Chapter Twelve
THAT CHRISTMAS WAS their very first together, and it was filled with all the magic of the season.
But that magic was even more special when Aikaterini told Kyriakos that she was pregnant.
It was Christmas Eve. They had attended the annual Christmas Eve ball in the city and they had danced perhaps more than they should have—but that was part of the new version of them that they had forged at the End of the World.
They would always do their duty, because that was a huge part of who they were. They would also make certain that they honored their marriage, too.
And that involved a lot of dancing at these balls, because it was a whole lot more fun than pointed, political mingling. It also brought home the fact that the Prince and Princess of Zaccaria were, in fact, human.
Delightfully human in every way, Kyriakos thought, as this news of hers threatened to knock him sideways.
“I was going to tell you when we got home tonight,” his marvel of a wife said, smiling up at him with those gray eyes of hers shining like silver. “I couldn’t wait.”
The band was playing holiday music from all over the world. It seemed like the perfect backdrop to look down at this beautiful, impossibly fascinating woman and receive this news that they were truly to become a family.
“We will raise this child on love first,” he said fiercely.
“We will,” she agreed, her expression solemn though her eyes gleamed. She kissed him, even though that was against protocol. It turned out that protocol was what they said it was—something they’d been playing with. “And we will show this child what love looks like. By example.”
That was precisely what they did.
They were scrupulous about their commitments to the principality, always. But their family came first.
They had five children, three boys and two girls. And when interviewers tried to make sly remarks about stacking the line of succession, the Prince and the Princess of Zaccaria would look at each other knowingly and laugh.
“I don’t think we considered the line of succession at all, to be honest,” she said once, famously, in a remark that set the country ablaze.
Because everyone got her meaning quite well.
The Prince and the Princess were wildly, passionately, irrepressively in love.
They named their first son and heir after her father and his, as was customary. But they named their second son after Venediktos, to honor him and to make certain that he was always a part of their family.
Because to Kyriakos’s mind, he was. In some ways, the most important part.
Not only because he had loved his cousin, but because if it weren’t for Venediktos, none of this would have happened. Kyriakos and Aikaterini might never even have met outside of the usual aristocratic tedium.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Yet because the two of them were so in love and so open with it, in contradiction of how royalty had always behaved on the island before, there was a loosening among the aristocracy.
It was the law that every Zaccarian of noble blood had to clear their marriage with the Prince, but Kyriakos did away with it.
At all the dinners they attended, he would play with his wife’s hand, like they were secret lovers instead of the Prince and Princess. He made no secret of his affection for her.
And he would tell all of his blue-blooded courtiers that he wanted no less for them. Or for his own children.
“I don’t believe that the blood could get any bluer if we tried,” he would say. “But I think that all of us could stand to be a whole lot happier.”
Some simply shook their heads and whispered that he was lovesick—his in-laws among them. Some had dynastic aspirations so intense that they could not allow themselves to think of what happiness might bring to the table, because happiness certainly wasn’t property, was it?
When he would complain about this, his gorgeous wife would hand him one of their babies and kiss him until they both smiled.
“You can show them the way,” she would say. “But you can’t make them walk the path.”
They settled into their life. They played their roles on the chessboard, as necessary.
But their true delight was in the family they made. And the children they raised to know that they were loved, first and foremost.
And they could never mend their parents’ marriages, though they knew better than to try. Yet five grandchildren went a long way toward melting hearts, even if they also inspired a good deal of sniffing and murmurs about seemliness, because of course their parents were still their parents.
But the good news was, the protocol they were so high on did not allow for contradicting the Prince. Certainly not in public. So they mostly had to keep those sniffs to themselves.
And in the end, Kyriakos thought that he was happy to share a headstone in the Grand Cathedral with only his name etched in, and hers beside it. And Venediktos’s, too, because they all had their places there, in the dashes.
It was the story of them that nobody would ever really know, but he did.
It was life lived to its fullest. There was no need to write a paragraph on that.
Kyriakos knew that he and Aikaterini would live every moment that they were lucky enough to have.
They would squeeze life out of every square inch of it, and do their best to keep each other alive like this, and love like this, and together like this, until they really were part of the stars at last.
They did it every day.
And all of it was joy.