I can’t get over the implications that Queen Desire was manipulating Shrewd into testing Chivalry’s loyalty the same way he does to Fitz. And the fact that the route they went with Fitz was to take away one of the only sources of companionship this chronically lonely child had and isolate him to the point where he was too depressed to get out of bed.
And Fitz was in a worse position than a legitimate prince or king-in-waiting would have been but just how much was the Queen doing behind the scenes to wear down her step sons?
I’m thinking about how heartbreaking the idea of a 16 year old being sent away from home for many months at a time, barely allowed to visit and see his family is. That was almost definitely Queen Desire’s idea and it’s likely it was framed as a test of loyalty as well, perhaps even explicitly of his loyalty to his king against his love for his brother, who he apparently barely got to see for 6 years.
Did she somehow manage to convince the king that Chivalry and Verity’s close relationship was a division of loyalties and they needed to be separated or was it just to see how he’d hold up while severed from everything he knew, including his brother? Because Verity not being allowed to join him until he was 20 was clearly a deliberate choice and a key part of whatever the fucked up goal was.
It’s all made so much worse by the fact that these boys had just lost their mother when Queen Desire entered the picture. Like my guesses for the ages from what the books say give me about a 9 year gap between Regal and Verity (Verity was 24 at the very start of AA while Regal should have been about 15)
This means Chivalry and Verity would probably have been about 10 and 8 at the marriage (And also that Verity was likely 6 or so when Queen Constance died, putting him at the same age Fitz was when he was separated from his mother, which is depressing to think about). There is a lot of subtle damage someone as ruthless as her could have done to mourning children that young, especially if their father wasn’t inclined to do much about it.
You can see a bit of that in Verity’s complete acceptance that when things are going bad his father will not object at all to him slowly killing himself through immense strain and a permanently mind altering addiction. In fact on top of that his father will be making further demands on him (an unwanted marriage) that he insists he is not able to fulfil. But he’ll do what his father says is needed anyway because he, like everyone else in this story, has been thoroughly conditioned that way.
And this is why he, as much as he hates himself for it, is willing to repeat these same patterns with Fitz- pressuring him to do and endure things that corrode his sense of self and his mental and physical well-being in the name of duty and loyalty- because that’s what Verity has always been taught is expected of people in this family.
And that is made all the more tragic if it started years previously with the implicit message of being separated from your brother, the person you love most in the world, because your father has decided that’s his duty. You know your father is choosing to keep him away and not to let you see him and you have to accept that, without complaining or questioning him, you just have to wait and hope for him to change his mind. Because he is fully within his rights not to and you have to accept that. You’re also fucking 14 at this point.
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