Chapter 1023: Chapter 1023 - Taming Impossible Puzzles - 7
"Did you ever think about anyone else besides Mom?"
Reed looked at the door.
Then at the other door.
Then at the window, as though Fern might also be at the window.
His father was going into mental overdrive, Ren could see it happening in real time, the look of someone who had never faced this particular category of problem and was trying to find solid ground to stand on.
Reed had found Fern by the luck of proximity and shared circumstances, the two of them growing up close enough in the poorest part of the district that the options had been what they were. They were both reasonably good-looking, which had helped, and being poor had never left room for the kind of thinking that involved maintaining more than one household, not when your own wife was helping cover expenses and you were barely managing that.
"No... Honestly we were to focused on having someone like you that all our young years were gone when we realized."
"Because of your isolated situation and mom’s situation," Ren continued, with the careful delicacy he had when he was touching something he thought might be slightly disrespectful, "Not at all, right? Now that I’m thinking about how you two are, asking someone like you this question feels wrong and..."
The past in which Fern had had trouble conceiving was one in which the issue of feeling less and talking about other partners had existed, but that story had ended in mutual support so as not to destroy the value of what they had.
But Reed realized that this was not helping his son in any useful way, so he left most of that out:
"No," he said. "But not because other girls didn’t appeal to me. Being young and living where we lived..." he ran a hand over his head and scratched the side apologetically, "...your mother appealed to me considerably more than anyone else. It just wasn’t a hard choice for me."
Ren nodded.
Thought for a moment.
"If you had needed to choose between two girls who were her equals," he said, "who you liked practically the same amount, both of whom you knew well, both of whom had done a great deal for you, both of whom cared about you... How would you choose?"
Reed swallowed.
The question settled into the space between them and stayed there with the weight of questions that don’t have answers, not because nobody has thought about them hard enough, but because they weren’t designed to have answers. They were designed to make you sit with the discomfort of not having one.
Reed thought about it.
Not quickly. With the honesty of someone who understood that his son needed something real, not something comforting.
"Being poor," he said at last, in the voice of someone finding the right words in the right order, "honestly, you can’t think about more than one wife without thinking about starving. So I never thought about it that way. I’m sorry, that’s just the truth."
A pause... Ren started to open his mouth but Reed kept going.
"But I understand what you’re asking. It’s natural for men to find women attractive. Nobody I know is outside that. Nobody." He looked at his son directly. "What I can tell you with certainty, and this is the most serious thing I’ve said to you in a long time: life with a partner is not all love and it is not easy. If you multiply that more than once..." a pause that carried its own weight, "...you’ve been warned about the consequences."
Ren swallowed.
"You’re right," he said. "I need to think about this very carefully."
"Yes," said Reed. And for the first time in the conversation he sounded like the father of someone who was about to make a potentially very costly mistake. "Yes, so you need to tell them..."
The door opened.
Reed jumped out of the chair with the reflex of someone who had been responding to that specific sound in that specific way for decades.
Fern was in the doorway.
She didn’t have the face Reed had been mentally preparing for during the last several minutes. No crossed arms. No temperature in her eyes. Not the particular quality of stillness that in Fern preceded things one preferred she not precede.
She was looking at Ren.
"Don’t be a coward," she said. "If you want something, pursue it with conviction and don’t waver!"
Reed and Ren looked at her simultaneously with the same square eyed expression.
♢♢♢♢
Fern walked in, closed the door behind her, and sat beside Reed with the composure of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to say what she had to say and had calculated that this was precisely that moment.
"A few days ago Selphira and Victor consulted me about something," she said, in the direct tone she used when there was no reason for detours. "And Julius had already been sending messages to the house before regarding that too."
It wasn’t the first time nobles had arrived with offers designed to connect themselves to Ren, she had encountered enough of them, with their mansions and their sums and their rare materials, to have a practical understanding of what a mistress was. But those conversations had been about mistresses. The messages from Julius and the consultation with Selphira and Victor were about something structurally different. Official wives. Connecting houses to the Dravenholms or the Ashenways. The scale was not comparable.
Reed looked ahead with the expression of someone who had just understood why his wife had found all of those earlier offers so unimpressive. Wait, then she was just selling to a bigger...
Ren said nothing.
"What’s behind this decision is not an ordinary partnership," continued Fern, looking at her son with the attention she had always had for him, the kind that educated more directly than lectures. "It’s something larger than that."
A pause.
"I couldn’t imagine sharing your father, and under our circumstances someone giving him a child before I could bring you would have destroyed younger me," she said, and Reed found immediate reasons to study the wall with great interest, "but our life was far from that kind of world. I couldn’t live with that... Not unless he were at least a king."
Reed deflated, would have spouted if drinking tea.
"But you are a dragon, my dragon," said Fern, with the calm of someone stating a geographic fact. "And king falls short of you."
Silence.
"Several young ladies can fit in a dragon’s mouth," she continued, and in those words there was the echo of someone who had spoken a very similar sentence in different circumstances. "As long as you respect them. As long as you care for them and want what’s best for them. And if connecting yourself to all the great houses of this city is part of what that implies..." she looked at him, "...that is no less than what you deserve."
She held his gaze.
"But if you decide to do it, stand tall and firm before that responsibility. Without wavering."
Ren looked at her for a moment.
Then he looked at his father.
Reed was also looking at Fern. With the expression of someone who had been married to a person for more than forty years and still occasionally encountered a version of them they hadn’t met yet.
Then Reed looked at Ren.
The two of them looked at each other.
The same thought was clearly moving through both of their minds simultaneously, the thought that there were people in the world who were completely unpredictable in ways that defeated any prior preparation, and that one of those people was sitting between looking perfectly calm about it.
They both exhaled.
At the same moment.
With the affectionate resignation of two people who loved the same woman and who, in this specific moment, in front of her, had absolutely nothing to add.
Fern looked at both of them.
"What?" she said.
