Emotions flash across his expressive face. Joy, fear, longing; she reads them so deftly, at this point, that she imagines she knows him better than he knows himself.

He gets the set of his jaw that means “confidence in the face of obstacles.”

“Oh, I’m so glad! We can go to my father, I can talk him around on you, and then we can be married before the baby comes.”

She saw this coming. She understands him, but cannot use that knowledge to control him; cannot stop him from running off a cliff. She wishes she had his gift, the ability to say hurtful things to people in ways where they like him better afterwards. But she doesn’t, and she has to stay true to herself.

“Felip. I don’t want to marry you.”

It cuts him deeply, more deeply than any other wound she’s seen on his face. Even counting the time it was nearly split in two by a bugbear; he had been holding on to something then, trying to reassure her that it would be okay, that she would manage to heal him before he died in her arms. There’s nothing for him to hold on to, this time.

His face closes. It is, in many ways, worse.

He is politely cold, after that. They both assume, of course, that she will keep the child, and that it will no longer be safe for her to venture into the wilds. Their last trip together is to the River Kingdoms, to the Gray Falls Lodge, where she can set up a temple for the year she'll be stationary. Felip, once the heart of the party, is withdrawn with them as well, and they decide to go their separate ways, splitting the haul from their adventures and sorting into new parties, or retiring. Marie decides to stay until the child is born, and then return to Isarn; Victor follows Felip, and Anastasia joins a different group of pathfinders.

Felip leaves his whole share with her, for the upkeep of the child. They knew he was noble-born, when they formed their party; to see him causally give up the money they all put their lives on the line for stings. The motivation behind it feels impure, somehow; this child is the grandchild of a duke, and so should be wealthy. He insists that she call on him if she needs more money.

Money, of course, is not what she needs. But she agrees anyway. They decide--in that fraught way, where both parties know they hold a dagger to each other's throats--that it would be best for them to go their separate ways.

He has to use a Sending to find her, seven years later. She tries not to weep at the expense of it.

Called to Taldor; father dying,

must marry. How are you,

and the child? All is

well with me, and I

hope so too with you.

She was not trained in the twenty-five word style, and so simply hopes for the best when composing her reply.

All is well. John is healthy; he looks like you. My answer has not changed. I hope you find what you are looking for in

And then she is merely thinking in her head.

That chapter of his life is closed; he regrets trying to reopen it. He turns his thoughts to Taldor, and to who his father has picked out for him to meet, and who he could charm (with his personality--he would recoil in horror at the thought of using his magic for that) and how he could sift through the options to find someone who is what he needs.

She never asked about the gift; he thinks he could have explained it if she had. It’s commitment to connection; it’s facing challenges together. It’s saying things, and listening to things, in a way where the other person can be themselves. It is being on the same team.

It was so easy to see your chains from the outside; how being your wife would be a cage. She is a Desnan; she is a creature of the sky and he is a creature of the land; he is forever beholden to the past and she is exploring into the future. Leave Cheliax behind, she wanted to say to him, wanted to say to him for years, and never found a way to do it that wouldn’t end with him wounded and rootless.

He dreams of being bound to Hell, and she dreams of freedom. How could they be together, for anything but a short time?

You could’ve said “I want you, not your father; I want our family, not your bloodline.” I would’ve thought about it; I would have wrestled with it; you might have won. I always viewed my responsibilities as to people as well as ideals. And perhaps you could have won me over to your ideals; it always hurt that you never tried, that our discussions on philosophy always ended with you having a knowing smile and deflection away from the heart of the issue.

I could have handled us looking into the dark together. We could have seen the stars, if we had tried.

I could've said those things. She hadn't, actually, thought of them, and they might have worked.

But would she have wanted them to work? She helped him arrange the boon, that he would dream of Cheliax every night, so that he would know the landscape of his ancestral home as if he had grown up there. She's not sure the dreams did all that much more than help him study the maps he already had, and so would be of limited tactical advantage. Their main effect seemed to be strengthening his resolve. He had to be strong enough, to rescue Cheliax; he and his brothers threw themselves into danger instead of living lives of luxury because they knew how much their people were suffering.

Did she want to break that? Could she? The first night that he wrestled with the question, and dreamed of innocent Cheliaxians being tortured by their unworthy duke, he would know what he had to do, and hate himself for having a moment of weakness. The stars are freedom, but they are also destiny, and she knew better to try to turn him from his.

And she could not join him; could not stomach what it would be to be a duchess in Cheliax, if they succeeded, and to sacrifice her children for an ancestral grudge, if they failed. John would be free, and she could not choose differently for him.

He asks her how much she wants to know about his past. He can't promise that she's the first woman he's slept with, but can promise that she'll be the last (until one of them dies).

She almost laughs, before stopping herself. Of course he'll have slept with someone before--she hasn't, of course, but things are different for men and women--but it beggars belief that he would give up all the other women in the world, for her.

But the sorcerer is so earnest that it is challenging to doubt him. Most honest faces come attached to liars, and it is wise to distrust them, but it is his heart that is convincing, not his tongue; he says things with his whole body, and she feels her whole body believing him. None of the other suitors have offered her anything that she might want, rather than something that their combined dynasty might want.

She's a curious sort; secrets are power, and it is wise, on embarking on a marriage, to establish what power you can.

His childhood is pleasant enough; his mother is a cleric, well-liked wherever they go, and he learns to be bold and daring, any scrape he manages to pick up healed as soon as he runs home.

Other children have two parents; she does not speak of his father, and turns his questions around when asked. "Who do you wish your father was?" He creates a dozen fictional fathers, a diligent smith, a valiant warrior, a cleric traveling through another part of the world. He imagines all the people he could be; once he is old enough, he constructs a new identity, as well as he can, for each town and village that they go through.

When he hits puberty there is a glimmer--of something, he can't quite feel into it--a flash of something magical that he cannot do again, and is later not sure whether or not he dreamed it. His mother gets him a book on math, and a book on comparative religion, but he does not enjoy the math and does not come to the attention of any of the gods.

He approaches adulthood and it is like seeing the whole horizon at once, not sure which direction to go. They don't stay in any one place long enough for him to become an apprentice, and besides he would rather chat with a thousand people on a thousand different topics rather than go deep in any one. Perhaps he should be a merchant? But the merchants that he knows are all merchants of something, cheese or cloth or grain or animals, and for now he is just a traveler, helping his mother and exploring the world.

He is seventeen when Galt first takes a bite out of its neighbors, intervening in Sevenarches. His mother clucks her tongue disapprovingly, and looks further north, but he wants to be part of something bigger than himself, and Galt is the story of their era. They travel to Isarn, she turns him over to his aunt Marie, who looks at him with a wistful remembrance he does not know how to interpret.

Andronika gives him a surprisingly large amount of money, and then vanishes out of his life, besides the occasional dream or letter. He modifies his name to be more Galtan, buys a position at the military academy and--washes out, disappointingly, too unused to the discipline and order.

It takes him a year to adjust, but his Aunt Marie helps, and he parlays his knowledge of the riverlands into a network of connections. Cyprian does not want him leading men and winning glory for Galt, but Isarn wants him guiding the flow of people and goods back and forth from Isarn to the outlying regions. His main success is helping to broker an agreement between one of the river kings and Galt, where a plebiscite sees them brought under the umbrella without any shots fired, but he shares that glory with twenty other merchants and diplomats.

He makes a modest living for himself, and argues politics with his neighbors, and grows fond of the city life. He cannot convince his mother to come to his wedding--she has grown to hate Isarn, as he has come to love it--but she sends him gifts nevertheless, and her love.

He cheers on the war in Razmiran, but it is distant, to him; shifting patterns of demand and modified lines of supply. He half-heartedly follows the news out of Cheliax, cheering on the end of slavery, and booing the continuation of the nobility, and never once dreaming of setting foot there, or viewing it as anything but a distant source of entertainment.