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So, if Edarial wasn't sure that his wife hated him before, he's really, really sure of it now. It's pretty usual that if they're in the same room, he feels nothing but silent, seething hostility from her. Usually, his reaction to this is a poker face followed by running. He doesn't like having someone hostile just - there at the dinner table, glaring at him with her hissing familiar.
Zevros doesn't hate him, Edarial's certain of it, but he's not helping. He's literally never seen his twin this angry before. This is coming from someone who has seen his twin be angry loads of times. At meals, he just - sits there. Stabbing his food and glaring at Edarial while he does it. He gets why, he knows that Zevros is furious with him for the whole 'cold political marriage' thing. It still hurts, though, to have his immediate family just be so openly hostile.
He gets more withdrawn. Meals get delivered to his room rather than him eating with Iobel and Zevros right there, being near-openly hostile. He stops sparring with Zevros nearly entirely, spends an unhealthy amount of time in either his office or his room, and Berathyme spends all her time coiled around his shoulders, offering what little comfort she can.
She's pretty terrible at advice, but at least he has someone that doesn't actively hate him nearby.
He throws himself into being a king, gets lots of things done, and is generally considered by the public to be good at it. A good king. It's sort of tainted by bitterness, now. But the country does not fall apart, it does not break down into civil war - he handles it. The education system gets a shove in the right direction, the canals get cleaned up, various unemployed people get jobs. He wonders what on earth he's done wrong when he's doing good in the world, but he supposes it doesn't matter.
He knew what he was getting himself into, when he made this choice. He knew that Zevros would be upset with him. Maybe to the point where their camaraderie will just never recover. He doesn't know. From the beginning, he knew that he'd be shackled to someone he doesn't love. Edarial hadn't been expecting the random hatred from his new wife, but he certainly wasn't expecting to be happy.
Just, well. He wasn't expecting to be so miserable, either.
It shows, the misery. Dark circles under his eyes, the withdrawn, blank expression, unkempt hair. He loses some weight due to skipping meals just to avoid his close family. Or, other times, he just forgets, burying himself in work so he doesn't have to think 'What did I do?' over and over again.
But he's a good king. So that's something.
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royal_obligation
royal_obligation
"I have them prioritized, but... Mm. I'm used to working on this sort of thing by myself, so..."
come_midnight
"I want to be effective; if I can't be effective working on the same thing you're doing because you have a solo workflow that works and shouldn't be perturbed, I'll do something else. I'm good at inventing spells and cheating at problems and aggregating a lot of anecdotal complaints into patterns. Deploy me where I'll be useful."
royal_obligation
"Okay," he agrees. "I do the same sort of thing with Zevros, but I need to get - used to actually talking to you."
royal_obligation
"Born a prince. Avoided my mother like the plague, for very obvious reasons. The king I didn't need to avoid - he didn't like either of us, for being bastards, so he did most of the avoiding. He at least threw some tutors and nursemaids in our general direction, so we weren't completely bereft of parental figures. None of them really - stick out to me, they got switched a lot on account of my mother, but it was better than nothing. When I was eight and between tutors I got bored and bound Berathyme, for permanent company - I'd had basically only Zevros - and because magic interested me."
come_midnight
"I was born out in South Fork, but my parents got divorced when I was very little and I grew up with my mother here in Emavan most of the time with visits out to my father now and then. He's a police officer and she's a schoolteacher, so I got to go to the school she teaches at for several years, even though it's mostly too pricey for the children of single parents. I bound Cricket when I was seven because I wanted to be a spellbinder and because I wanted to be able to pet him." She pets him illustratively. Cricket purrs.
royal_obligation
"Berathyme promised to keep me company. She didn't even bother learning any Marlese until Zevros started teaching her curse words."
come_midnight
"I taught Cricket the translation of his name - which I now mostly call him even in the private language; he likes the sound of it better - and enough basics that I could send him on little errands like asking Raney when dinner would be, and then a bit more when I opened the store and wanted to be able to leave it open when I stepped out without paying a human shopkeeper. And he has wheedled me into teaching him a little swearing, although not nearly as much as Zevros has managed to pass along recently."
royal_obligation
"My brother takes an absolute delight in teaching familiars swear words. Berathyme didn't even particularly care much, he just wanted to teach her and she didn't protest."
come_midnight
"Cricket's not even that vulgar when he's just muttering to me about his negative opinions, but obviously it would be hard for him to develop enough eloquence in Marlese to express the same judgmental dislike for virtually everyone but me."
royal_obligation
"Berathyme doesn't tend towards vulgarity either. I think it just amuses her to say things that are considered extremely rude to people she takes offense to."
royal_obligation
"It is," agrees Edarial. "I wish there were a spell to help with familiars and learning a language."
come_midnight
"I'm pretty sure translation magic, if it were even theoretically possible, would take years to chart and a superhuman to learn. Alas."
royal_obligation
"Not to mention a complete fluency in the language itself. So it would be confined to the number of languages the spellbinder speaks."
come_midnight
"It might be possible to do it for familiar languages in particular without. We do learn those in the first place by magic, so if there were a way to tap into that - I just don't know what it would be, and it'd be absurdly complicated, anyway."
royal_obligation
"True. I just don't know of a way to even begin to figure out how to tap into magic familiar languages. It's rather hard to do something with no starting point to work from."
come_midnight
"Yes. But in the most farfetched of theory, there could be translation spells that were not ninety percent dictionary."
royal_obligation
"Certainly. But the same can be said of lots of theoretically possible but in practice unworkable spells, though."
royal_pain
They reach Zevros, who is currently playing with a knife. Idly, not in the threatening manner he occasionally feels like employing.
"Hey!" he says, and the knife is put away. "How went the talk with the crazy?"
"Hey!" he says, and the knife is put away. "How went the talk with the crazy?"