winter: Year 253 of the Bynding
The smoke and heat that greet Aidan on his return to himself are... disappointing, albeit expected.
He wrangles with the water in the air and nearby cisterns, forcing it to move towards the crackling flames that surround his wife. He's grimly used to Evonalé's slips. Even the servants are trained to flee and stay out of the way.
Their guests, unfortunately, are not used to dealing with random fires. Kitra's fine, since her affinity for air magic means she can't suffocate. Ferrel, however, is coughing something awful.
Aidan tackles the immediate problem first—fire is fire, and it doesn't matter what started it once it has fuel—and makes certain that's doused. The basins and cisterns added around the castle make it so much easier to use his magic, even with the discreet sabotage by people miffed by their queen's illegitimacy, or elfiness, or attitudes, or lack of heir, or....
In any event, water isn't a common affinity, here, so the petulant saboteurs don't realize it doesn't matter if they piss in the water. It's still water, and all they're doing is making their environment smell unpleasant. Even replacing the water with turpentine doesn't affect him, since he pulls water.
He hadn't realized how much he relied on the Nidar River to fuel his magic until he moved away from it, to a castle without the massive river he grew up beside.
He's able to pull water without such assists, but he's not used to it, which makes it dangerous. Magic can so easily cost a user's sanity.
Aidan's magic is decent in strength, but far better honed and controlled than Evonalé's, though hers is both stronger and more dangerous. Some of that's natural, and some is a consequence of how her education was...customized.
Aidan understands why Ferrel's twin sister Silva left significant gaps and misunderstandings in Evonalé's knowledge of magic. Her anxiety has mellowed over the years, and they had needed to ensure she stayed willing to use her magic, for the same reasons she's queen of Grehafen now.
Aidan isn't certain that it was wise, though, and fears the repercussions still haven't appeared. How much of her difficulty with controlling her magic comes from her incomplete education on how magic is supposed to act? How much of her continued sanity is because she's ignorant of how much her magic deviates from normal?
Is she ignorant of that? Evonalé isn't the sort to want to talk about such things.
She's aware that he killed her father and half-brother she'd grown up with, but she also doesn't care. Their deaths were a relief, as she does her best to think on them as little as possible while she untangles and fixes the mess they wrought.
It still bothers him, when he remembers how he had to kill his wife's family to end up with her. His grandfather killed his wife's family to get the throne of Salles, and that wife—his grandmother—ultimately assassinated him for it.
His wife's family more earned their deaths, and his grandmother was executed with cause, but to this day he doesn't know if his grandfather was similarly justified in killing Grandmother's family. Propaganda runs both ways, and he regrets that he never asked his grandmother's brother. That uncle was his tutor, so he'd had plenty of opportunity before the Shadow got him.
Aidan realizes he's wandering, mentally speaking, and drags his attention back to the room. The fire's out, and Ferrel's coughs are settling. He's rinsing put his mouth with some water and a basin provided by the little pregnant server whose name isn't elvish.
Evonalé is hunched over, shoulders drawn inwards. Her skin would surely be hot to the touch, since she's elf enough that her emotions can affect her body temperature and human enough to lack control over it.
"Sorry!" she squeaks.
He sighs. Times like this suggest he's being generous when he thinks of her as 'not the best' at ruling, but she steps up and even makes the hard choices when it's necessary. She's just truly horrible at navigating the psychological games of internal politics. Like the basics of encouraging others to trust your competence.
The fact that this castle is where she experienced severe abuse as a child doesn't help. She still sometimes trails off or freezes up while speaking, staring at the site of some memory he never asks about.
He's suggested she build another castle—Grehafen can afford a small one, even with the reparations and the social support programs she's implemented, and he has his own funds that he would gladly provide for the project.
Evonalé, true to form, stared at him in confusion for the suggestion that she take care of herself...much as she's looking at him now.
"Aidan?" she asks tentatively.
He sighs. "Yes, I know, I just went unresponsive and then returned with a rock the size of a dog."
It's by his foot, too, and... actually shaped kind of like one, crouching and waiting for the person's attention. Now, doesn't that open all sorts of questions about what the rocks actually are?
"What—?" Kitra glances at Ferrel's expression, which has cleared at Aidan's summary. "Oh! Oh by the black fires—"
Ferrel winces, the years and marriage apparently not changing his inclination to prudery. "Kitra."
"What? That's the nice, sanitized mountaineer version. This is that Three thing?"
"What?" Evonalé echoes her, but for a different reason. "What three thing?"
Ferrel winces again.
Kitra's eyes widen. "You lived in Salles for how long, now?"
"The Three are actually not common knowledge," Aidan cuts in, before the conversation gets Evonalé panicking yet again due to the things she doesn't know but 'should'. "Thus why I am officially the crown heir of Salles although the magic named me the spare."
"Wait, what?" Evonalé's voice is rising in volume, not pitch, so that's temper flaring, not panic. "You're not actually heir to Salles?"
...In hindsight, that is something he should have bothered to mention at some point. "I wasn't while my father was alive, no."
His voice keeps light, but then his throat closes up.
"Curse it," Ferrel mutters. "Your father is the one dead. That's...not good."
Aidan's father is the most experienced and capable of them at self-defense. Several of the family have died, over the years—most in the plague that took Grandmother's brother—but most who remain are civilians, and that's if you're only counting the legal or openly acknowledged relatives. Aidan's grandfather sired an alarming number of illegitimate children.
Aidan doesn't really remember the man, although he remembers Evonalé's mother who he met briefly a few years before his grandfather died, but the living family who knew him say he lost the only woman he loved (Ferrel's grandmother) in the battle for Salles. With how Grandmother murdered Grandfather, Aidan figures that she probably killed Fey, too, and his grandfather's excessive fondness for lovers was how he coped with that. Hard for your wife to murder your favorite lover if you don't have a favorite.
"What," Evonalé grits out, "are you talking about?"
"Salles has royal magic, too, like how the Bynd affects succession of Marsdenfel." Sort of, if 'magic picks the successor' is the only metric you look at, but Evonalé should understand the analogy. "The magic picks Three, and I have to take this rock to the Cave of Ascension to find out if I am ruler, heir, or spare, this time."
Evonalé studies him with a frown, eyes narrowed. "And you couldn't be bothered to tell me this earlier because...?"
He shrugs helplessly. "I didn't think of it. I've always ever been the spare, Evonalé, and my father's likely to...was likely to outlive me. I've never seriously thought I was likely to inherit Salles, unless perhaps Father abdicated, and he wouldn't do that to me."
Aidan also married Evonalé due to a betrothal that had been long assumed to apply only to Evonalé's homicidal (now dead, thank the Creator) half-sister, so it wasn't as if he ever had a particularly long life expectancy. William had noticed the loophole that made Evonalé fit the betrothal, too, and Aidan had done all he could to ensure he ended up with the wife he wanted.
Evonalé's still frowning at him. "You like politics."
"Father doesn't. Didn't." Creator help him, that hurts to say.
"Right. And you'd enjoy ruling more, so abdication would've been a gift, not a punishment."
Oh. This is her poor acumen biting again. Aidan sighs. "My grandmother liked politics, too."
"It's dangerous," Ferrel cuts in, "to give too much power to people who enjoy the game. Even when they're sincere and mean well, they very easily get caught up in the fun of the game and lose track of why their original end goals. I've Seen it."
Does Ferrel mean in general or regarding Aidan specifically? Does he want to find out?
"Why consolidate power in single persons at all, then?!" Evonalé snaps. "If the only people can handle this sort of power safely have to make themselves miserable to do it, just spread the power."
Kitra breaks into hysterical laughter, though Aidan's not sure if it's because Evonalé, queen of this realm, is ignorant of various models of government, or because Evonalé is echoing arguments Kitra would have heard back in her native lands. (Different clans of Plainskin—who are pretty much all distant kin of his, too, as weird as that is—have their own rules and government structures, which get argued over whenever various clans meet up.)
Even Ferrel's forehead pinches up a bit, as he clearly debates how to phrase educating Evonalé on something she should have been taught long before now. "Spread it to whom, though? Any group that rules is going to attract the people who shouldn't have power."
"Then just share it with everyone! The sincere people who like games can just focus on stymieing the jerks, and everyone else can take care of their own accursed lives!"
Considering how much Evonalé's reaction to deference has been 'Go do your own thing as long as it's not harming others,' Aidan shouldn't be surprised by her conclusion.
He is, though, maybe because he's never questioned that monarchy is the most effective path to protecting the people. You can countermand the jerks, interfere with and destroy them, when you're a ruler.
But when the ruler doesn't care, or when the ruler is cruel themselves, things turn bad so, so quickly, with so little recourse apart from other rulers or even subjects overreaching their authority and meddling.
"Democracy," Kitra wheezes. "That's called democracy."
Evonalé snatches a slate off a shelf far enough away that it escaped fire damage and starts scribbling. (She refuses to use paper and ink for her personal notes or thinking things out. It's smart, since that reduces evidence of just how much she's had to figure out as she goes, but Aidan is pretty sure she opts for slate and chalk because she still thinks of costs and budgets from the point of view of a poor servant.)
Ferrel looks uncomfortable, obviously Seeing something but uncertain what it means or how to interpret it.
Kitra is still laughing.