Epilogue
The sun was shining and the air held the faint scent of flowers and wet earth.
Spring was a lovely time to begin negotiations.
Granted, Westin had started negotiations on much worse days, in much worse conditions, so he was inclined to favor the crisp air and even the slight chill that came with it.
Nonetheless, he took it as a blessing from the fae that though he was in a large room filled with people he’d rather avoid, that room had many windows that overlooked one of the palace gardens, and the garden was in full bloom.
From his seat at the vast, round table, Westin could only see the tops of the garden walls, overgrown with small pink roses and a patch of moss on the shadowed side, and the branch of a tree heavy with white blossoms, but he’d rather that view than look at the wealthy, prideful nobles and their guards, all gathered about and looking for gossip instead of taking their seats at the table.
Perhaps they were waiting for the king to sit.
If so, the king seemed content to make them wait.
But Westin didn’t look in that direction yet either.
Maybe Westin should have also waited, but this was not, officially, a formal gathering, and he still wasn’t certain he even wanted to be here, so he didn’t move.
It was just possible that he’d been invited to this meeting, this start of negotiations, out of politeness, or that the new king was going to take charge and Westin was little more than a figurehead.
Or scapegoat, should things go wrong. But that was a risk with any negotiation, and Westin had headed so many now over the years that he hoped his reputation would speak for him.
Anyway, the new king wasn’t really new, and if Westin considered the entirety of the past twenty-five years and beyond, then this king had been king the whole time, if uncrowned.
He wondered if the other beat-of-fours here realized that.
Some of them were young; they might not know that the one they called the Traitor King had been the intended ruler all along.
Of course, some of those here were young because the older generations had been killed or weakened by twenty years of in-fighting that the so-called traitor had finally put an end to.
That was the danger of time passing. People forgot what once was, even with the Great Library at their disposal.
Westin had requested information from the library when he had first received the invitation to be here.
Yet he felt wildly unprepared now, sitting alone—almost alone—among finery and youthful faces.
Some of these nobles could likely barely remember the time before the warring.
Some might not have known it at all. Some didn’t know him.
Their occasional glances toward him were likely curiosity about the gray-haired, somewhat simply dressed man among them.
Westin didn’t look back at them. He considered their sworn guards—each noble was permitted two unarmed sworn guards when within the palace, but for this meeting, because of the size of the room, or as a precaution, each noble was only allowed one.
A few had no guard to accompany them, perhaps they considered themselves to be warrior enough, but most did have guards, silent and watchful.
But the sworn guards in the room were outnumbered by the palace guards at every corner and by the door and several of the windows. In addition, the king’s husband—first husband—was ever armed and armored. As was the king. Even here, at the start of negotiations over the fuss around a wedding.
Twenty years of fighting. Twenty-five years of suspicion and fear. Then the incident that winter. Westin could not blame anyone for their fears or their precautions. But it did indicate these meetings would be tense, to say the least.
He considered the garden again and the tree with all the white flowers. The scent from the blossoms must have been delicate, because the perfumes around him continued to wash it away.
A jarring mix of scents, in all honesty.
Westin was again grateful for the windows and the size of the room.
It meant tetchy beat-of-fours could keep space between them and that the many windows prevented all their expensive perfumes from becoming too overwhelming to someone sensitive to those things.
The sunlight would help him avoid headaches if Westin had to examine tiny handwriting on any ancient documents.
His eyes were not what they used to be, and even the investment in magnifying glass lenses, fitted to wire frames that looped over his ears for stability, did not quite make up for the lost clarity of youth.
With that in mind, he pulled his lenses from a pocket of his robe and slipped them into place so he wouldn’t end up squinting later.
From beside him, above his shoulder, came a mournful sigh.
Westin ignored it for the moment to pat his robe back into place.
His finest, which of course was nowhere near as fine as the robes on the proud peacocks and preening robins gathered in this room, but was hardly shabby.
He’d chosen it as a matter of pride but also to keep some of the creeping chill at bay—another hazard of age, even for those who didn’t have bad memories of cold nights.
He reached up to check his long braid, painstakingly bedecked with glass beads and tiny strips of gold wire only that morning, but Sun batted his hand away.
“Don’t touch it.” Sun was firm. “You look incredible and that’s all you need to worry about.”
That was hardly all, but Westin glanced up.
Standing beside Westin’s chair, Sun met his eyes, made a little punched-out noise, then turned his attention back to the rest of the room.
“Not the lenses too,” he complained, breathless but snotty about it.
He was ridiculous about what he thought of Westin’s looks even now with silver cuffs all down the shells of his ears to match the threads of silver in his hair.
His lips were pushed out in a slight pout, even while he kept watch on the various nobles milling around.
“Your hair done as a proper beat-of-four and the lenses that make you look yet more serious than you already are? And I must behave? You will owe me when this is over.”
“Oh?” Westin asked with mild interest, playing along because dealing with his husband was more entertaining than trying to suss out which people in this room were going to be a problem.
Negotiations were easier if his mind was open to everyone at the start, he’d found, and he would need to be especially sharp here.
Soothing noble pride and noble tempers with regard to a wedding should not have been worse than stepping in to try to keep peace during decades of warring.
But since one was the conclusion of the other—hopefully—Westin was possibly right to worry.
It wasn’t going to be easy, in any case. Westin’s skills as an arbiter had been called upon often in the last twenty years, but even he had never dealt with this many noble families at the same time, all of them vying for attention and victory.
“What is it you think I owe you?” Westin asked to keep himself from examining the others in the room one by one, though he would be doing that soon enough anyway.
Sun hummed. He put a hand on Westin’s shoulder and bent down to whisper.
“Your mouth.” His lips brushed Westin’s ear. “In that garden out there. It’s a familiar-looking garden.”
Westin doubted his knees would enjoy kneeling on a stone path or moss-covered ground. Nonetheless, he considered it.
“With the lenses on, then?” he wondered.
Sun had been obsessed with them from the moment Westin had reluctantly agreed he needed them.
Westin had thought it another sign of age that might make him undesirable, but much like the mostly gray color of his hair or the crinkles at the corner of his eyes, Sun liked them.
Sun liked them a lot.
He made the punched-out sound again and curled his fingers over Westin’s shoulder. “Must you make eyes at everyone? They’re staring at you.”
“They are staring at you, brat.” Westin looked up to observe Sun glaring at nearly everyone in the room and put his hand over Sun’s to bring Sun’s attention back to him. “Rather surprised you aren’t trying to charm them.”
Sun scoffed. “What for? They’re all going to be focused on the king and maybe the new husband-to-be.
To-be.” Sun scoffed again. “I’d bet a whole season’s beet crop that the king and his husband have made vows to the little one already.
Doesn’t matter what spectacle they want or what The Arlylian says. It’s done.”
Westin glanced over to one of the windows, where two large figures stood behind a smaller, slighter figure peering down at two books he had open and resting on a window ledge.
The small one was almost completely hidden from the rest of the room by the larger men, which Westin assumed was intentional.
He glanced over the room again, at the nobles in their best surreptitiously watching the trio at the window, at the guards, palace and personal, at the one pretty-but-scowling figure in the corner dressed like a well-paid library assistant but probably a Master Keeper. They all seemed to be younger now too.
He finally returned his attention to the three everyone else was staring at.
The larger two were talking to each other, not aloud, but in glances and looks, with an occasional shrug, like a pair who had known each other for most of their lives, but also like outguards in hostile territory who didn’t want to risk their words being overheard.