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Macsen being the one to marry is less a function of his position of authority—though that doesn’t hurt—and more the fact that out of those leading the charge, he has neither lost nor found love. It’s convenient enough. The marriage, they hope, won’t last long. Once they have set things to rights in Sang Souïn, Macsen will be released, a citizen like all others, and so will the former princess. Politics does not welcome a smooth road, and whatever stepping stone can be used after the thorns of the coup, they will use to best advantage.
So Macsen is the one to marry.
He dismisses any misgivings whenever they insist on intruding on his thoughts. The victory they’ve won by taking control of the council of regents is slippery. He has the ability, and hence the responsibility. He can be patient.
---
It is possible that he has underestimated the quality of his patience.
The princess- his wife- Ymna is sitting on the bed they will both share for the duration of this sham marriage, and her gaze is too steady by far. It should be easy enough. 'We shall only sleep,' he'll say, and she shall take it as a relief, and they'll lie down on this too-soft bed. (He should have had the mattress removed by now. This sets a bad precedent.)
He puts his hand on hers, very carefully, and tries to muster his words.
---
Ymna's new husband seems to find it difficult to actually look at her. It may be a consequence of wedding night shyness. Her ladies had spoken of this, but only as if it would be she who shied from her spouse, sought to slip away from his skin.
His hand is rough, and suddenly, inexplicably, Ymna wants to be tender. She puts her other hand on his cheek, leaning forward before she can overthink it. There’s a movement before their lips meet, one she only feels from her hand, and when she opens her eyes, he has jerked back an inch or two. She pulls back, mirroring his distance, visibly confused. (The shoulder of her nightgown slips down her arm, as if by accident.)
“We needn’t,” he says, the barest quaver in the firm tone he’s using. How often has he spoken so to an unruly customer, or some knaves on the verge of a brawl? It is one matter to stand, feeling his authority rooting into the ground, but another entirely to be seated on a soft bed with a beauty not just in front of him, but reaching for him.
“Needn’t we?” she echoes, the confusion uneasing. “Do commoners not have a wedding night?” This is less a sincere question and more an attempt to put him at ease. He does not, however, appear to have a sense of humour.
“Of course we do,” he snarls, snarls, as if she’s made a truly frightful insult. “You speak as if we don’t know what that is!” He retreats immediately, clearly conscious of how strange such behaviour is in this moment, a flash of regret in his eyes.
She isn’t frightened. She doesn’t think she’s frightened. But this reaction to her joke is far out of the realm of what her ladies had laid out for her future.
She thinks she rather likes it.
His cheeks are flushed with embarrassment, or desire, or both, but he doesn't look like he's going to flee again, so she presses on.
---
Macsen has severely underestimated the quality of his patience.
---
Ymna so often sits on his desk that he wonders if they should move it into the great hall, to serve as her new throne. Not for lack of dissuasion, either: she’s back the next day, and the next, until he wants to tie her to their bed.
(He’ll have to revisit that thought another time.)
It’s not as if she’s banned from council meetings. She was kept from her regents’ meetings. And, well, even he hasn’t tried very hard to correct her understanding of the new orientation of the castle’s inner workings.
Effectively, she directs all her questions at him. It astounds him, how she has so many, never ending, through meals and on walks, even when they go to bed.
(Perhaps especially when they go to bed, because he’s more willing to entertain her attentions over her questions.)
They’ve found a balance now, one he hadn’t foreseen. Ymna is not uninnocent, her lineage being what it is, but a puppet cannot be blamed for the workings of its masters. Set her aside until control is assured, and then annul the marriage. That was the plan. The wedding night had merely altered it from annulment to divorce.
Where would she have gone after that? What plan did he have for her–if he or his comrades ever had one?
---
The tapestry of Sang Souïn and its neighbours takes up a whole wall of the north solar. It is older than Ymna’s great-grandfather, perhaps a generation further, and periodically it is brought down to be embroidered with new details of politics and geography. Unlike many objects around the castle, it has a purpose beyond decoration. He spends more time looking at it than at the fussily precise maps his office has accumulated; his merchant view of land and river seems so utterly naive, ignoring the isolated villages, the porous borders of the mountains.
Ymna often offers her assistance in learning it. He is too proud to accept.
He is too proud, oppositely, not to hold her when she reaches for him. Too conscious of whatever tales she must have been spun, brutal commoners, unkind nights. She never flinches from him, but she never flinches from anything. Once, he’d assumed it was the courage of ignorance. It’s still that, in part, but also it’s the courage of indifference. Whomever she married, she would reach for in the same way.
He is too proud to refuse her, and too proud not to want to try to make her want, want him for more than duty.
---
“How do commoners couple?” Ymna asks one evening, brushing out her hair to braid before they bed down. She genuinely is curious if there is so much of a difference, but the timing is not unintentional. The sputter that comes before he raises his face out of the bowl for his evening rinse is suitably satisfying. When he’s cleared enough water from his face to look at her properly, she’s already seated primly, brush engaged, innocent and unaware.
It takes some minutes before Macsen finds anything to answer with, by which point the brush has already been laid down in favour of braiding. That, at least, gives him something to work with, so he tugs her away from her mirror to sit on the bed (hers, because he's yet to talk himself out of at least seeing her to sleep). Ymna goes pliantly, although from weeks of experience she knows that the naive mask she’s perfected over the years has yet to build resistance to actual intimacy. That’s fine; he can’t look at her expression if she’s already kissing him.
“Why do you ask,” he asks, flat with purposeful lack of curiosity, trying to pretend there aren’t wet patches all down his nightshirt still. She likes this part, playing with him like a cat with a ball of yarn. Or, no– her husband so very much likes to be in control, so perhaps she is the ball of yarn. Ensnaring him, perhaps, in her clumsy way. He’s certainly tangled in her hair now.
“Oh, I just wondered. Some of the new servants speak a little louder than they should; maybe they’re not used to such closer quarters as the castle.” She pauses to let him fill in his own speculations. He pulls her hair a little harder when he’s flustered. It’s one of the things she’s found deliciously thrilling about married life.
“It’s no different to how bluebloods do,” Macsen mutters at last, fingers vehement in his plaiting. “One man inside one woman. Any fool knows.”
“But they spoke of other ways,” Ymna argues, without turning and betraying the amusement in her eyes. “So there must be some difference. Is it that I’m not fit for that sort of sport- ah!” Her hair’s plaited enough that it won’t unravel, and the tug puts her on her back, sideways on her bed. She smiles up at him, savouring the flush in his cheeks. “Or perhaps I am.”
“Stop talking,” he says petulantly, before leaning down.
---
Ymna's mother died when she was not very old, and her father when she was not much older, so she has been seldom outside the palace grounds. She is little recognised in herself, the same black hair and black eyes as most of her subjects, the same fox-sharp features. She should be able to blend, once removed from her rank.
He could, Macsen is sure, recognise her anywhere. Dressed in silks, linen, undyed cotton, she moves like no other, smiles like no other.
In his wildest fantasies, after they have enshrined their new government, after she has been dethroned, he takes her home. Home to his brother’s workshop, his sister-in-law’s humble fare. Home to less, less, everything less than what she has.
Less. And less. And still less. The more he seeks her equality, the more he dreams. That she will rest easy in coarser sheets, sit comfortably on bare wood. She is just as lovely unadorned. She makes no complaint of the simple dishes set before her.
In less she will see more, be more.
---
In no way has Ymna thought too long about who fathers her heir. She will need someone, true enough. She has long trusted that her regents will present her with a suitable shortlist.
Macsen is unexpected. No less interesting for being someone entirely out of her experience, no less enchanting for being as common as she is royal. For so long she has understood how unlike the bards’ ballads her own marriage will be, that she can hope for, but must be realistic about, loving her husband. About being loved by her husband.
So. To have one but not the other—it is no hardship. Not as much as it could be. She can remedy that.
She hopes she can remedy that.
---
“What do you want?” Macsen snaps one afternoon on another walk around the grounds. “Not a delicacy for tea, or a luxury to flaunt, or whatever celebrations are being held this month. Don’t you want anything?”
“An heir,” Ymna says, deliberately saccharine. It’s an answer partly automatic and partly to needle him. She lets him blush and bluster and never produce a coherent sentence, without sparing a thought for any word that could ring true to her enough to say out loud.
He is frustrated by the empty-headed doll he’s bound to. Ymna’s certain of that.
---
Is that all you want, he wonders later, safely surrounded by paperwork, able to hide from her too-curious eyes. Is that all you want, and will anyone do to give you that?
Can’t it be me who gives you that?
Can’t it be me who gives you everything else?
It’s hard to concentrate on reform. Not when Ymna perches on the corner of his desk or leans over his shoulder to pester him with questions about the documents in front of him. Not when she insists on inching her chair closer until it seems almost more appropriate to share his seat instead. Not when she slides her hand up his forearm after council meetings in such a manner that they wind up in yet another hidden corner. He didn’t even know the castle had this many secrets.
(He’s glad she doesn’t do it before council meetings. He’s not sure he could look his comrades in the eye.)
His comrades find it immensely amusing, which he in turn finds immensely unfair. The goal is to end the marriage eventually, and this is… it’s not promising an end, is what.
Even Ian, who came up with the idea of one of them marrying her originally, is backtracking on the plan. "That settles the problem of where we'll put her eventually, no fear that she'll be sent to a secret sympathizer. And she likes you very much, so she'll hardly complain."
"I'll complain," Macsen answers, in precisely the tone he expects to produce if things come to pass as Ian hopes. "And she doesn't like me that much- she'd behave the same no matter who! If she had her choice-"
"She'd still choose you," Ian says placidly. It's a manner very effective in stonewalling the former regents, and very irritating now. "But if you like, we could go forward with a divorce when we're ready to make her abdicate, and then you could remarry each other."
"Which she won't do," Macsen insists, but today he's lost the argument.
---
If her regents pulled invisible strings, Macsen’s council bypasses that entirely. In some ways, it makes her lack of power plainer, going over her head rather than bothering to persuade her into agreeing. They don’t trouble themselves to hide it, but Macsen will answer if she asks. So she asks. She asks and asks and keeps asking. Couching it in fluffier language is… well. It’s possible, no, probable, that she could choose more intelligent subjects to discuss. It’s probable that he would look more favourably on her, would want to stay with her if, or when, she is made to abdicate.
It’s probable. It’s not certain.
So it's easier to smile at him in her bright, bland way, slide her mouth against his cheek and her hand over his knee. Ask him about whether the merchants will have silk this season instead of whether trade is stable from the neighbouring land. Watch his eyes light up as he scribbles a note to bring up at next council meeting, and half-smile at her as he works. Sometimes they stumble into discussions before she remembers how she's downplayed her interest before, and his smile brightens further, even as she peppers him with questions she can't not ask.
He works hard, her idealistic husband. He lives even more simply than he did before marriage. Ymna knows this because she asks all of them, every comrade placed on the council. They have, if not down, straw in their mattresses, or scraps of unusable cloth or something beyond wood scraps. He eats the same food she does, a middle ground between her luxuries of before and his everyday staples, but his kisses taste of the vile tea he insists on for no reason than its sour-bitter aftertaste. It started out appalling, but she’s used to it by now. They don’t share a bed every night, but one needn’t use a bed for what she intends. It’s taught her to be creative.
When intercepting him between yet another meeting of merchants and his library skulking, for example.
The yelp he stifles upon realising that she's round the corner really is darling. It's a close second to the look in his eyes, intense assessment shifting to relief and, if she flatters herself, a hint of admiration. It suits, the way he looks at her.
"Wife," he acknowledges her first, and she takes that as her cue to slide her arm along his and walk indecently close. He flinches but doesn't pull away, keeps his eyes straight ahead, back stiff with effort. Ymna makes a small moue in the space of his not looking, annoyance mingled with a faint wistfulness (and feels the fool, knowing that there is no real nostalgia for a love that hasn't yet happened). But she does her best.
"Husband," she bats back, and begins yet another rollercoaster of questions. From which burg do the merchants hail this time? What news of the mayor's daughter, the lady newly-ascended? Has the fashion for deliberately unlavish weddings continued? Was it a trial for them to call at Sir So-and-so's home or avoid the Baron-that-was? He answers her questions, every one, and promises to find out what he has no answer for. It's a promise he always keeps; it is receiving those answers that thrills her every time.
He concentrates so on her questions that sometimes she feels guilty for steering him off course. But only sometimes. Now, for instance, he goes quite a delightful colour when he realises where they've wound up.
"I find it highly unlikely any of your ancestors have made as much use of these alcoves as you and I have," he mutters into her hair, but with his hands on her hips and the way he gasps at the touch of her fingers to his back beneath his shirt, it's nowhere as gruff as he usually attempts to be. She pushes the point by nuzzling at his ear. That it allows her to whisper, breath warm on his lobe, is merely a coincidence.
"How would you prove that? It hardly seems the thing to have made it into the archives." The question of how such an occurrence might be recorded for posterity is quickly put aside in favour of a related proposition. "Or if you mean that we should ensure that by using alcoves whenever possible-"
He doesn't let her finish that, just then, but she's got the base of it in her mind as a dog grips a bone. How many times, how often. How much time they would have. Her traitorous thoughts remind her that there are far more important problems gripped in the knot of her marriage than outdoing some unknown ancestor, but there's enough else tied up in the concept to keep her occupied.
---
"Are you sure she'll be happy divorcing," says Ian, not a question.
"Shut up," Macsen mutters, trying to hide the newest hickey on his neck.