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The night of their official Star Binding was supposed to be an important occasion. The first time they greeted winter together, and the moment their relationship shifted forever. Their threads had been tied irreversibly during her fifth year, but only now would they be allowed any of the privileges of marriage.
As she stood in their bedroom--officially speaking her bedroom, but she didn’t intend on sleeping apart much--she shivered despite the balmy Alexandrian evening. The Conference had been a massive undertaking, as she known it would be. They'd met with nearly every duchy on the topic of paper, every grand duchy about printing, and the Zent herself on a number of issues relating to kingdom-wide patent and copyright laws. All this in addition to the usual negotiations that allowed a duchy to function.
Oh, and the collapse of Sigiswald's administration in Korinzdaum. That unmitigated disaster had led to all the greater duchies pulling all-nighters in their attempts to adapt plans, renegotiate contracts, and generally clean up the mess.
Between the weeks of preparation and the exertion of the Conference itself, Rozemyne was drained. Flattened.
A knock sounded from the door that linked Ferdinand's official quarters to hers, the Aub's, and she squeaked an acknowledgement.
Her husband stepped through the door, looking nearly as exhausted as she felt. His eyes were soft as they landed on her, but he seemed oddly undriven, for once. Almost at loose ends.
Also, informally dressed in just trousers and a loose linen shirt, with his chamber robe draped over his shoulders. Barefoot. Like the hero of some regency romance novel back on Earth.
It was strange to see him like that, but freeing. Cornelius wasn't going to storm in and yell at them for being alone. No one would care if he touched her face, or if she flung herself into his arms, or if they sat together with her on his lap for hours.
"Rozemyne," Ferdinand greeted her.
"F-Ferdinand," Rozemyne replied, and stretched out her hand to him. It was the only thing she could think to do. The thing that felt natural. He crossed the room and took it, linking their fingers together. His hands were cold, as they often were, and the normalcy settled something in her stomach.
A long silence strung itself out between them, each breath and blink a bead suspended in time. Finally Ferdinand swallowed--her gaze was drawn to the bobbing of his larynx, usually obscured by a high collar--and said, "We ought to drink the synchronization potions, at least. Then I believe you ought to seek Schlauftraum's blessing in all haste."
"I ought to?" Rozemyne asked, reflexively, and annoyed. "And you're going to do, what, work?"
He frowned. "I meant merely that your health will recover more quickly if you rest early tonight."
She wrinkled her nose at him. "You look just as bad as me," she pointed out.
An exasperated sigh escaped him, and he tapped his finger twice against his temple. "Let us both seek Schlauftraum's blessings then," he agreed, in tones of deep resignation. "But first, the potions."
"The totally unnecessary potions," Rozemyne agreed.
Ferdinand briefly cast his eyes up at the ceiling in a gesture she'd seen very rarely, and only since they'd come to Alexandria. His version of rolling his eyes, she thought. "We could advertise the nature of our relationship if you insist, but it would be foolhardy to do so," he told her.
"What? What are you talking about?"
He raised a brow at her and guided her over to the bed, next to which on the nightstand sat two goblets of what looked like nothing so much as red wine. She knew what they actually held, of course. For once, she’d been responsible for brewing one of them.
"To leave the potions undrunk would signal that we have no intention of consummating our union," he explained. "While that is true, it would not be wise to circulate the knowledge."
"It's true?" Rozemyne repeated, blankly, accepting the goblet he placed in her hand.
He stilled and stared, his own face having gone carefully masklike. "...Did we not...agree to marriage for the sake of politics?" he asked carefully.
"Well, yes, but even in political marriages people....I mean...." Her face slowly heated and horror opened up in her stomach. "I know you said you'd be family but I didn't think you meant like a...a brother or something."
Ferdinand slowly set down his own glass, unconsumed. "Did you expect me to come in here and...that we would..." His expression was still as blank and unreadable as stone wall, but the discomfort in his voice made it amply clear to her that marriage or no, he himself wasn't ready for any such relations.
"N-not tonight, maybe," she acknowledged, closing her eyes. "But...I mean, how else do we have kids?"
"We have Letizia," he pointed out. That adoption had been finalized shortly after the Star Bindings on the second day of the Conference.
Rozemyne searched his face for any sign of joking. "Ferdinand...I want to have a family with you. Not just Letizia. Um. And we have to have kids, anyway. There won't be a big enough archducal family to support the duchy in just one generation if we don't."
His mouth thinned and twisted, just a little, and she knew she'd hit on something real. Maybe he had a plan, or maybe he'd been worrying about the eventuality, but he hadn't intended to solve it in the simplest and most traditional way.
"Maybe we should have talked about this before we signed the contract," she murmured, chagrined.
"I believe that ship sailed around the time you allowed Sterrat to bind our stars when you were only fourteen," Ferdinand remarked. He kneaded at his temple for a long moment before letting out a gusty sigh. "I offered you a marriage of convenience based on the belief that you had neither understanding of nor desire for a more traditional arrangement. Do you mean to say that you wish for a...normal marriage?"
She paused and bit her lip. "Well. Yes. I just...Plenty of couples are normal and happy without being in love, right? Mother and Father aren’t in love and they have three sons and like each other a lot. These days. We’ve always gotten along well, so…”
Ferdinand sat unceremoniously on the bed and sank his head into his hands.
Fear ignited in her belly. “I--I mean, if that’s, if you don’t want that kind of relationship that’s okay,” she stammered. “I shouldn’t have assumed that…just because I’m okay with it you would be, I’m sorry.”
“Hush, Rozemyne,” Ferdinand told her, but his tone wasn’t angry. He spoke his next words directly to his own knees, his face still buried in his palms. “I have no objections to your notion of marriage. I am…merely reorienting myself.”
“We could have talked about this already if Cornelius hadn’t been such a stick in the mud about letting us be alone,” she griped, perching beside him on the edge of the mattress. As he sat unmoving--reorienting, she supposed--she swirled the potion in her cup. “I meant they were unnecessary because we already have the same colors,” she murmured. “Not because we’re not going to be…mixing mana.”
“So I have since inferred,” Ferdinand replied, drily. He let out another enormous sigh and unbent himself, looking up at her with furrowed eyebrows. “Regardless of what sort of marriage we are embarking upon, I still believe sleep ought to be your highest priority tonight. Drink your potion.”
“Drink yours,” Rozemyne retorted, lifting her glass at him. He reclaimed his, and she tapped the rims of their cups together. “[Cheers],” she told him, and sipped.
It was sweet, of course, and rich. Better tasting, in fact, than it had been the first time, when she was only a kid. It wasn’t a hardship to drink to the bottom of the glass.
Ferdinand, it seemed, had a similar experience, and was regarding his own emptied goblet with an air of faint amazement. “I have had cause to consume another’s synchronization potion only twice before,” he said, “And in both cases they were repulsive.”
She grimaced, recalling the stinging, bitter, astringent flavor his potion had had when she was still awash in divine mana. “Well, I’m glad mine is not.”
“The furthest thing.” He took her glass from her and set them both on the table. Then he lifted a hand to her face and caressed her cheek. “And now, to bed with you.”
“With us both,” she reminded him, and reached for the pin securing her hair.
He caught her wrist lightly. “Allow me, if you would.” Gently, he slid the long silver stick from her hair, the dangling feystones clacking delicately on their chains. Her hair asserted its natural texture and fell out of its style immediately, unwrapping and unfurling down her back, free, for once, of any of the gels or pomades that usually held it.
A look of covetousness flickered over Ferdinand’s face, and he slid his palm down the fall of hair, before returning to the base of her skull and carding his fingers through the length of it, root to tip.
“Beauty beyond accounting,” he murmured. Then he caught her chin and tipped up her face as heat and flush bloomed over her cheeks.
Very slowly, he leaned in, and when she didn’t stop him, he placed a kiss on her lips. A proper one, this time, not fueled by the need for subterfuge. It was soft and searching, and rather than overwhelming her it tempted her.
He broke away just as tenderly as he’d begun, and turned to place her hairpin beside their empty goblets, leaving Rozemyne reeling. “You won’t leave, right?” she asked, suddenly and desperately. “You’ll sleep here?”
His eyebrows couldn’t exactly fly off his face, but they were as close to his hairline as biology would allow. “You wish me to?”
“Of course!” she insisted, even as her blush deepened. “To sleep. Next…next to me.”
The expression in his eyes was cautious as he examined her, but hungry, too. “I…suppose I can be prevailed upon.”
“Good.” Rozemyne nodded, briskly, and turned aside to unknot the belt of her robe. If Ferdinand’s breath caught as she slipped it down her shoulders, well, she knew she’d been dressed up as a confection. He took her robe from her to set aside. Divested of her chamber robe, she was even colder, underlining how little energy her body had left for her to spare. Her foamy, very beautiful nightgown was made of diaphanous linen and many, many insets of delicate lace, with a sort of false collar that came almost to her throat but exposed her collarbones and skin all the way down to the last moment of modesty thanks to its being comprised almost entirely of hole rather than fabric. It was absolutely the Jurgenschmidt equivalent of sexy lingerie, and she probably should have asked to tone it down a little, but she’d been focused on her own bodily tiredness and uncertainty as Lieseleta and Gretia dressed her. The filmy material floated loose from her body, the sleeves only just reached her elbows, and she absolutely wanted to burrow into her bed and huddle into a ball like a hedgehog.
Ferdinand draped his own robe over the back of the chair and gave her an appraising, even appreciative look over, before he extended a hand in mirror of the gesture with which she had greeted him at the start of the evening.
Without consideration, she took it. Gently, he towed her in and pressed his lips to her forehead, before steering her into her own bed. As she wiggled under the covers, he followed, pulling her blankets up around them both and touching the lighting-emitting magic tool to darken their chamber. Finally, he slid down, and she felt him stretching his legs out, settling.
Her husband, Ferdinand, getting comfortable beside her in their bed. He didn’t protest when she scooted up alongside him and curled her arms around one of his, resting her cheek on his shoulder.
Lying beside him, she was finally warm, and sleepy, and she smiled.
“Schlauftraum’s blessings,” she murmured, her lips brushing his sleeve.
“Hush, Rozemyne,” he muttered back, a hint of a yawn in his voice, and an ocean of fondness.
With the scent of him in her nose and the heat of him banishing the last of her chills, Rozemyne closed her eyes, and slept as she hadn’t in years.