"I love you, dear. I am - not sure you can get better at having preferences and feeling happier and safer by trying on someone's orders even if you don't want to? But I guess - you tried thinking about what you wanted and it made you scared so you stopped? And you could do the same thing here?"

"I tried having feelings. And then I stopped."

Sigh.

He turns around. 

He sees Zakiya.

"What are you doing here."

"I clean the floors, your majesty, and had not been dismissed when you arrived."

She really feels like she should say something. Ask him to leave her alone. Say that she's good at her job. Something. But she can't get the words from her brain to her mouth.

"Is she like this with you."

"She has had hard pregnancies, your majesty."

He says an incantation, reaches out and touches her, and a flash of something otherworldly darts across her face. "Lying to me is a crime." And now it is also impossible; that's a truth spell.

"I have never lied to you, your wife or any of the healers that have advised you on her care, your majesty. I want her to bear you many healthy children. I think she can do it.

But not if you're always scaring her."

 - he blinks. Looks back at Korva. "Am I scaring you?"

She has never been more terrified in all of her days in the palace. She'd thought she'd made herself too unafraid - was honestly planning to spend a lot of time reminding herself to be more afraid after this conversation, she doesn't like how she's conducted herself so far - but she's so, so, so terrified that she will take one wrong step and that at the end of it Zakiya will be dead. She has the words 'please don't hurt her' a moment from her lips, and has to spend a moment thinking of something else to put there.

"Yes," she whispers.

"Oh. 

I'm sorry."

She sits in her bed, trembling.

"Please don't hurt her," she says, very softly.

"Oh, love. You told me that - ages and ages ago, remember - you told me not to hurt your servants, that they were important to you - you've told me so little I can do for you - please don't be scared - 

- were you scared of me," he asks Zakiya. 

"No, your majesty."

"See? It's all right. It's all right."

She starts crying. Silently, just tears, no sound. She nods.

Apparently she has a preference. She wonders, idly, whether it'll occur to him that he can probably find more if he threatens enough things.

He looks helplessly around the room. 

"What do I do?"

"I am not afraid, your majesty, because I am yours, and if I am to join your court in Axis instead of here then so be it. But Korva loves - the man Abadar chose, not the god - and so she is afraid, because what she loves is here, and might not follow her. And Verita - wouldn't follow her. And - and the baby wouldn't be anywhere, your majesty, if we lose it now."

"Well I'm not going to kill Korva!"

"If we are having a conversation you do not need to stand there like a mannequin every time I fail to end my sentence with a specific prompt."

"I might have advice for you, your majesty, but I am not a healer or a priest or a cleric. Just a woman. But it is a woman's trouble, so maybe I could still think of something."

"If you have advice you should damn well give it."

"Korva is afraid all the time. To care for her baby she needs strength that she fears you would misinterpret as disobedience. So she tries to stay weak enough she cannot disobey you. But it will be bad for the baby."