Page 170 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“A valid point,” Nore allowed, seeing the knots of duty that held Locke in place, and why it was getting harder and harder to breathe. “So there are no hidden heirs, then.”

“No,” Locke said, but there was something concealed in her expression. Nore narrowed her eyes, held the High Lady’s gaze. Locke looked away.

“Your Majesty,” Nore said, “I didn’t want to bring this up the last time we spoke.” Nore searched for words. “I… may or may not have… investigated your tailor. Right before the worst of the droughts last year, there was an order for new clothing. Differently sized, dare I say—”

“Surely, you understand one’s body is not a constant shape,” Locke muttered under her breath.

“—and then you cancelled them,” Nore said quietly. “Or, probably an attendant did, considering the drought. You were not seen by your council that week, either.”

“Ah.” Locke looked at her hands. Then, almost like an afterthought, a confession, Locke said, “I—we… There was nearly an heir. I lost them, over the winter. I was very ill in the aftermath. Presumably, that illness was the reason for the drought, though of course, it was not something we could admit.”

Nore drew a breath. She sat very still, waiting to hear if the High Lady’s voice faltered. Locke paused, wavered, then continued, “Kier suspects, if you worked for Cleoc, you already knew, or your husband did; if not, Cleoc trusted him enough to send him here, even knowing he might uncover it.”

Nore turned to study Locke’s face. “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty.” Nore herself had never considered children and had gone through all possible measures to prevent them, but she knew how much responsibility Locke had to have a child, and what such a loss could mean to her politically—

And as a person. The grief compounding.

Perhaps the High Lady read her thoughts. “I didn’t know,” she said finally, “that there was space still, after everything else, for more grief within me.”

Nore caught herself again in one of those eddies. She paused, considering her next words, trying to aim for somewhere between sympathy and tact. “Did anyone else… know?”

Locke snorted. “Kier did, obviously. My healer. My closest attendant. Ola. And… Cleoc,” she said, her voice softening.

“And Scaelas?”

“No,” Locke said, setting her empty mug aside, then wrapping her arms tighter around herself. “I didn’t want him to worry, or tell me about how strong my mother once was.”

She found her suspicions confirmed. Nore remembered that Locke had lost her mother early, but she wondered if the High Lady of Cleoc Strata, another sovereign rumored to be cold and cruel, was only cruel to protect those she cared for.

She was, perhaps, sensing a theme in Idistran cultural structures.

“And it was a reminder that if something happens to you,” Nore hedged, “and you have not left a clear line of succession…”

Locke nodded. “The United Council threatened to reevaluate alliances if I did not marry by Wintertide—and though I did not want to, what other choice did I have?” She frowned, folding more securely over herself. “This Isle. Its power. It takes and takes and takes—it takes my emotions and corrupts them; it takes the things I love and turns them to dust. The only thing it has left me is Kier, and if loving him puts him in greater danger…” Locke hesitated. “I can’t lose him again. And if that means I have to marry for an alliance, even if it’s only political—”

“But political marriage is not enough,” Nore said softly. “They would know, when you do not complete a binding ritual, that something else is afoot.”

Locke was silent for a moment. “I was hoping,” she said finally, “that others would not know the intricacies.”

It was not an assumption they could rely on, but there was no use in pointing that out to Locke—not if there was another solution. Nore turned to the conversation she was dreading.

“What if the power didn’t follow your every whim?” Nore said. “What if you could give up some of the control?”

Locke sighed. “It would be welcome. But I don’t know if it’s possible. It was so unstable, so erratic when we brought the Isle back. The only way to direct the power was to control it myself. It’s not as if I can ask for advice.”

“And you are good,” Nore said, taking a chance. “But what happens if you do pass on the control? What happens in fifty years? Five hundred? What happens if it doesn’t pass correctly, or if someone seizes control?”

Locke took a moment to answer. “I think it’s best if it dies with me.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” Locke said, curling up, burying her face in her hands. “We’ve been through this so many times, Kier and I—how to redirect it, how to make it hurt less. But I don’t know, Nore. If there are technicalities I’ve missed, they died with my mother’s line. There are no gods here on this Isle—there are only ghosts.”

Nore was not here to debate theology nor history. “If we found a way to separate you from the control of the power, to root it in the Isle instead of within you, would you try it?”

Locke laughed bitterly into her arms. “It’s too much of a risk. What happens if it goes wrong? For all we know, I can blow up the Isle again. I’ve done it before.”

“I know,” Nore said quickly—too quickly. “But what we found… it requires a mage and a well and does not speak of destruction. It’s old lore of the Isle, but my colleague, Professor Augustine—”