"Oh, yes, definitely, there are lots of things like that! You just never ask about them!"

"...This would go faster," though he doubts Clepati has any interest in that, "if it was not a guessing game."

"Well, for example, say that you said to me 'Nefreti, can you please fix Jan Zima's marriage? I'll provide a Miracle diamond for it.' I would be happy to help, of course, and this would definitely lead to the collapse of the Asmodean regime, wouldn't it? But you never ask me for that."

"...I was not aware that his marriage needed fixing, nor that it would take a miracle, nor that that would in any significant way impact Cheliax."

"Yes, you're very ignorant, it's your second biggest problem. - your biggest problem is Asmodeus."

"Yes, thank you, I knew that one. Do you plan to elaborate on either of the latter two points?"

"I find it very annoying to keep track of what order things happen in. There are hardly any times you fix Jan Zima's marriage and don't conquer Cheliax. I'm not even sure how you'd screw up badly enough to not conquer Cheliax, at that point."

Jan Zima's marriage does not need fixing. This is not because it is not broken. Lots of things are broken in this world, and marriages have the nearly unique property that you can, in principle, fix them in the next one, and if as a consequence of this fact about marriage they break more often, and often by the time their participants reach the next world there isn't anything left to fix - 

- well, that sounds like a not very important problem, in the grand scheme of things. 

Jan Zima does not beat his wife. He would never dream of betraying her, though she spent five or so years in there wishing he would, because then everyone would agree that she had been horrendously wronged and humiliated, which would be quite different than having merely failed in some complicated confusing way that involved no wrongdoing, and for those five years her greatest and most passionate yearning, in the world, was for things to be quite different, in any way, even a terrible one.

Jan Zima cannot afford to keep his wife in the style to which she is accustomed, but she knew that the moment he gave his name, at the officer's ball where they met in Vellumis, and she didn't care then, and she doesn't think she cares now, either, except that the house would be less empty if she could afford to staff it.

Jan Zima is not a jealous man (she wishes he was, though she is possessed with common sense and good character and would never stoop to trying to provoke him to it), and he does not drink, or gamble, or raise his voice. Indeed he never argues with her at all; if she is dissatisfied, he apologizes, and then he comes home less often so as to not encounter the situation in which he brought dissatisfaction. By the time she realized that was the pattern they were too far into it, and now she is always satisfied when he comes home, but he almost never does. His work is very important, and keeps him very busy, and if he comes home to more work he will diligently and grimly do it, and if he comes home to no work at all he will be relieved that he is not needed. 

But for all of this, Iolanda Zima has not wished in several months for things to be quite different in any way even a terrible one; she has not kept track, even, of when he comes home or whether he remembers to kiss her on the forehead as he goes directly to his study, or whether he pats her fondly or grunts at her if she encroaches on his side of their shared bed. And this is because Iolanda Zima has been granted, by some merciful power of the universe which should be making more effective use of its powers of mercy, a fourth child. 

They have three, all conceived in the space of five years when their marriage was new, and the youngest is twelve now, and Ioana is thirty-eight, and - she'd always wanted a great deal more than three, you know, wanted to hear someone say wonderingly "I don't know how you do it" as she sat surrounded by a proper flock, wanted a second son with which to privately console herself when the oldest one went off to be a knight of Lastwall like his father -

And now there will be four. Four is - enough. It will be many years before the house is empty and by then she will be old and it will be respectable for her to live with whichever friend she likes. No one wonders what is wrong with a woman of sixty whose husband doesn't want her because it's very obvious.

He looked bewildered, when she told him, like he'd forgotten that women could do that. If anything could have spoiled her happiness, it would've been that. But it didn't.

It is very rare, these days, for Jan to come home while the sun is still up, and altogether unheard of before the midday bell. So it comes as quite a surprise when he returns barely an hour after riding off in the morning.

"Iolanda," he says brusquely, interrupting her needlework, "Pack a trunk, we're leaving the city."

- she has several dozen questions, starting with "why" and proceeding through "for how long" and "with how much of the staff" and "to where" and "you do remember that I'm pregnant?" and "when" and "why" - if there were armies of zombies marching on the city then he would send someone to evacuate her but he would, himself, be staying - 

- no complaining - 

- some of those are perfectly reasonable questions, though -

"For Vellumis? For how long? With how much of the staff?"

"Out of the country, with just the two of us. I cannot say how long."

"Just the two of - have you told the girls? I should ask my mother to come up, to stay with them - when are we leaving?"

"Arrangements have been made. We're leaving once you've packed... and written your mother." he concedes.

This seems frankly unreasonable. It will take a letter several days to reach her mother and her mother travels very slowly.

No complaining. 

Is "well, I'd like to say goodbye to them" complaining - yes, it is, because he already conceded she could write her mother and she'd be asking for something further on top of that. 


A hot climate or a cold climate - no, she doesn't need to ask that one because the baby's a very big one and she only fits into two of her dresses anyway. 

"As you wish," she says, and it still comes out complaining somehow but in her defense this really seems very unreasonable, and she goes upstairs to pack and write the letter, and is as prompt about it as a person can reasonably be when bending over is astonishingly difficult.

Jan helps Iolanda down the stairs and into the carriage; a lieutenant does the same for the trunk. They set off toward Castle Overwatch.

If he wanted to explain himself he would have, so she doesn't ask. 

She feels - dizzy, and annoyed, for no reason she can pin down until she realizes that last year she would have been ecstatic, to have all her vague prayers for something different have come true, and it's just that her prayers were already answered, with the baby, and so now it seems like an odd imposition for anything else to change. Where are they going? Why go anywhere? ...why go to the castle, if they're going somewhere? 

Once they're inside he leads her to a quiet room with a table, some benches, and an incongruous plush chair.

"The teleporter should be here within the hour. We're going to Almas, then Sothis, then - elsewhere." He shrugs. "I don't actually know exactly where either. Nowhere dangerous."

She is dizzy and confused and trying so hard not to punish his deciding to be present in her life by complaining about it but at that -

"Jan. I can't teleport. If it goes wrong we'll lose the baby." Civilians mostly don't teleport but a mishap won't usually kill them if there's a priest on hand. Children will reasonably often just die, though. He's going to tell her there's some awful secret reason she has to anyway and she's - what's she going to do - 

...

"That's a good point.

I should be able to arrange a greater. Those don't go wrong. Is there anything I can get you before I go to do that?"

Oh.

"Well," she says a bit shakily, "is this the castle where they keep all the explanations? Because I would take one of those."

He hesitates for a moment, but - they'll be going from here straight to Sothis. How much could she possibly say, and to whom? The teleport wizard? He'll be right there next to her, he shouldn't worry about that.

"I was planning to explain after we'd gone, but - 

The high priestess of Nethys recently told us - Lastwall - that she'd help fix our - your and my - marriage. Using a miracle. And that this would somehow lead to the defeat of infernal Cheliax. She has not told us how the one thing will lead to the other, but she's going to use the miracle to send us somewhere conducive to a happier marriage and our best guess is that while there we'll meet someone who can and will help us with Cheliax.

...I know this sounds crazy. It's because the high priestess of Nethys is crazy, but the Inheritor has confirmed that she's telling the truth and that we'll be safe where we're going."

That does sound like - something she would have been very very happy about, if it had happened some time ago. 

She should - react well. He's explaining things to her, and - spending what must be unfathomable sums of money - not for her sake, obviously, but for once the needs of the world are not the exact opposite of the needs of his family and -

Is she unhappy that he's trying just because it would have been more convenient if it'd happened some other time? What's wrong with her?

What if they can't fix their marriage are all the souls in Cheliax lost forever -

Will she have to give birth alone in a strange country -

"I haven't - I don't have complaints, I - you're a good man, Jan, and I don't see what kind of place would fix anything except that if it doesn't have anything for you to do -" she hadn't meant it to come out like that "but I'm not complaining -"

"Well, they say Nirvana's like that. Nothing to do that would distract from healing the scars of life... we're not going to Nirvana, but maybe there's something similar planned for us."

There’s something odd about hearing that. She had rather figured that he just didn’t like her, probably regretted not marrying someone else, rather than regarding himself as - injured. Or maybe it’s her he’s regarding as injured. 

She sits down in the plush chair. It was obviously brought in for her. She doesn’t want to be - too precious for the chairs that presumably everyone else uses all the time but in fact her tailbone hurts constantly in the later months of pregnancy.

She should say something. “And we don’t know how long it will take?” Maybe they can be very efficient about it and not miss Carmen’s upcoming harpsichord recital, but she’s not even going to mention it so he doesn’t think she’s frivolous.

"Well in Nirvana it sometimes takes years. Decades. Centuries, probably, in the worst cases. I'm sure it's less than that, we're not instructed to elevate a new permanent Lord Watcher and I'm sure if it were years we would be." Xiomarra's acting and competent to manage his and her own responsibilities for a time, if she doesn't sleep, but probably not for a whole year.

"Well, I hope we're back before the baby arrives, because I don't know how to hire staff in not-Nirvana and you'll despise me if I've got a baby and no staff." She means it lightheartedly but it's hard to make things come out lightheartedly when they never really have casual conversations. 

The problem with being commanded by God to fix your marriage with tens of millions of souls on the line is that it makes it very hard to know what one sincerely feels and even harder to make known what one sincerely feels. The bonds between a man and his wife are harder to mend when the mending is transparently done out of duty to third parties. Words spoken and actions taken that would not have been but for the Goddess' command aren't like to move Iolanda's heart; what wife would take joy in reminders that even now she's second in her husband's thoughts?

Words not spoken at all will certainly not move Iolanda's heart.

"I could never despise you," he says gruffly, after a pause.

What do you possibly say to that -

- why couldn't the madwoman have picked some other odd thing to demand -

- what would you have said to that twenty years ago, when he liked you, when you knew he liked you -

("I think you should marry someone else" is the wrong answer, but jumps to mind first, when she tries to imagine herself back like that -)

Eventually she has the answer, the shape of the joke she would have told, something like 'now, now, you think at once too highly and too little of me, I am sure if I set my mind to it I could learn demon summoning and get enough of Vigil eaten that you despised me', but she can't tell that joke now, because she couldn't, actually, learn demon summoning if she set her mind to it, she's not twenty and convinced of her own cleverness, and anyway imagining whether they'd let her bear the baby before they executed her is just terribly instead of darkly funny.

"You said you were going to - go get the teleporter."

"Of course." He steps out and heads towards Heliu's office.

She didn't handle that very well, did she. 

She feels abruptly very tired, or maybe aware she's felt tired for a long time. 

Do you pray to Iomedae for your marriage if through some bizarre contrivance She's interested in it? Or is it still not very useful, because She never married?

Goddess, please make me worthy of Jan, so that he can love me, and we can do whatever it is we are supposed to do in a faraway place, and give us another son and make him a great hero like his father, the last of which is her ordinary prayer. Please make me more clever and less tired and less fussy and less fragile. And let him notice. Once I've pulled it off. And don't permit me to err beyond repair before then.

Before Jan is back she has recovered her composure, though once she's done that it crosses her mind that possibly her composure was not the most important thing for her to be recovering. Most things one should aspire to patiently endure, and then one can be pleasantly surprised if they're better than that, but one probably cannot patiently endure one's way to fixing her marriage and must instead actively strategize. The problem, though, is that love is a reasonably well-understood art, and it's an art for young women. All of society by necessity sets itself around the objective of marrying the young women off suitably; everybody with any sense funds dresses and plans parties and scrapes diligently for the gossip that will guard against a bad choice. It is an endeavor. It is exhausting, but young people are inexhaustible. 

How do you make a man love you, if it's very important, but also you're nearly forty? She can think of a dozen things to stop doing but there ought to be things to start doing and she couldn't name those if her life depended on it. If millions of lives depended on it. Which they do, apparently. 

When Jan returns with the teleporter she has picked up her needlework, again, though the light's no good in here.