Epilogue
Tor
Four Years Later
“Save me, Daddy!”
A happily shrieking Shara, dark hair wildly blowing in the wind, raced past Tor before he could even consider rescuing her from her father, who was chasing after her across the grass-filled meadow.
One of Tor’s favorite things about parenthood—and there were many—was how Pel was absolutely not the strict rule follower that they had both imagined before the most adorable baby in the entire world had been born.
(She was tied with Cala, obviously. And Ada’s Frin.
Actually, there was a lot of competition these days.)
Yes, Pel had to rein Tor and Shara in sometimes if they got a little too wild, but Tor was actually not the one voted most likely to sneak an extra cookie to their baby girl.
Tor loved every minute of it.
Pel’s energy ran out before Shara’s, and he came to sit beside Tor, his hand on his stomach.
“Everything all right?” Tor asked.
Now that he’d been through it once, he understood why Var had gotten so anxious about Fernila’s first pregnancy. Pel was just past the three-month mark now, and Tor was filled with just as much joy and worry as last time.
Pel patted his knee. “Totally fine.”
Tor bit back the urge to ask Pel if he needed to see the healer. There was no reason he shouldn’t have as smooth a pregnancy this time as he had last time. Pel knew his own body very well, and he’d ask for help if he needed it.
Shara streaked past them again. This time she was being chased by Nur, Beluna and Cavun’s two-year-old.
Nur’s chubby legs could absolutely not keep up with their baby girl’s speed, but since Shara didn’t actually want to outpace her chaser too much, she kept looking over her shoulder, giggling, and running in jagged lines and circles.
Cavun jogged past, keeping an eye on the children for the inevitable moment when one or both of them fell over. Bumps and bruises, Tor and Pel had learned, were totally standard when it came to small children, and it was nothing to panic over.
(Yes, they’d both panicked more than once. But they were getting the hang of it now.)
Behind Tor and Pel was the constant hum of activity that came with castle construction.
Two years ago, their citizens had voted to join the United Realms, and it seemed to be a matter of pride that they have a castle just like all the other realms did.
They were quarrying the stone right here in the mountains, and the labor involved was going to keep many of their citizens employed for years.
Tor and Pel had tried to suggest they didn’t need a castle—and they’d been outvoted.
One of Tor’s first suggestions as the holder of the Fealty of the exiles had been to create a citizens’ council. Twenty-five citizens got voted onto the council for four-year terms, and they in turn voted on all the major decisions—including what their realm would be named.
Tor was still ninety percent sure that they were just messing with him, but Torpel the realm was the same age as their daughter.
Yes, those sneaky asses had voted to name the realm Torpel.
Every single one of Tor’s friends and family members had laughed uproariously when they heard and referenced the realm as often as possible.
Tor and Pel had the right to veto suggestions from the council, but this was one of the first things they’d voted on. So goddess help them, Tor and Pel lived in Torpel, and that just never got old, apparently.
(Sometimes, Tor sneaked in a name change motion, just to see if everyone on the council was paying attention. They always were.)
Cala raced by next, strawberry-blond curls already falling out of the tie her mother had tried to put it in.
“Gonna get you!” she cried.
Shara and Nur both screamed in delight and tried to run faster.
Tor was pretty sure there were no actual rules to this game and it lasted until someone ended up in tears, but he couldn’t be certain. Yesterday, Cala had very gravely told him that he “just didn’t understand because he was old.”
Put in his place by a five-year-old.
“I save you!” Chada yelled.
Somila and Gornexi’s four-year-old daughter raced in front of Shara and Nur with a stick that Tor assumed was supposed to be a sword.
Cala snatched up her own stick, a martial light in her eye.
Someone was definitely going to get poked somewhere sensitive, and there would definitely be tears.
On the plus side, they might all exhaust themselves with running around so that some of their parents could sleep the night through.
“Wavilon is around, right?” Pel asked, because he seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Tor.
“I saw him at some point today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I’ve lost track.”
Because Wavilon was amazing, he’d moved to Torpel six months ago to train their two recently Manifested healers.
Today was the naming ceremony for Tama and Bav’s first child, and she’d wanted to have the celebration here in Torpel, where she’d spent most of her life.
(The Torpelians mostly found it weird that there was an entire ceremony for a ruler to announce a baby’s name.
But really, it was an excuse for a party, and everyone liked that, especially since in Torpel, everyone was invited.)
Tor wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been sure this day would come.
It turned out Bav and Pel had inherited the same stubbornness, and they both knew how to hold a grudge.
It had taken Tama years to win Bav over again, but it had finally happened, and they’d bonded a little over a year ago.
She’d moved to Tond, and that had left Torpel without a healer.
It really did feel like the goddess was looking out directly for them, if Tor was being honest. It wasn’t just the two healers Manifesting, though that was amazing.
All across the United Realms, there’d been an increase in Illustrious, Extraordinary, and healers—almost like the realm was happier now that they were whole again.
There were a few holdouts, but most people subscribed now to the idea that happy citizens meant good Fealty meant good land. Those who’d lived in Torpel for the last twenty-nine years attested regularly to the fact that these last three had been the best they’d ever had.
(And most conceded that first year had been for recovery. It was why they’d voted to join the United Realms, when they’d seen the results of Tor living here with their Fealty.)
Var had also made changes. He had his own citizens’ council, one for the entirety of the United Realms. It had three citizens from each realm, and a minimum of two of them had to be Unremarkable to better represent the population.
They also couldn’t be royal. Each individual realm had followed suit.
They didn’t all have identical power yet—Tor’s was the only one that could vote to leave the United Realms or to oust the holder of the Fealty, for example—but it was progress that Tor was proud of.
His was also the only realm that didn’t require anyone pledging Fealty to live there.
They tracked the pledges solely in order to ensure that if they ever dipped to a problematic level, they’d know what that level was for the future.
It was both exhilarating and a bit terrifying that so much of what Tor did was experimenting.
Currently, more than ninety-five percent of Torpelians had pledged their Fealty to Tor, and the land had never been more prosperous.
There was still plenty that they were figuring out, but Tor celebrated each success.
As far as they knew, Fealty could still only be inherited, but Tor had begun to wonder if it couldn’t be transferred in some way.
It mostly transferred to blood relatives, and almost always the eldest child.
But sometimes it transferred to a spouse or different child, and occasionally to someone else entirely, though their records seemed to indicate that happened only when there were no blood relatives left.
But was that because it had to or because that was what the holder of the Fealty expected it to do?
People kept pointing to Pamexa as a prime example.
Nostex hadn’t known she was his daughter, but the Fealty had gone there.
Tor always argued back that Nostex had known she existed and he had believed Fealty passed by blood or bond.
Just because it hadn’t gone to the blood he’d wanted it to didn’t mean the transfer hadn’t been influenced by his overall belief.
Or it could turn out it was truly linked to blood and bond, and there was no way to influence where it went.
The problem was that it was difficult to test without potentially huge repercussions.
Their back-up plan was that each person in Torpel could revoke their Fealty from Tor and select someone new.
It sounded long and painful, but it should work.
Everyone knew that Fealty could be revoked—it was how the exiles had left in the first place, and it was the standard process if people moved between realms, although people usually stayed where they were born.
Tor had another theory that the tie to the Fealty and the land meant that people tended to stay on that land, unless something catastrophic happened and a ruler was so bad that it prompted an exodus like that of the exiles or the citizens who’d moved to Alossa after the war.
Even there, the exiles hadn’t left the United Realms. There was an entire world out there, and while their trade with the mainland was minimal, shouldn’t it have seemed like an attractive alternative to exile or death?
Yet they’d all stayed. Tor was adventurous and liked to travel, yet he had no desire to visit the mainland.
And no realm on the mainland had ever sought to conquer them.
Tor had always assumed that they were too small and hard to reach to make it worthwhile, but maybe it wasn’t that at all.