I was worried that it wasn't supposed to hurt and that I was doing something wrong."

Ah. All right. If this is a problem that her parents who evidently adore and respect and admire each other had then she is much less troubled by it. Clearly it is not much of a barrier to happiness. "I think I understand."

"You have every right to expect him to treat you as a lady and his wife, and need not oblige him in anything obscene or inappropriate for a Duchess. Sometimes in life it is wiser not to pick battles that you have every right to pick, but - I think it is still worth knowing that you had every right to pick them, and are strategically forgoing them."

"And it will be obvious which things are - obscene or inappropriate, and which are - the normal marital act which is painful enough a person might get confused about whether they're doing it wrong?" She did not mean that to come out that snappish. 

"If he is touching you for your pleasure, that is not obscene, and is recommended; it is very good for a marriage, if a woman is eager for her husband's company. If he wants you to handle it a little, to warm himself up, that is perfectly all right.  If he moves you around while figuring out how to take you comfortably, that is not obscene, and you can tell him if there is some position that you enjoy especially, and he should be glad to know it. But he shouldn't be putting it anywhere else, as he might with a whore, and he shouldn't be involving any other people, and he shouldn't - it is ordinary to be sore as after long riding, but you shouldn't be injured. - there is some bleeding for some women the first time."

...she will write that down and probably it will make more sense when she has firsthand experience. 

"And while you are with child he should be especially gentle and if he forgets himself and isn't, you should come home, anyone who knows the situation will not judge you for it and you might lose the baby otherwise."

"How many years did it take for you to be happy in marriage?"

"Three or four, I think. I loved your father sooner than that, but I didn't know how to be a good wife and he didn't know how to be a good husband, and then I had the misfortune to find pregnancy very difficult. But over time you come to understand a man, and -" 

"- I don't know if you will ever be happy in this world, Carlota. I am afraid that you will not. I do not wish to prejudice you against your husband, but I have told you what I know of him because I do not wish for you to be unhappy and imagine that it was your fault, that you should have been able to do this and weren't. Maybe he is better than the tales suggest. Maybe he is as terrible but not towards his family. I don't know. But I cannot tell you in three years you'll be through the worst of it. It may be very difficult forever. But it will be full of choices of great importance regardless. If it is hard there will be the temptation to let misery turn you to cruelty yourself, and you must not do that. There will be the temptation to let other people suffer to make your own life easier. If it is hard one of the ways that it will be hard is that it will test your goodness. And I can forgive myself, Carlota, for doing this to you, if we meet some day in Heaven and can mourn together that it came to this. But not if it turns you from your course. I could not bear that."

"I won't allow that."

"Come here."

Then she'll hop up onto her mother's lap for a hug, like a little girl. 

"I love you so much."