Epilogue
Sy didn’t realize he’d gone a bit quiet until Petur pulled him aside a few days after the storytelling ended.
It had taken more than a single night for them to get through it all—ten years was a long time, after all, and they’d gone down plenty of rabbit holes when it came to various missions, the fun things they’d done together, and the torturous times they’d spent apart.
It was all interesting to Sy, of course, an almost entirely novel look into his lovers’ pasts.
He liked knowing more of their history together and admired them even more for how determined they’d been to cleave to each other as the years went on. It just …
“What’s wrong?” Petur asked bluntly as court adjourned for the morning.
They’d made a habit of listening to petitions together when Petur had first came to Bekkon, in part to get people used to his authority as well as to get his assistance in actually ruling.
Petur was the only one of them with any real experience at it, thanks to his role in Riyale, and Sy was always grateful for his perspective. Nothing ever got past Petur.
Sy wasn’t always grateful for that part, actually.
“What do you mean?” he prevaricated as he took off his crown and rubbed at the line it left around his head.
Everyone else had filed out of the throne room, so it was just the two of them.
Jon had taken their much-recovered daughter to the garden to play, and Deyvid was out working with the cavalry.
Come to think of it, this might be the first time Sy and Petur had been alone together for a week. “Nothing is wrong.”
“You’re such a bad liar.”
“No, I’m not!” Sy realized what he’d just said and backtracked. “I mean, I’m not lying! Nothing is wrong.”
Petur arched one eyebrow, a gesture he alone of the three of them had mastered. “You’ll forgive me if I note that you’ve barely been able to meet my eyes all morning.”
“I’m just thinking,” Sy replied.
“What about?”
Sy huffed. “Why do you always do this?”
“Do what?”
Ask questions I don’t know the answers to! “Push,” he went with.
Petur didn’t take offense. Instead, he smiled. “I’ve been married to you for three years, sweetheart,” he said. “Forgive me if I’ve learned a thing or two about how best to approach your moods in that time.”
Oh, his moods? Moods? “I’m not in a mood.”
“You are. It started as thoughtful, and I was happy to leave you alone with it then, but it’s turned pensive over the past day or so, and that’s the beginning of a descent into obsessiveness that I’m just as happy to help you avoid.”
“Feel free to go do something else if I’m being distracting,” Sy snarked.
Petur sighed, then got up out of his chair and came over to Sy’s.
He sat down on the arm and leaned in so he could press a kiss to the top of Sy’s head.
“Darling.” He kissed his cheek. “Beloved.” He kissed the side of his neck.
“Dear husband.” He finally pressed a kiss to his lips, and Sy couldn’t help but respond to the heat of Petur’s mouth, the gentle caress of his thumb as it swept over Sy’s collarbone.
“Please talk to me,” Petur said, and Sy heard that for the plea it was.
“I’m all right,” he said honestly. “Just … it seems a little incredible to me that we’ve managed to get along as well as we all have when you and Deyvid were so happy together before me. You were content, just the two of you, and then you were forced to let me in.”
“Darling—”
“And I know you don’t regret it anymore,” Sy continued doggedly. “I know you love me, I do. I just, I wonder if you would have been happier if you’d stayed a pair, rather than …” He gestured awkwardly to himself.
Petur immediately shook his head. “We wouldn’t.”
“Petur, come on.”
“I’m serious.” He wrapped an arm around Sy’s shoulders and pulled him in closer.
“I was content to run from reality for a long time, but the truth of the matter is that Deyvid and I could never have stayed a pair. Deyvid realized that long before I did; hells, he had his own political marriage before he ever met me. The thing I’d hoped for was always an impossibility, and after I got a good look at some of the people I might have ended up married to … ” Petur shuddered. “Horrifying.”
“But if you hadn’t had to marry someone else, you would have been fine together.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’d have killed each other without the pressure of caring for a kingdom,” Petur rejoined, “which is the only circumstance that would have allowed for such a thing.
“But as long as we’re talking about impossibilities,” he went on, settling in against Sy’s throne, “let’s consider how things could have gone if I’d met you first. If we’d been prepared to marry each other from the start, raised to it like so many royals are. Would we have gotten along?”
Without Deyvid to smooth things over? “Perhaps eventually,” Sy allowed with a little smile. “As long as we didn’t try to kill each other.”
“Now consider how things might have gone if you’d met Deyvid first.”
“He wouldn’t have wanted me,” Sy protested. “He’d have thought I was too young.”
“He thinks you’re gorgeous,” Petur said confidently. “He’s so sweet around you it’s ridiculous. He was never like that with me; he couldn’t be like that with me; I wouldn’t tolerate it. You give him an outlet for his need to dote on someone while I’m more of an outlet for his combative urges.
“And for me …” His eyes softened. “You challenge me to be the absolute best I can be, just so I can keep up with you. You’re far cleverer than I am, and yet you’ve given me real power in my role as your husband here when you could easily have kept it all for yourself.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” Sy protested.
“I know,” Petur said. “But you could have, and no one would have raised an eyebrow. It would have been expected, even, since you were coming into such a chaotic situation. Yet you’ve shared your rule and your home and your family, effortlessly, and in doing so you’ve given me more ability to help the people we care for than I ever got in Riyale.
” He grinned. “Not to mention, neither of us can talk policy with Deyvid, he gets so bored.”
Sy snickered. “He almost fell asleep two nights ago when we had that debate about trade tariffs, remember?”
“Poor thing,” Petur crooned. “We made it up to him, though.” He pressed another kiss to Sy’s temple. “Does that help?”
“It does,” he admitted.
“You’ve made us better, I promise you. I wouldn’t lie about this,” Petur said, and Sy believed him.
“I’m glad you think so.”
“If anyone should feel guilty, it should be us,” he went on, “for taking you from your former lover.”
Sy had to think for a moment to figure out what Petur was even talking about. “Who, Colten?” He laughed. “He and I were never serious.”
Petur looked like he was going to argue the point, but then Deyvid came into the room, a small scroll in hand.
“This just arrived from Alie,” he said, indicating the white-and-gold pattern on the ribbon holding it together.
“She sent a wyvern. Some of the griffin riders intercepted it and when they saw the color, they came and got me directly.”
“A wyvern?” Wyverns were how Harrier clans scouted terrain, winged creatures they domesticated that came in at about half the size of a horse.
No clan could keep too many of them on hand, though; they tended to go after foals and small children.
“It must be important.” Sy waited for Deyvid to open it but instead ended up with the scroll in his own hands.
“It’s addressed to you,” Deyvid pointed out with a little smile.
Oh, so it was. He took it, untied the elaborate knot holding the parchment closed, and opened it to read the top line.
“It’s a declaration of, ah …” He blinked as the translation spell he wore kicked in at the sight of Harrier symbols.
“Intent to host a trial for marriage.” Sy frowned. “Trial for marriage, what is that?”
Deyvid grabbed up the scroll without compunction, his eyes roving hungrily over it. “So much for propriety,” Petur mocked him, but Deyvid ignored him as he read through the missive himself.
“Alie is looking to make an alliance,” he said at last. “A trial for marriage is essentially a series of competitions that are intended to help her choose the best spouse. They’re more common in the north, but”—he grimaced—“since she has no elder family in the clan to advise her on an appropriate match any longer, this is an acceptable way of determining who’s interested enough, wealthy enough, and skilled enough to suit her. ”
Petur’s eyes lit up. “And are we being invited to watch or to participate?”
Deyvid whapped him on the shoulder. “Watch, obviously. She isn’t accepting foreign partici—well, actually, it doesn’t say that specifically,” he amended.
“But accepting foreign participants would be a bad move for her. Alie is already considered a bit of a stretch for leading a clan, despite her lineage, due to her status as a High Harrier. She’d best be bolstered in her role by making a marriage with the heir of another clan or at least one of their more powerful members. ”
“That makes sense.” Sy felt a pang of sympathy for Alie.
He knew how difficult it was to be confronted with the needs of a kingdom when you weren’t ready for it.
Was anyone ever ready for marriage? Even though his had worked out so well, he wasn’t blind to the fact that things could have gone very differently.
“Hmm.”
Sy and Petur both looked sharply at Deyvid, who was still scanning the scroll. “What hmm?” Petur asked. “Why hmm like that?”
“Because it appears as though we’re not the only foreigners invited to observe the festivities.”
Sy didn’t know what to make of that. As far as he knew, Alie hadn’t done any outreach to the rest of the Southlands in her tenure as the leader of Clan Windwest. “Who else has she invited?”
“A representative of the other border nation.” Deyvid looked from Sy to Petur, where his eyes lingered. “Princess Givencie has been invited as well.”
Petur went absolutely still for a moment, frozen with uncharacteristically wide eyes.
Sy knew that the hardest part of Petur’s separation from Riyale had been losing contact with his nieces.
No longer commanding the Shifter Corps had been a wrench as well, but he still saw many of them while performing his intelligence duties for Bekkon.
Not so with Delainie and Givencie, who were being kept firmly away from any formal meetings by their parents and absolutely forbidden to attend informal meetings by the same.
“Tania won’t let her go,” Petur said after a moment, but his voice was uncertain. “There’s no way Tania will let her go into Harrier lands by herself.”
“Apparently, she’s being allowed a significant escort,” Deyvid said.
“Alie is touting it as a chance to take ‘unprecedented steps toward a lasting peace.’” He sounded proud.
“Of course, just because the offer is there doesn’t mean it will be taken, but Givencie is fifteen now.
She’s going to be expected to start taking on more diplomatic roles for the family. ”
“And she’s the fighter of the bunch,” Sy added.
He’d only lived with the Alloui family in Delomar for a year, but he’d spent enough time with Petur’s nieces to know how absolutely feral the youngest princess could be when it came to the defense of her or her sister’s honor.
“It would be quite a statement for her to be the first Southland royal to make a connection with a Harrier clan.”
Deyvid quirked an eyebrow at Sy. “Do you and Petur not count anymore?”
Sy blushed. “Our situation is different,” he insisted. “We’re family.”
Deyvid came over and sat on the opposite arm of the throne, then pressed his own kiss to Sy’s head. “You’re right,” he said. “I know Alie looks at you that way. We’re all invited, by name, to attend the trials.”
Sy hadn’t ventured out of the country since the end of the war with Deyvid’s father, the late and unlamented leader of the Windwest Clan before Alie took over.
He’d been so busy with ruling, Bee, and the magic school that he hadn’t felt the urge, but now that travel was in the offing, the desire to do so hit him with the force of a gale. “Oh, we should!”
“It’s a security nightmare,” Petur said, but he was still staring at the scroll in Deyvid’s hand. “All three of us out of the country at the same time? The opportunity for creating deliberate chaos is high.”
“We’ve got the best bodyguards on the continent for Bee and Jon,” Sy reminded him.
“You two trained them yourselves.” In five years, they’d have their own Shifter Corps as well as a cohort of experienced mages, but for now his lovers had gone overboard in ensuring Bee’s safety.
There were probably four pairs of eyes on her and Jon right now in the garden.
Jon had argued against it at first, actually, calling it too much intrusion into their lives, but it hadn’t taken more than a reminder of the fact that his stepson, the former heir, had fomented a rebellion right under his and Melisse’s noses to change his mind.
“Sy has to go regardless,” Deyvid said. “This is an official invitation from a ruling party, and he’s going to be expected to show up. If he doesn’t, some of the clans might think he’s losing his nerve and feel emboldened.”
Oh, damn. Sy hadn’t thought about it that way, but … “Deyvid, you have to be there as well,” he said. “You’re her father.”
“I agree,” Deyvid said mildly, and Petur sighed.
“Leaving me to rule alone, bereft of your company and going out of my mind with worry over whether or not you’re all right?
” he said dryly. “Absolutely not. We’ll all go, but.
” He held up a hand. “We’re going to create new safety protocols for the road, and I want to make it clear I’m going to support Alie, not with the expectation of seeing my niece again.
I know my sister too well to think she’ll allow that. ”
Sy pulled Petur down into a kiss. “Perhaps she’ll surprise you,” he murmured.
“Perhaps cows will fly.”
“We’ve seen stranger things,” Deyvid said, a smile on his face. “The trials start a month after foaling. We’ve still got plenty of time to plan our journey and ensure we’re as prepared as possible in case things go wrong.”
“It’ll be a fun adventure,” Sy said, his spirits lifting. Now that the idea was in his head, it was impossible to think of anything else. “What could go wrong if we’re together?”
His lovers just laughed.