"I'm certainly not an archmage, or a god-to-be. But the men aren't either, and they do good work."

Aaaaaaaaargh.

"I didn't mean – I'm sorry. I promise, I'm not deliberately trying to insult you. I asked for your advice because I sincerely value it. I never knew much about warfare to begin with – and you saw this morning how what knowledge I do have is nearly useless to me here. I don't want to keep making mistakes I could have avoided if I'd thought to ask the people around me, who've been fighting this particular war for thirty years." 

"I appreciate that. I don't think you're arrogant, and I've met plenty of men who are. If I had advice for you I'd give it, and I'll try not to assume you've already thought of it just because you're cleverer than mortal men have any business being. But we're from very different worlds, you and I. Iomedae can bridge it, but that's because she's been busy trying to build your world herself in ours. I personally am not trying anything more complicated than stabbing Tar-Baphon until it sticks."

This at least is something he can work with. 

"What is it about your world that I don't understand?"

"Well, I'd presume it's more that we don't understand yours, with archmage-wives and republics and the Empire fallen and so on."

"You know, it confused me earlier when you seemed so surprised by that. You have more archmages than we do – than we did until a year ago, at least – and many, many more powerful wizards. What's so strange about us marrying each other?"

"Well, the first reason I would give is that war runs wholly contrary to the cultivation of every feminine virtue, and the second is that every archmage I've ever met was as stubborn as a river."

He laughs. "That's my Naima. But I've found war doesn't do much to cultivate the masculine virtues, either, so we answer well enough for each other." 

"Well, that really seems like an argument for the opposite, to me, a marriage where everyone in it is devoid of virtue would have nothing to recommend it."

"I would say rather that we try to cultivate our virtues in spite of our battles rather than through them."  

"I suppose wars of the future as you've told us look very different than todays'. I would not particularly claim that any of us have had much time for the cultivation of those virtues of peacetime."

Arnisant's really incredible. It's like talking to a knight right out of a storybook, which of course is precisely what he is.  

"I'm curious what the proper feminine and masculine virtues are, in your opinion – and for that matter, the separate virtues of war and peace."

Do they not make a distinction in the future, between feminine and masculine virtues. That seems slightly sad, like learning that in the future everyone is colorblind.

"- in wartime virtue is courage, and singlemindedness, the ability to see an aim and see it done, and the ability to be the same man every day whatever you paid for it yesterday, and the capacity to take most of what you've done to Heaven with you rather than flail around searching for a mortal expression of it.

In peacetime, I'd be guessing. The impulse to beautiful things, maybe to make them and appreciate them; to self-consideration and philosophizing; to asking questions whose answers you do not require to stay alive and forming opinions on matters that don't concern you. 

The essential feminine virtue is to build an oasis in the world whatever the rest of it looks like, and to see your strength spent in the strengthening of other people, and to build things worth protecting at the price that will ultimately be paid to protect them."

"I haven't been involved in what you'd call a real, proper war since I was about twenty-two – my life is more a series of intermittent skirmishes. But in times of peace – singlemindedness is rather dangerous, I've found. 

And then, there are so many things one might want to do when one isn't fighting. When it comes to building nations, which is most of what I've been thinking about lately, one should be honest, especially with one's self, and infinitely patient, and above all capable of holding one's ideals in one hand and necessity in the other and never let go of either. I suppose that has something to do with philosophizing and forming opinions on matter that don't concern us – at least, that don't concern our own immediate survival or well-being. Maybe concern for those matters which concern our fellows is another virtue of peace. 

Maybe those are feminine virtues. I'll admit, I'm more interested in how my strength can strengthen other people than I am in almost anything else – if only because a world where I'm the strongest person in it just seems so much less interesting when I'm one archmage among many. But my wife is better at it. She's a healer, the best in the world. She – became a spellcaster so she could save her child by her late first husband when he was very ill. Now she spends her time establishing hospitals and healing babies and trying to teach other people how to do the things she does. All her effort is spent in making people safer and stronger. I don't think the virtues that requires are so very different from mine, and if they are, I hope to learn them from her."

"Who raises the children, if you're both off founding things and teaching people?"

"We both do! Probably I spend more time with them these days, since my work is more flexible. And there are servants, and of course we do leave them with their aunts or the high priestess of Nethys or something when we're both unavoidably busy."

Arnisant doesn't think that actually sounds like a marriage. It sounds like a research partnership so fruitful its participants can afford to make up for the fact neither of them are wives. "If you have succeeded in defeating the great evils of your age I doubt I have anything to teach you," he says.

Élie pulls up his legs so that he's sitting cross-legged in the air. 

"Well, there are always more evils to go around, and besides I'm just curious for historical reasons. You serve with enough women in the crusade – would you never consider marrying any of them?"

"Of course not! They wouldn't contemplate it either! Women can be warriors, though it is cutting against the grain of their innate strengths and virtues, and in doing so they - choose not to lead the life of a woman, and not to bear children, and not to make oaths to a husband. In a war like this one many people are obliged to do things which injure them in the doing."

"Only the women? When I was in a position in life where it would have been wrong of me to have children, I'd say it injured me."

"I have children. But if you want to say that war injures men too, I would say that you are right, it does. Differently, and on the whole less, but we are none of us leading the lives that make us strongest and noblest, just the lives that keep our land free and our families alive."

"If I ever find anyone who's managing to live the life that makes them strongest and noblest and not the one they've been forced into by circumstances, I'll be sure to tell you.

If you don't mind, would you tell me about your wife? So far I've only met the sort of person in this era who ends up dedicating their life to an eternal war against evil, and I'm worried it's giving me a skewed perspective." 

"I suppose, though if I were seeking that I think I'd go visit Absalom or something. Ignacia bore seven living children, four boys, all of them now grown, and we have twelve living grandchildren. Her father and my father were old friends, good friends; they'd joke about building a road between their lands. Our parents proposed the engagement when I was twenty-three and she was twenty, and we married the following spring. She doesn't write, but when we were young she'd send me sketches when I was away at war. Of the land, of our children, of herself, of my parents." He seems at a bit of a loss to think of more to say after that. "Our firstborn was her favorite, and she took it very hard when he died. She has a good memory for names."

To Élie that doesn't sound so much like a marriage as a business arrangement cooked up by the respective fathers. 

"You must not get to see her very often."

"When our children were younger I tried to spend a month at home every year. These days, no, not often."