The Duke's Decision

“There you are,” Isolde said as she crested the top of the stairs and onto the ramparts of the castle bailey wall. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Both true statements. Avery turned away from his view of the river and the city walls, facing his cousin.

Isolde wore a smile across her lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes as she continued. “My friends have been just delighted by the way you decided to propose to half of York.”

Avery did not need the assistance of the power James had unlocked within his brain to tell that Isolde’s friends were, in fact, not delighted. With the assistance of that power – he gritted his teeth and dug his blunted talons into his palms, trying not to react to the willful dissonance between Isolde’s words and meaning. The wolfhound next to him licked his clenched fist sympathetically.

Isolde folded her arms over her chest. “Did you give any consideration to what it might mean for me if my most famous cousin becomes best known for his lechery? I’m supposed to find a husband of my own, and that’s been hard enough with my grandmother’s blood. By the time I could fill a dress out well, I was already halfway to being an old maid. This was only the second year I’ve been able to host my own ball convincingly, and you stomped all over it the very next day with your stupid proposal.”

“Isolde, I’m sure you’ll find someone,” Avery said, soothingly. “Your mother was over twice your age the first time she married. But first, could we walk while we talk? I want to inspect the rest of the bailey wall while it’s still light out.”

Isolde nodded curtly. “Fine. We can walk, and you can explain to me how this infernal idiocy got into your head.”

The two of them walked side by side for a little in silence, the hound and one of the human members of the ducal guard trailing in their wake.

“I’m not motivated by lechery,” Avery said to Isolde. He paused, peering down at the moat and then pointing as he addressed the man behind him. “Philip, here’s another place where sediment has built up enough to make a landing.”

Isolde regarded him in silence, and then turned and resumed walking.

Avery stared at her retreating back in annoyance, then jogged to catch up, shouting after her. “You know what? By offering to marry multiple noblewomen, I’m actually lessening the competition you might have for any nobleman you might be interested in.”

As Avery caught up with her, Isolde rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, every nobleman who’s called on me yesterday or today seemed mainly interested in you.”

“What about Stephen de Lancaster?” Avery glanced down, and tugged Isolde’s hand, pulling her to a halt as the human guard and the hound caught up. As Isolde responded, Avery silently pointed down at the vines growing below and looked at the ducal guards; both human and wolfhound nodded. Anything that made the walls easier to scale made them less secure; the vines would need to be cleared.

“He sent a note! That doesn’t count, he didn’t visit in person.” Isolde sniffed. “And he didn’t dance with me at my ball. He didn’t even come to my ball! No, what’s going on there is that Sabine was grievously offended by your proposal, and this is a political move from the Lancastrians.”

“I’m sorry that your relationship with me is now of paramount importance to your gentlemen callers, but when I became duke, I became suddenly quite important, especially to anyone living within twenty leagues of here.” Avery said, squeezing his foster sister’s hand before releasing it and resuming his walk along the battlements. “That’s just the way the world works.”

“Important or not, you can’t just do whatever you want,” Isolde said. “We fought a war two months ago because our cousin thought he would better rule York, and you can’t afford to inspire other nobles to believe likewise. You just offended dozens of nobles at once. Some who think you’ve asked their daughters to become mere concubines for your lecherous whims, and others who are offended that you didn’t make them the offer.”

Avery reluctantly nodded as he ducked through the doorway into a bastion. “I didn’t think about the fact that those not proposed to would be made all the more jealous by the breadth of my marriage proposal, but the hounds have picked up on uneasy sentiments. I may have made new enemies, and my existing enemies might be inspired to action. That’s why I’ve asked you and Maude to stay within the grounds of the castle for this next fortnight.”

He paused, looking at a barrel full of arrows. “Those worries are why I’m inspecting the battlements now. Thus far, the reaction has been far more confused than violent, but making a move like this could inspire some of our enemies to act.”

Isolde glanced at the ducal guards and then looked back over at Avery, switching the conversation to the privacy of a telepathic channel of communication as she followed Avery up the stairs to the top of the bastion. One caller who visited me this morning did so only for the express and most improper purpose of conveying a note from a couple of noblewomen who seemed disgustingly intrigued by your rumored insatiable appetite and wished to arrange a private meeting with you.

Avery shook his head. I’m not interested in furtive liaisons. I’m interested in political security and nothing makes political alliances firmer than the bonds of marriage and shared family.

Isolde snorted skeptically. Metalface, I remember catching you staring impolitely down more than one bodice at the ball.

Lacking a witty reply, Avery instead walked to the edge of the bastion, peering down between two merlons to get a better look at the state of the wall of the bastion. “Some sediment building up in the moat around the corner here,” he said, looking back at the human ducal guard. “This will also need some dredging.”

“Duly noted, Your Grace,” the guard said.

“I don't know what to say,” Maude said, shaking her head. “Ordinarily, I’d offer you a series of false reassuring statements, but… polite lies are of no comfort to you now.”

“Then say nothing,” Avery replied as he carefully poured his aunt a cup of tea before setting the teapot back down on the tray and sitting on the couch across from her. “Or say everything. Say whatever you want, Aunt Maude. Whatever you wished you’d said the other night, whatever you want to say now. I’m asking for your opinions, so I can hardly object to you giving them.”

As Maude stared at her former ward numbly, a servant discreetly brought over a tray of tiny pastries, leaving it on the side table next to Maude’s well-worn chair before quickly walking out of the sitting room. Silence hung in the room, but Avery waited patiently, taking the tiniest of sips from his teacup until his aunt spoke.

“I just don't know why you're doing this, Avery,” Maude said. “You've never seemed interested in womanizing. When you took the throne, I was worried you might not marry at all, in spite of the clear political necessity. And now you wish to marry nine wives?”

“I'm still not interested in womanizing now,” Avery said, holding back a flinch at his own shading of the truth. He did find some women appealing, though he hoped it was not an unhealthy level of interest. “I’m mainly interested in the duchy. I wanted to forge alliances and I wanted to make sure I can get an heir quickly. Like you said I should. And seems as if it will work! Not only to seal the lords of this duchy more closely to me, but I’ve gained the fealty of the ruler of Northumbria. That’s not a small county – a poor one, but not a small one.”

“But… nine wives? Really?” Maude rubbed her temples. “And in two weeks? That's very little time to plan nine weddings.”

“I'm not planning nine weddings,” Avery corrected her. “I'm planning to have one ceremony for the… coronation of nine duchesses. We just had a coronation on not much more notice than that, and the ceremony itself was the least painful part of the affair.”

“I suppose you're right,” Maude admitted grudgingly. “If you say it will happen in two weeks, it can happen in two weeks; there’s nobody short of Ivar the Fleshless who can gainsay that. But… I'm still not sure it's wise. Nine wives? It's a lot of work, and a lot of stress. I'm getting a headache just thinking about how to handle the seating arrangements. Nine wives…”

“Would you stop repeating ‘nine wives’ over and over again?” For the first time, Avery looked annoyed. “It might not even be nine. I pledged an offer to the whole room and told them they had more time to decide. It could be more. It could even be less – if any of them wish to back out on the marriage part, I will let them as long as I can keep their loyalty. If you don't want to help plan the wedding, then don't. I'll find someone else.”

“I'm not saying that,” Maude protested, holding up her hands. “I'm just saying that there are a lot of complications involved that I haven’t finished working through. I thought… I didn’t think it would meet with that positive of a response.”

Maude took a long drink of her tea, but Avery remained silent. She continued. “I thought once Johanna stood up, that would be the end of it, that no other noblewoman would throw herself under the millstone of being a second wife. And then the Northumbrians stood, and I thought it was politics on his part… but that for any woman to stand up behind Elizabeth as third wife was like standing up to her father and daring his pride. When you accepted the mere daughter of a country knight after Elizabeth, it felt to me like you’d slapped Earl Ricard and Baron Joseph both across the face.”

Avery grimaced. “I had second thoughts about my plan after last night, when I danced with her. She seemed clearly interested, I could not possibly do better than the daughter of an earl, and from what Gregor relayed from the hounds who followed them back to their lodgings, a private proposal of marriage and alliance would have been quite acceptable to the earl.”

“So, why didn’t you?” Maude set her empty teacup down and eyed the bell next to her chair. Rather than summon a servant back into the sitting room, though, she stood and took up the teapot herself, filling her teacup and then topping off Avery’s before sitting back down in the chair that had conformed to every line of her body for more than a century.

“I was asleep when the hounds reported in, for one. I didn’t get the full report until morning.” Avery brushed his hand over one pointed ear absently. “Then I had to balance the question of whether an ordinary alliance with Northumbria was worth as much as whatever oaths of fealty I could take up by offering an open proposal for marriage. I didn’t know, so I cast the dice and got lucky.” He hesitated. “And what Isolde said about Fiona bothered me. The bit about her breeding.”

“She has nothing against elfbloods,” Maude said. “She’s one herself, even if her ears don’t show it.”

“No, I was thinking about what you said about the peasantry,” Avery said. “That I enjoy the support of the humble born. So, I asked myself: What would my people want me to do? Would they prefer I married a nobly-bred earl’s daughter, or the peasant-bred girl adopted by an archmage?”

“Do you think the peasants would ask you to marry nine women?” Maude raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“No, I thought that I didn’t know what they would prefer,” Avery said. “I set this course for myself almost a month ago, and I wasn’t going to turn aside unless I found certainty in another path. I didn’t.”

“I wish you had put the burden of certainty on the stranger path. But now you have promised, and nobody likes a lord who breaks his promises.” Maude rubbed her temples. “The wedding itself is the least of it. Dukes having multiple duchesses just isn't done. It upsets a lot of precedent, and there's a lot to think through.”

Maude paused, visibly thinking. She raised a finger. “Speaking of precedent… there’s the issue of social precedence. Which is especially complicated if you marry all of them at once,” Maude said. “Cases of bigamy – as opposed to simply taking a lover or having an affair – are rare among the nobility, even with the complications of the aristocratic disease. And even then, usually one spouse has a clear prior claim when that happens. Precedence in the finer details waits on age of the title and of the holder relative to their own family. There are no rules for what happens if each becomes a duchess at the same time.”

Avery shrugged. “So it makes seating arrangements complicated, then. What else?”

Maude tapped her chin. “What happens if this becomes the rage? The ruler sets the fashion for his domain. Imperial law does not touch on such local matters, and the old duke never established a law against it here in York that I know of, but monogamy is a well-established custom for good reason. If men start taking multiple wives regularly after your example, the imbalance will lead to a lot of single young men across the duchy with little to hold them in place. That would lead to unrest.”

Avery frowned. “And if I decree that the taking of multiple wives is a privilege of men of great rank?”

“That would be worse. Then every man who has rank will feel obligated to do so to prove his status.” Maude sighed. “When the old duke still reigned, I sometimes thought you would never marry. And now, I wonder if I really knew the young man I was raising.”