AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You sound certain I won’t make an offer.”
“Kings don’t make offers—they make demands.”
“And you have no wish to be a queen?” Was she imagining the tone of his voice? The way it seemed less a question than a taunt.
Queen. How she hated that fucking word. Min quellea. My queen. She dug deep inside herself, found a laugh and forced it out. “No. For one, the political position seems tedious, and for another, I have no wish to marry at all.”
“I thought all women wished to marry.”
“May I be blunt, Your Majesty?”
“Please do.”
“No woman wishes to marry. They may wish for love or money, power or station, public acknowledgment or lifelong companionship. They may wish for the attention of the wedding day. But they do not wish for marriage itself—marriage is simply the set of shackles that allows them to attain their desires. Whatever things I desire, I will acquire some other way, or do without.”
Alaric laughed. “I think I begin to understand his obsession with you.”
The unease simmering beneath Clare’s skin intensified at the vagueness of that pronoun. It could mean Numair. It could mean someone else. “Was there something in particular you wanted to speak with me about?”
He let her change the subject. “I heard you went riding with Proconsul Aula. What did the two of you talk about?”
Unease crept down her spine and she was grateful, more than ever, for the vagueness of her own words in that conversation. “I don’t recall.”
“No? Do treasonous words stick so lightly in your memory?”
Her shoulders stiffened, and he laughed.
“People speak too freely in my own court, it seems. But do not worry for her. She’s useful where she is. For now.”
“Then why bring it up?”
“Because she told you a simple story. About a king who spilled blood to take her land. But all stories have two sides. I wager she failed to mention the history of her own province. Her lands were soaked in the blood of the fallen long before I spilled any there.
“The Taellan Province was once several countries, you know? But the Taellans waged war ruthlessly, until they formed the kingdom they were when I came.
“You see, people only have a problem with subjugation when it happens to them. They only believe people have a right to their own beliefs and systems and rules when they are the ones in danger of being subsumed. When they are at the top of the hierarchy, however, I assure you they have no difficulty believing their rules and mores ought to be imposed upon the lesser masses.”
“And what am I to take away from this lesson, Your Majesty?” Clare stopped—the garden path had looped back, reopening into the mouth of the palace’s back courtyard—and faced him.
“Only that I have not done anything that others have not been doing for centuries. The singular difference is that I have succeeded where they have failed. I do not deny that my actions have killed many. But the world is now at peace. Is a temporary sacrifice not worth it, to attain a better state?”
“Why should my opinion matter?”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “Because they love you. And they hate me.”
Miriam had been right. Alaric did want his people to love him. And he couldn’t understand why they didn’t, because he didn’t have the faintest idea how to love.
“What is love worth? You hold all the power over them. Any woman in that room would marry you if you asked. Any courtier would debase themselves for you, any proconsul kneel.”
He laughed, as if she was hopelessly naive. “Love is power. It shackles people to each other. It destroys them. And all without you ever having to lift a finger to make it happen. I hold power over them, yes. But I am forced to remind them of it at every turn. They will only kneel so long as they haven’t had enough distance to think perhaps they do not have to.
“But you…when you sing, they love you. When you sing, they would do anything for you, and do it happily.”
“They may love me while I sing, but they forget me easily when I am silent.”
“Because you allow them to. Because your…charms are constrained by the rules that govern magic’s use. I can remove those constraints.”
To anyone else, it might have been a tempting offer. Anyone else might have asked if it would be so bad to be beholden to one man, if doing so meant that everyone else was beholden to her. But a leash was still a leash, no matter how long the line. No matter if only one person was ever allowed to hold it.
