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“Náli,” Mattias interjected, moving to his side.

“No. No, I won’t stop. She’s spit at me like a cat my whole life, shoving women in my path, hating me. It’s to mask your own guilt, isn’t it?” he asked Serafina. “You couldn’t provide another heir, and so you’re constantly petrified you will have doomed us all. You don’t care about me, about what I want, or what it’s like for me. It’s nothing but pure selfish–”

“Náli,” Mattias said again, more insistent, and gripped his shoulder. “She’s…”

Oh. She was crying.

She’d shielded her eyes with a trembling hand, but tears coursed down her cheeks, winking in the candlelight of her bedchamber. Náli couldn’t think of a time when he’d seen her like this, and it instantly deflated him. His anger bled out to the sound of her sniffles and hiccups.

He sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mother.”

She didn’t try to call him back, and he didn’t allow his gaze to linger on the concerted expressions of his Guards, nor the worried, unhappy ones of Serafina’s maids.

He was an ass. He knew this already.

Guilt needled him, on the long walk back to his suite, but he didn’t wish he hadn’t said what he did. They were words he should have spoken long ago, and that she’d needed to hear.

“She’ll get used to the idea,” Mattias said, when they were alone in the suite, and he was swinging the teakettle over the fire.

Náli hopped up to perch on the edge of his bed, feet dangling, heels drumming against the bedframe. “Why did you step in? You’ve never liked her.”

“I don’t see the wisdom in making an enemy of your own mother if you can help it,” Mattias said, crossing to the side table to fill a sachet with tea leaves and lavender blossoms.

Náli frowned. “I wasn’t making an enemy of her. “She’s browbeat me my whole life. I was standing up for myself.”

“True,” Mattias said. “I’ve never approved of her methods. She has a sharp tongue and lacks all maternal softness.”

“I’m sensing a but.”

“But,” Mattias said, a touch wry, and turned around so he could lean back against the table. “She wasn’t ever wrong about the bloodline being necessary. About your magic needing to be passed on.”

He held up a hand when Náli started to protest. “I know that’s changed, now – though, for the record, you’re putting an awful lot of faith in Klemens reproducing, if you ask me – but your mother had no way of knowing that until tonight. For her, the Corpse Lord breeding an heir isn’t just an ugly prospect looming in the distance. It was her life. She was a young, beautiful, frightened girl shipped off to the north to live at the foot of a mountain that might kill an entire kingdom at any moment. The entirety of Aeretoll’s future rested on her shoulders in that way, just as it now rests on yours.

“A baby isn’t something a father sneezes into his hand,” he said, stepping closer. “There’s a mother, too. Did you ever stop to consider that, no matter how unpleasant she is, she’s carried the same weight that you have? That she’s been just as frantic?”

“She…But I…”

Mattias drew closer. “You haven’t ever considered that before, have you?”

“What? Of course I have.”

Smile plucking at the corners of his mouth, Mattias closed the last bit of distance. He placed a hand on each of Náli’s thighs, bared as the robe slipped and parted in front, and spread them enough to step between, right up against the bed. He smelled a little of ozone, like the air after a storm, and that was different. “It’s all right,” he assured. “You can admit that you think only of yourself.”

“Oh.” Náli smacked him in the arm, and earned a chuckle.

Then he sobered. “I know it’s not been fair, but you’ve never been ordinary. Neither have your responsibilities. But I’m glad you’re happier, now.” That damnable groove appeared between his brows. “You are happier, aren’t you?”

Don’t let it have been for nothing, his face said. Tell me it was worthwhile, breaking with centuries of tradition.

“I am happy, yes,” Náli assured, and gripped the front of his tunic, just to feel the steady thump of his heart against his knuckles. “What about you, though? Are you happy? Wishing, now that you’ve had a taste, that you’d broken your vows for a winsome young lass instead?” A not-small part of him would die if Mattias showed any doubt or regret.

Mattias seemed to sense that. His smile came back, instantly soft, and he cupped Náli’s cheek in one careful palm. “Yes to the first, no to the second.”

Náli swallowed. “You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve forgotten which order I asked in.”

Mattias huffed a quiet laugh, and leaned in to kiss him.

“Oh!” Náli jerked back and gripped Mattias by both biceps.