Sean nodded. The hint of a prideful smile tweaked the corner of his mouth. “About that, aye. They’re hoping for a good strong lass.”
Darshan frowned. “She has a wife?” After learning they had hunted men for what had been seen as a corrupting act only half a century ago, the notion of those same people being allowed something as official as marriage was a surprising one. “Same gender couples can marry?”
Again, the guard bobbed his head in affirmation. “Nae many choose to and most priests dinnae like the idea, but coin generally changes their tune.”
“Dinnae let the priests hear you saying that,” Zurron quipped. “They’ll see you strung up for slander.”
Darshan held his tongue as the pair continued to squabble good-naturedly amongst themselves. He had preferred not thinking about how much of a hold the priests had on people’s way of life here. Not as badly as the kingdom of Obuzan, where the people lived in fear of their priesthood.
“Sean?” Darshan interjected during a lull in their chatter. “Did I mishear or was there a mention of an impending pregnancy?” Even before the rumours of a new child-making method whisked out of the Empire of Niholia, there were women in Udynea who bore children without seeking a man’s aid. However, he was uncertain if that was what either of the men meant.
“Dinnae ask me how,” the man insisted, waving his arm. “I’ve enough brains to nae enquire how a woman got in the family way, especially when that woman’s me sister.”
“Fair enough.” He could rule out the Niholian method, which required magical healing knowledge on a level that boggled him, and he didn’t think Tirglasians as a people would be the kind to impregnate without sex, but it was possible. Without those, that left Sean’s sister as being also willing to sleep with a man or the woman’s wife had done the deed herself. He couldn’t see any of those options being open to any sort of dialogue. “I could not see myself asking the same of my sisters.” Perhaps a few of the younger ones, but that would’ve been a completely different conversation given that the youngest was ten.
“You’ve sisters?” Gordon interjected, arching a brow at Hamish who just smiled and shrugged; the man had been there during the hunt for a special trinket to gift Anjali, after all. Gordon slapped his knee before Darshan could respond. “That’s right. You said some are still unmarried. Are they all younger than you?”
Darshan inclined his head. “Although, in the case of my twin, just barely.” Two hours. That was all it had taken for their mother to turn from having a healthy birth to dying in distress.
“How many?”
“Several more than I would like,” he muttered, garnering a laugh from the group. In truth, he had lost count of them. If they had all survived, then the total would be a great deal more than the current dozen. At least, he hoped it was still that. Onella had made quite the contribution towards thinning the royal line, not that anyone could actually pin anything on her. Assassination studies had been the one place she had rather shone in the execution thereof.
Darshan glanced up at the cloister. The closer they got to the cliff, the more that building loomed over them and he found ignoring the cloister’s presence wasn’t a simple task. “I wonder if you could indulge me in a question?” he asked of Hamish. “Why are all your spellsters cloistered?”
“Did you nae learn that when you were taught the language?”
“Well, yes but I—” He grinned sheepishly. “I rather drifted off.” Only his elderly nanny, Daama, could make the learning of history engaging enough to absorb, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of asking her to come along. “There was a war? Or am I confusing your history with that of the Demarn Kingdom?”
Hamish shrugged and turned to his brother.
“I cannae say much about Demarn’s history,” Gordon confessed. “But aye, there was a war. Spellsters like yourself had full reign of the land.”
Sounds familiar. It seemed to be a common theme in most of the lands where spellsters were either imprisoned or outright slain on sight. “I suppose they enslaved people, too?”
Gordon’s expression soured, but he shook his head. “There wasnae a need. The entire kingdom was under their thumb, each clan blindly following their chief. They were considered blessed by the Goddess and untouchable. Right up until the first king of the people challenged his chief in battle and won.”
“Against magic?” Could there really be a Nulled One that far back in the royal line? “I take it he is your ancestor?”
“We’re nae direct descendants. Our line comes from a civil war five hundred years back.”
After his tutelage, Darshan had been left with the impression that Tirglasian rule had been stable for far longer. His own bloodline’s influence rather fluctuated, holding power on and off over the past thousand years, with his great-grandfather being the one to wrest the crown back from a usurper not even a century ago. “I cannot imagine the spellsters of that time were pleased with the idea of whiling their lives away in cloisters.”
“They were prisons first,” Hamish mumbled.
“Like the Demarn tower?” Reports of what transpired behind those thick walls were few. Rumours ran rampant about the place, with Udynean parents using the horrid imagery of the tower complex to frighten young children into line. To spend one’s whole life from birth to death in one tower. The imperial palace was bad enough at times and he had the choice to leave its walls should he desire.
“I dinnae ken about their tower, but the stories mention a lot of death. On both sides.”
Darshan could imagine that. A single, moderately-powerful, spellster was
