As the sun rose the next day, we departed our impromptu camp on the side of the road. Haydith rode with me on my carriage, and David rode with Miriam on Eadric’s old carriage. Sherlock the Caligan Hound walked beside my carriage in an attempt to stay as close to Haydith as possible.

  In the light of the early morning sun, I held the reins of my two draft horses and sat in a comfortable silence. A moment of respite after our harrowing experience with Alexander Lee the Blue Mage was much appreciated by my weary bones and sinew.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I looked over at Haydith, whose eyes were locked on the pages of The Tale of Etron and Sondrith, a quasi-historical romance novel from the library in my carriage. Haydith had already read more than half of the book. She must have spent much of the past twelve hours reading.

  “Have you read much since you got here?” I asked.

  “Huh?” Haydith muttered, blinking back into reality. “No. I wish it were different, but books are expensive. Most people can feed themselves for a week with the amount of money that a book costs. My father taught me to read by scribbling runes in the dirt.”

  “Your adoptive father?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Haydith said with some muted resentment in her voice. “It’s funny, you know. My biological father lived less than a mile away from me for my whole life, and he never came to visit me.”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s an asshole; we can agree on that,” I said, eliciting a laugh from Haydith.

  After a beat of silence, Haydith said, “Do you really think I can become the next Queen of Etronia?”

  “It will be tough. Without soft power, we’ll need to show our dominance in battle,” I said truthfully.

  “If we had more soft power,” Haydith said quietly, “would fewer people have to die?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well,” Haydith said, shutting the book and placing it on the seat next to her thigh. She cleared her throat before nervously saying, “There was a plot line in this book that gave me an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “According to the story, Etron was a nobleman in Ostland, and Sondrith was the first Saint of Nyx. They wanted to subtly build support for the Church of Nyx in Ostland without immediately revealing Sondrith as a saint, so they had Etron declare his engagement to Sondrith before revealing her true nature,” Haydith said.

  I was too busy thinking about the nature of the story to really pick up on what Haydith was saying. There were many inaccuracies in the theoretical engagement between Etron and Sondrith due to the era’s poor record keeping and hundreds of years of mysticism surrounding the heroes. For example, nobody knew what Etronia was called before Etron came along. The name “Ostland” - which literally meant “Eastland” - was an invention that came two hundred years after Etron died.

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  “Oh, yeah, I remember that part of the story,” I said. “The engagement became a huge scandal, so every noble in Ostland heard of Sondrith by the time she declared herself to be a Saint of Nyx. But then…”

  “Hey,” Haydith said, lightly nudging my shoulder. “I’ve only finished half of the story. Don’t spoil it.” She cleared her throat again. “My idea is… well… wouldn’t we benefit from the same thing?”

  “Hmm,” I said, scratching my face. Suddenly, realization dawned on me. “Oh! You mean…?”

  “Sorry, j-just forget I said anything!” Haydith said as her cheeks turned a bright red.

  “No, that’s a great idea, Haydith. My reputation will take a hit, but that’s a small price to pay.” I cleared my throat and turned my head to hide from Haydith the slight reddening in my cheeks. Luckily, the flush of emotion didn’t cause my body to heat up significantly. That only happened when I felt anger, apparently.

  “Are you really okay with this?” I said, looking over at Haydith. “I know that’s the point, but there will be some controversy.”

  “It was my idea, wasn’t it?” Haydith said.

  “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath in an attempt to flush the adolescent feelings out of my system. My physical nature as a teenager only seemed to affect me at times like this. “When we get to Fulvang, I’ll introduce you to Duchess Mandelbrot as my fiancée. We’ll need formal clothes and a pair of engagement rings.”

  “Y-You don’t have to do that,” Haydith said nervously. “Can’t we just tell the town crier, or something?”

  “Would you prefer that?” I asked. “If we’re going to do this, then I think we should really commit to it.”

  “All right,” Haydith said, looking down. “I’ll do it if you think it’s for the best.”

  We continued our journey for the rest of the day, and I spent most of the next few hours thinking about Haydith’s plan. It was similar to my own plan, but I intended to move much slower for her sake. The long-term goal was for me to become Haydith’s prince consort, so I would hardly turn down the opportunity for me to achieve that goal so quickly.

  Achieving this goal so quickly caught me off guard. Though, that wasn’t a bad thing. Sometimes, unpredictability could be a good thing. It reminded me that I was human and not an omniscient god in a sea of computer code.

  When we stopped at the end of the day, we began unloading the tents and camping equipment. As I moved my tent out of my carriage, I caught sight of my own reflection in a small mirror off to one side.

  My eyes were even more sallow than usual, and sickly black veins still ran across my face, neck, and hands due to the side-effects of the mana potion. I was unclean, and small bloodstains marked my left sleeve where I had been injured in the fight against Alexander Lee.

  “She wants to marry this guy?” I asked rhetorically to the reflection, and he looked back at me with a sardonic smile.

  The reflection staring back at me was unequivocally a descendent of Sondrith. Even after more than six hundred years, most of the Northern Lords carried her pale skin, black hair, and red eyes. I recalled the ending of The Tale of Etron and Sondrith. It could only really end one way. There’s a reason why Haydith and I aren’t related, after all.

  Etron and Sondrith’s fake engagement did eventually transform into a real relationship, and some historiographers even claimed that they were in love. As history showed, they did not end up together.

  Would the pattern continue? Would the descendents of Etron and Sondrith follow their progenitors’ footsteps? I had no idea how it would end, but that hint of unpredictability filled me with a strange excitement.