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Try as he might, he fails to find anyone who’s even half as disgusted with him as he thinks they should be.
He tells as much to the Lioness when she finally musters at Port Legann.
She eyes the mark Daine left on his neck.
“If you’re ashamed of your behavior, then change it,” she says with the air of someone calling a bluff. And perhaps she is, because he has no interest in changing anything about his treatment of Daine unless she herself asks. He’d just feel better if someone would rage at him about it.
Thayet listens sympathetically when he raises it with her, but then simply points out that, if he wanted outrage, he chose an inconvenient time to act on his feelings. Everyone, even the busybodies at court, are too busy rebuilding in the aftermath of the war. Coupling and bedsport have become secondary items right now, and by the time anyone has the energy to gossip again, he and Daine will no longer be a novelty.
He thinks he’s finally found someone who will have a proportionate reaction when Jon enters his rooms in Port Legann one night for a quick power boost on a scrying spell and finds Numair curled around Daine in his - their - bed. The wait while he puts on breeches and boots, and then the walk to the King’s makeshift study, is silent and exquisitely awkward. His hands are shaking by the time he casts the spell. When he’s finished with it, instead of dismissing him, Jon raises the sound wards and eyes him into a seat. It’s almost a relief.
“For how long, exactly, has Daine been sharing your bed?” he asks.
Numair feels his face flame, even as something in his heart unclenches. Finally.
“Since just after Midsummer, Sire,” he says, mouth and throat going dry.
Jon looks at him with sharp eyes, and then - relaxes. He nods at him once and motions for him to leave.
“Wait!” Numair hisses, and Jon turns back to him. “Don’t you have - I don’t know - an objection?”
Jon’s eyebrows raise. “She’s an adult,” he says.
“ Yes , but-” Numair stops. Breathes. “But I was her mentor. She was my ward. How do you know I didn’t - didn’t - use my influence over her to - or maybe she imprinted on me, or…” he trails off when Jon’s facial expression doesn’t change.
“She was a ward of the crown,” Jon finally says. “In point of fact.”
“ Yes , but-”
“She has power over all animals.”
“That’s hardly the point-”
“Neither you, nor I, nor anyone has ever successfully ordered her to do something she doesn’t want to do. At this point, if I see she really has her heart set on something, I order her to do that to make myself feel better.”
Well that explains your orders regarding Ozorne, Numair thinks sourly, still bitter that Jon had let her go after him alone. Eventually, at a loss for anything else, he says:
“But - aren’t you disappointed in me?”
Jon is silent a long time.
“Do you remember,” he says, “Before you went to Carthak, and I told you that the decisions a good king would make and the decisions a good man would make are often different?”
“I do.”
“When I first saw you and Daine fight together, when she’d first arrived in Tortall, that day those Stormwings attacked the palace, and I realized how powerful she could be, it stood juxtaposed against how powerful you already are.”
Numair squints at him, and Jon sighs.
“I confess that, partnering you two together, I rather…hoped this might happen.”
A cube of ice trails its way down Numair’s spine.
“Neither of you are noble, so I cannot arrange for you to marry, and even if I could, the lack of title decreases the incentive to…produce a legitimate heir. So at first, it was just an outside chance. But then as you two became closer, it was a…distinct possibility.
“Of course, I would not have thrown you two together like that if I thought you were any danger to Daine.”
The King looks at the floor for a long moment. “Or at least, I hope I wouldn’t have.” He sighs. “So no, I’m not disappointed. In fact, should your…association produce children, Tortall will be all the stronger for it.”
The King nods to him again, and this time Numair leaves, feeling like there’s a film of slime on his tongue.
The problem, he decides the next morning, is that he’s been trying to talk to nobles about this. Nobles are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to parsing - or having - basic human emotions. After all, they’re brought up thinking of marriage as a transaction and viewing human bloodlines the way some people view stallions’.
To his deep disgust, he realizes that these days most of his friends are nobles - particularly when the first not-quite-noble he’s able to find is actually, technically, a baron .
George sits back lazily in his chair while Numair paces and talks, hands flying. It quickly occurs to him that George isn’t taking this quite as seriously as he ought to be.
“Numair,” he interrupts him gently when Numair has stopped to breathe. “Do you honestly believe Daine would be happy with a lad her own age?”
“I - well - it would be proper -” Numair blusters.
“Use that big brain o’ yours and think for a minute. Out of all her friends, how many are her age, and how many are, say, older’n you?”
Numair thinks about it. “Well - then surely that’s even worse!” he says. “She spends all her time with me, so of course her friends-”
“She spends summers surrounded by folk her own age when she travels with the Riders, and comes back muttering about flighty youths. Roald and Kally are only a few years younger’n her, and she treats them like her own children. She seeks out adult company because she prefers it, not because she has no other choice, and I can’t see why she’d do any different for her romances.”
He knows a lost cause when he sees one; he tries Onua next.
“If it’s a shovel talk you want, I’ll cheerfully give you that,” she says, wrestling with some tack and without even looking up at him. “But I won’t validate this silly notion that Daine is entirely without agency between you two.”
“Without-” Numair splutters. “So if you heard about any 16 year old girl embarking on a new relationship with her thirty year old former tutor , who she has spent an uncommon amount of unchaperoned time with since she was thirteen, might I add, your response would be that the girl has agency? ”
Onua sighs and finally looks up. “We’re not talking about any couple, we’re talking about you and Daine. You spend so much time fretting about decency and morality and honor that the rest of us don’t need to. Besides, her parents are gods , and ones who seem to take an uncommon interest in her well-being. As far as I can tell, you’re still alive and all your bits work, so I can only assume that they don’t object to the match too strongly. Who am I to judge against that?”
Numair boggles at her, and she rolls her eyes.
“If you want someone to coddle you, go talk to Daine about this,” she says, and Numair throws up his hands and leaves.
Finally, in desperation, Numair seeks out Lindhall . This conversation proves to be the most distressing of all.
At first he thinks it’s going well. Lindhall gives him tea, and sits across from him in his study, and lets Numair rant about integrity and the sanctity of the bond between teacher and student for a full ten minutes. Lindhall clucks sympathetically in all the right places, but there’s something guarded hiding behind his eyes.
“I mean,” Numair says, “You wouldn’t behave this way, surely?”
Lindhall is silent a long time, then sighs and goes to fetch a book from his bookcase.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever show this to you,” he says. Numair examines the book. It’s written in Old Thak: a recounting of the words Kidunka the World Snake related to Aran, the first human prophet.
“Look at the marked page,” Lindhall says. Numair finds the page and dutifully reads:
And still there are gods who are yet unborn. The greatest of these is Lady of Beasts, who is the intercessor of all beasts before the human gods. Though she is divine, she must pass through mortal form before ascension. Her consort, the Gift-Bringer, holds the black and white fire of all mortal Gifts in his hands, and so too must be born mortal himself.
It takes him a while to puzzle out the passage, as written Old Thak has notoriously thorny syntax, but then when he does he looks up at Lindhall, horrified.
Lindhall’s eyes are kind - and sad.
“What’s fourteen mortal years to gods?” he says.
Numair spends the next four hours burying this new information under the most intricate memory-modification spellwork he can manage before finally taking Onua’s advice and going to find Daine.
By this time, his speech is well-rehearsed, and he runs through it quickly, his voice only cracking into its hysterical register twice. By the time he’s done, Daine is shrunk into herself, looking at the floor, and it’s so different from the reaction he expected that he reaches out to her.
“Daine?” he asks.
“So that’s it, then,” she says, voice small. “You’ve had enough of me.”
See? She’s sixteen! The hysterical part of his brain wails at him - while the more logical side points out that, after the trauma she’s sustained, she’d likely have this reaction to perceived abandonment no matter what her age.
“ No ,” Numair says, grabbing her hands. “I’ll never have enough of you. You’re stuck with me, Magelet, until I hear otherwise from your own lips and not a moment before.”
He sees her shoulders begin to relax.
“I don’t want anything between us to change, except perhaps our marital status. Just-” his voice goes petulant, even to his own ears “-I think I’d feel better if someone took my feelings seriously in all this.”
She relaxes fully and abruptly.
“Oh,” she says.
Numair blinks. “Magelet?” he asks.
“I understand.” She nods once.
“You…do?” That would make her the first. He’s still parsing this when she takes a step forward and wraps her arms awkwardly around his shoulders - the closest she can come to holding him when they’re both standing, with their height difference.
“Mhmm,” she says, nodding against his chest. “You have this idea of what a good man looks like in your head. And part of that image is someone who doesn’t bed their student. And now, here we are, and I used to be your student, and suddenly the picture of yourself you have in your head has a part that doesn’t overlap with the picture of a good man anymore, and it’s makin’ you feel all tangled up inside.”
“Yes,” Numair says slowly, parsing this. Then: “ Yes .” His arms come to her waist and he cuddles her close. She breathes into it for a moment, then tips her head up to watch him. Her eyes are big, and intelligent, and wry, and he loves her so much.
“You know,” she says. “I could point out that I’m not your student anymore, and that I’m an adult and that plenty of girls my age are married to men older’n you, but I don’t see how that’s going to help much. So instead, how about I tell you that I know you’re a good man, because you’re the kind of man who wants so badly to do right by me that you let yourself go and get tangled in knots over it. And how about I tell you that I love you, and it’s not because I imprinted on you like some duckling, but because you’re funny and silly and moody and daft sometimes and work so hard to be worthy of what you have. And since sometimes you’re just going to feel this way, and that’s alright, let’s agree that when it happens I’ll sit with you or hold you or whatever you need and remind you that you’re a good man and that I love you. How does that sound?”
Numair tries to ignore the fact that his eyes are wet by the end of her little speech, and focuses instead on the way the band around his heart seems to ease.
“It sounds perfect, Magelet,” he says - croaks. “Where did you get so wise?”
She grins at him, her cheek dimpling.
“Cloud, of course,” she says, and kisses him.