Why do you want to look anywhere else? He knew the answer, regardless of whether he felt like giving it to Sosia, which he didn't. He knew it wouldn't make sense to her, and would only make her angry. Because I knew everything you were going to do before you did it. The serving girls he bedded weren't that much prettier than his wife, if at all. They weren't that much better in bed, if at all. But they could surprise him. He liked that.
He did love Sosia, as much as he could in their arranged marriage. Would he have chosen her if he could have picked from all the girls in the kingdom? He had no idea. For one thing, the idea of marrying for love and only for love was an absurdity. Most of him accepted that. The part that slept with maidservants didn't.
His deep, regular breathing became shallower and less regular for a moment. No doubt he had as much trouble surprising Sosia as she did surprising him. She'd threatened to take a lover now and again. He hadn't believed her or taken her seriously. He didn't think she was looking for variety, as he was.
Revenge? That might be a different story. He knew too well that it might.
But she could no more keep it a secret in the crowded world of the palace than he could. Servants always talked. It might take a while, but it always happened. He'd never heard anything that made him think she was doing anything of the sort.
A good thing, too. She was angry at him. He would have been much more angry at her. Maybe that wouldn't have been fair. He didn't care. It was how he would have felt.
Another child? He smiled and yawned, this time genuinely. Another child wouldn't be so bad, especially if it was a boy. He yawned again. If he had another son, what would he name him? He fell asleep before he found a name he liked.
Grus kept a wary eye on Ortalis. If his son was going to show signs of plotting, having Marinus to plot for might start him off. But he seemed no more than a new father happy at the birth of a son. Maybe I misjudged him, Grus thought. Or maybe he's just sneakier than I figured.
Every day that went by without word of trouble from the south, without word of pestilence or other natural disaster that might not be so natural, felt like a triumph to the king. He dared hope the Banished One was so weakened by everything that had gone wrong for him lately, he couldn't hit back at Avornis the way he would have a few years earlier. Grus didn't really believe that, but he dared hope. Hope marked progress, too.
He didn't need long to realize that Lanius and Sosia had reconciled. Neither his son-in-law nor his daughter said much about it, but their manner with each other spoke louder than words could have. Grus suspected Marinus' arrival had a good deal to do with that, but whatever the reason, he hoped it lasted. And so it would – till Lanius found another serving girl attractive and Sosia found out about it. Grus didn't know what he could do about that. Seeing trouble ahead didn't always mean seeing any way to stop it.
Grus had had that thought down south of the Stura, when Otus plucked his woman from a village of freed thralls and decided to bring her up to the city of Avornis. The king had nothing against Fulca, who seemed nice enough and very capable. He also had nothing against Calypte, with whom Otus had taken up while Fulca remained a thrall. And Otus himself was solid as the day was long. But when one of his women found out about the other one…
When that happened, it proved as hard on Otus as it would have on anyone else whose two women suddenly discovered neither of them was his one woman. A lot of men, in a mess like that, would have lost both of them. Otus didn't. While Calypte departed in a crockery-throwing huff, Fulca stuck by him. But she was furious, too.
"What was I supposed to do, Your Majesty?" Otus asked plaintively after the dishes stopped flying. "Was I supposed to act like a dead man while I was far away from Fulca and I thought I would never see her again? Once I'd found she'd been freed and found her, was I supposed to pretend I'd never known her?"
"I suppose not, and I suppose not." Grus answered each question in turn. "But I didn't think you would be able to keep both of them once they found out about each other. Things don't usually work that way."
"Why not?" Otus said. "They should."
"Well, suppose Calypte had taken another lover while you were south of the Stura with me," Grus said. "Would she have been able to keep two men?"
"I don't think so!" Otus sounded indignant.
'There, then. Do you see?" Grus said. Otus didn't, or didn't want to. Few men wanted to when the shoe was on the other foot. Grus set a hand on the ex-thrall's shoulder. "Be thankful Fulca is sticking by you. You don't have to start over from the beginning."
"Even she wants to knock me over the head with something," Otus said. "Shouldn't she be glad I came looking for her and took her out of the village?"
"Oh, I think she is," Grus said. Otus hadn't told her anything about his other woman when he took her out of the village. She'd thought – not unreasonably, as far as Grus could see – she was his only woman, and that he had no others. No wonder she was none too happy to discover she was wrong. "If the two of you really love each other, you'll figure out how to patch things up." And if you don't patch them up, it wouldn't be the first time things fell apart. Grus kept quiet about that. Otus wouldn't appreciate it.
"I don't know what to do," Otus said sorrowfully.
A lot of that sorrow was no more than self-pity. Grus knew as much. Even so, he soberly answered, "Congratulations."
Otus stared at him. Grus hadn't expected anything else. "Congratulations, Your Majesty?" the ex-thrall echoed. "I don't understand."
"Not knowing what to do, not being sure, needing to figure things out for yourself – all this is part of what being a free man is all about," Grus explained. "You wouldn't have said anything like that when you were a thrall, would you?"
"No, I don't suppose I would." Otus shook his head. "No, of course I wouldn't. I knew everything I needed to know then. It wasn't much, by the gods, but I knew it." He spoke with a certain somber pride.
"That's about what I thought," Grus told him. "You have more things to know and to try to figure out now that you're on your own. Not all of it's going to be easy. It won't be much fun some of the time, especially when you get yourself into a mess like the one you're in now. But this is part of what being free is all about. You're free to make an idiot of yourself, too. People do it every day."
"Freedom to get in trouble, I think I could do without," Otus said.
"I don't know how you're going to separate it from any other kind," Grus said. "You've done a good job of getting the hang of being your own person. You didn't have years and years to learn how, the way ordinary people do. You had to start doing it right away after Pterocles lifted the spell of thralldom from you. Now Fulca has to do the same thing, and do it just as fast as you did – maybe faster. Remember, it won't always be easy for her, either."
"I suppose not," Otus said, and then, "Thank you, Your Majesty."
"For what?" Grus said. "I don't have any real answers for you. I've landed in this exact same trouble myself, and more than once." So has Lanius, he thought. It's something that happens, all right.
"For listening to me," the freed thrall said with a rueful smile. "Just for listening to me. That was something neither of my women wanted to do."
"Oh. Well, you're welcome." Grus fought hard to hide a smile. "Between you and me, when a man's women find out about each other – or when a woman's men find out about each other, which happens, too – they aren't usually in a listening mood."
"Yes, I'd noticed that." By the way Otus said it, it was for him some strange natural phenomenon, like the fogs that afflicted the Chernagor country or the tides that swept the sea in and back along Avornis' coastline.