Do you hate me for taking Harrow away from you...? {aequum-regina}
Yes or No Questions || Accepting!
He has to pause before he answers.
(He wonders if that is at all telling.)
It is not that Queen Sarai ‘took Harrow from him’, he wants to say. It was never that Harrow had ever–belonged to him. Or to her, in fact. A king belonged to no one man or woman, but to the whole of his country.
… But that line of thinking is… obtuse, he realizes. Deliberately obtuse. This was never a question about kingship as a philosophical construct, of duty and patriotic responsibility. This was only ever about the way Harrow’s tone warmed with affection whenever he spoke to her. The adoring way he’d gazed at her on their wedding day. The things she provided, as a wife, that Viren could not. The ways in which Sarai is indispensable to him–ways in which Viren will never, can never be.
Sarai had been a good match for Harrow. Though her courtly connections had been few, she and her sister were respected for their military prowess, and she was well liked by the people. And Harrow loved her. That’s the core of it, he supposes. Viren could be content with a loveless marriage in circumstances that otherwise benefited him (and his had–he’d not trade his children for the world), but he knows that Harrow could not.
He’s too old to dwell on such things now. Not the way he had when he and Harrow had been young. But Viren would be lying if he said that there have not been moments. Times he has seen them together, and considered what it might feel like for Harrow to look at him the way he looked at her. Times when the thought made something twist in his gut–something ugly and bitter, something he didn’t like.
Did he resent her? Perhaps.
Did he envy her? Yes.
But did he hate her?
Viren sighs.
“… No.”
