It was Lady Bhagya who steered the conversation toward the topic I found myself most curious about, as our exchange about marriages and family life reached a natural pause.
"I heard Princess Zaria arrived at Turga port," she said, with the easy tone of someone raising something pleasant. "It's been some years since I last saw her. I wonder if she still remembers me." A warm smile. "I should like to greet her, regardless."
The familiarity surprised me. I glanced at Gayathri.
"Lady Bhagya's family spent ten years in the Kingdom of Furha," Gayathri supplied quietly. "Her father served as Selon's ambassador there."
That explained it. I set my lemonade down.
"What is Princess Zaria like?" I asked.
A few days ago, that question would have been entirely academic. Now it carried the particular weight of information I genuinely wanted to understand — about the woman who was Zaren's sister, who had sent a one-line letter announcing herself, and who had apparently been in love with my husband since childhood.
In the middle of forming the question, I noticed that we were seated in almost exactly the same arrangement as Gayathri and I had occupied a few days prior — the same table, the same angle, the same sight line toward the Silver Eagle stall. The stall that I had helped build, had hauled crates for, had dug holes beside in the early morning heat. The man who ran it was invisible from here today, presumably somewhere inside managing the considerable queue of customers I had seen forming when we passed.
I had missed the beginning of Lady Bhagya's answer while my thoughts wandered. I caught the thread on its return.
"—not the previous king's daughter at all, you understand. The current King of Furha isn't the son of the previous king either. The old king had only one child — a daughter — and Furhan law does not permit a daughter to inherit the throne. So he adopted a son from his extended family, a boy of seven, and raised him as crown prince. That adopted son is the current king." She settled into the explanation with the ease of someone who has told this particular history before. "The old king's daughter — the biological princess — was married off to the previous Emperor of Selon when she came of age. She bore our current emperor. That is the connection."
She continued, drawing the threads together.
"When the adopted son was crowned, he eventually married a noblewoman. She gave him thirteen sons and one daughter — the youngest, and the last. That daughter is Zaria. The most beloved child in the Furhan royal household by considerable margin." Something fond entered her voice. "The eldest son is the crown prince now, and the others have been encouraged — required, really — to build independent identities. Furhan tradition holds that princes, after the crown prince is named, must set aside their royal name from dawn to dusk each day and live under another. It's a safeguard against ambition becoming something more dangerous." She paused. "The princess is exempt, of course — she will be married rather than inherit, so there is no such requirement for her."
"She grew up adored," she went on. "Her mother's beauty, her father's and brothers' unconditional devotion, and the goodwill of an entire kingdom inclined toward her from birth. For all ten years I spent in Furha, I heard almost nothing but good about her — she was kind, she was courageous, she was loved by the people as much as by her family."
Lady Amara, who had been listening with her characteristic quiet attentiveness, spoke then.
"But she hasn't married yet? I thought she would be — she must be older than his Majesty by a year or two, at least."
Gayathri's expression communicated, with the economy of a single glance, that she considered this a difficult question to have raised at this particular table. Lady Bhagya looked at me — briefly, apologetically.
"I'm sorry, your Majesty. We've gone on rather extensively about a foreign princess. Should I change the subject?"
The consideration was genuine, and I recognised it as such. What I did not recognise as genuine was my own mild irritation at the delicacy — the protective redirection, the careful avoidance, as though I were something fragile that couldn't be trusted with a direct answer to a simple question.
"Not at all," I said, keeping my voice easy. "I'm as curious as Lady Amara about the answer."
They settled, slightly, and Lady Bhagya continued.
"The Furhan royal family has always adored her, as I said. And because they adore her, they gave her something rather unusual for a princess: the right to choose her own husband. She hasn't been compelled into any arrangement she didn't want." A pause, brief but present. "And so, she hasn't married."
She left it there.
She didn't need to finish. The implication assembled itself without assistance: a princess given the freedom to choose, who had chosen someone specific, who had sent him letters that were set to music and performed by bards across two kingdoms, who had now boarded a ship and sailed to Selon the moment circumstance gave her a reason to.
She had chosen Arvid. Or believed she had.
Before I could sit fully with that thought, Gayathri touched the hourglass on the table — the one she had set at my request, an hour measured from when I'd said I needed to leave.
"The sand has run through, your Majesty," she said, with a gentleness that was also, I thought, something of a rescue. "It's been an hour."
I looked at the hourglass and then at the women around the table and produced a smile that I hoped communicated warmth and nothing else.
The farewells were warm on all sides. Lady Bhagya pressed my hand with the sincerity of someone who has genuinely enjoyed an encounter. Lady Amara inclined her head with the quiet precision that characterised everything she did.
I walked back to the carriage and sat in its shaded interior and let the fair sounds fade as we moved away from the grounds.
The discomfort was still there.
I turned it over honestly, trying to determine how much of it was rational and how much was simply the accumulated anxiety of someone who has too many things to hold at once and not enough certainty about any of them.
'As long as Arvid doesn't choose her over me.'
I had barely finished forming the thought before I heard how it sounded. 'Choose her.' As though I were uncertain of the answer. As though the past weeks of painful revelation had eroded something I hadn't noticed was eroding.
He had told me he would wait. He had said it plainly, without performance, in the library where everything else had been stripped away. I believed him. I still believed him, despite everything — perhaps because of everything, in the way that belief sometimes grows stronger precisely where it has been most tested.
But.
'Double royal heirs.'
His words from sometime ago, the ones he had said before I knew what kind of man he was. He had married me for a specific purpose, among others. I was still, despite all that had changed between us, the primary vehicle for that purpose. What would he do if a different vehicle presented itself — one uncomplicated by everything that had accumulated between us?
'He won't,' I told myself. 'He said he loves you. He said he would wait.'
And I believed it. I did.
But the discomfort remained in my chest, quiet and persistent, refusing to be reasoned out of existence.
The carriage moved through Arpa's streets, and I looked out the window at the afternoon light on the stone buildings, and I wanted, with a directness that cut through everything else, simply to see him.
Not to talk about the princess, or the trade route, or any of it. Just to be in the same room as him, and let that be enough, and remember what it felt like before everything became so complicated.
'I want to see him,' I thought, and the wanting was absolutely without ambivalence.
That, I had learned, was the mate bond in its most honest expression. Everything else could be questioned and complicated and turned over endlessly — but this particular wanting was simply the truth, consistent across every version of things.
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