The Duke's Decision

In the silence of a beautiful morning, two men rode on horseback. One was tall and silver-skinned – Avery, the new Duke of York. The other was his new seneschal.

Marcus was an unacknowledged cousin of sorts, born on the wrong side of a noble cousin’s sheets to a hedge witch called Rosamund; since reaching adulthood, he had served the duchy loyally as a man-at-arms. On the battlefield against Richard's soldiers, he had led the charge even though some of his closest kin had been on the opposite side. Avery felt he could trust him implicitly. Marcus looked the part of a nobleman better than most of Avery's legitimate cousins – tall and lean, with his dark beard neatly trimmed and his eyes a piercing blue. The man had done well on the battlefield before his appointment and was now quickly learning to wield the office of seneschal as adeptly as he could a mace or sword.

When they reached the top of the rise of a hill and turned west toward the woods bordering the forest surrounding the estate, Marcus broke the companionable silence of their ride to ask a question. “So, what else did Maude say? Beyond needing to replace Lucas and most of the castle servants?”

Avery shrugged. “Lots of things,” he said evasively.

Marcus grinned. “Out with it,” he said. “After appointing me as the new seneschal and replacing half the castle servants – which became my job as soon as you appointed me – what’s the important thing that you haven’t talked about yet?”

“She said I need to get married and get an heir,” Avery admitted with a frown. “Right away.”

"She's right,” Marcus said. “Unless we want the whole thing to turn ugly again in a few years. You know how little control the Silver Duke – the old Silver Duke, I mean – had over his extended family. If he'd kept better track of everyone involved, maybe the war wouldn't have gotten quite so messy. Or if he'd done a better job with marriage himself…”

Marcus stopped when a flock of starlings flew overhead. Several landed near a bush growing next to the road and began pecking through the grass for bugs. Silence settled for a moment.

“What?” Avery shook his head. “He married, he had children. That's where we came from.”

“I guess your parents were waiting until you got older to fill in the ugly details. Aunt Maude probably assumed you already knew.” Marcus sighed. “There’s more to tell about it. Legitimacy and bloodline are everything for the nobility, and the old duke wasn’t raised in those sorts of circles. He made a mistake, a pretty big one, when he got married.”

Marcus got off his horse and bent over to pick up a stick. “The old duke had a fully human wife, Jennifer. There was another who kept Jennifer close company, a halfling, one of his boon companions who rode with him to rescue Jennifer from the red dragon. Nobody knew if the halfling was a man or a woman. They had smooth cheeks, but that could have just been elven blood in the mix. And Jennifer had five children.”

“Right,” Avery said. “Richard, Mary, Hugh, Thomas, and Gwendolyn. I’m descended from Mary and Thomas, Richard was descended from his namesake, and your father was descended from Gwendolyn. Right?”

Marcus nodded. “Right. The problem is that Jennifer's first child, Richard, looked like a halfling – he was always small for his age and simply stopped growing at ten. The old duke still claimed him as his son, saying that his mother had been a gnome."

Avery nodded, climbing off his own horse. “I knew that much,” he said. When a human or elf had a child with a gnome or dwarf, the resulting half-breeds usually were short with a mixture of features. They were called halflings both for their size and their mixed blood. When two halflings had children, those children could look like almost anything. If the duke’s mother had truly been a gnome, the original Richard could have been the duke’s son.

Marcus drew several lines in the dirt with the stick, starting to sketch out a family tree. “Now, your ancestor Mary was a different story. She grew up tall and slender like the duke, and her skin turned silvery just like the duke’s skin. She had the duke's affinity for the cold, and no winter weather bothered her. Nobody doubted she was the old duke’s get. The same with Thomas – he had the duke’s golden slit-pupiled eyes and pointed ears.”

“And I have both,” Avery said. “That’s why the people of York rallied around me – I look like the old duke, because I bring together Mary’s line and Thomas’s.”

Marcus shook his head. “That wouldn’t have mattered if everyone had agreed on who the duke’s heir was in the first place,” he said, pointing back at the first branch. “If Richard was the duke’s child, he should have been. But was he merely Jennifer's? Everyone knew that Jennifer loved her halfling partner just as she loved the duke. Nobody would call the Silver Duke a cuckold to his face, not more than once, but the question of inheritance worried the siblings a great deal. In time, each of the four eldest siblings came to think they had a claim.”

Avery blinked, dismounting to look more closely at the diagram. “How? I mean, if Richard wasn’t the duke’s son, succession would just fall to the next in line.”

Marcus cleared his throat. “Women don’t customarily inherit titles if a son exists, but Mary thought otherwise. In her defense, the old duke did rule that Richard’s wife counted as the true heir of her barony on the basis that she was the eldest child of the previous baron, so the tradition was being called into question at that point.”

“That explains Mary,” Avery said. “But how could Thomas claim the title of heir? Hugh wasn’t small at all. Maude showed me her father’s armor once. The man had to be near seven feet tall.”

Marcus tapped the third branch. “Hugh may have been a giant of a man, but the child of a human and a halfling with human ancestry can look like an ordinary human. And that was enough for Thomas in his later years. All this positioning of claims took place in the shadows, outside of the duke’s courtroom. The old duke strictly forbade any talk of his mortality, and that meant no official clarification about who was next in line.”

Marcus paused for a few minutes while he added to the diagram in the dirt, drawing a horizontal line connecting two branches and then adding a trio of slashes off the bottom of the line. “And there you are. Merging two lines. It disrupted the balance.”

Avery nodded. His mother was the eldest of Mary's great-granddaughters; his father was Thomas's youngest grandson. He’d known that, abstractly; he hadn’t thought about the implications.

“When you started turning silver and sprouting up like a beanpole, someone hired mercenaries to murder you, your parents, and the twins. James thinks it was probably his uncle Roger, but since Roger was poisoned not long later, he was never sure. After that, Aunt Maude took you in, and you know the rest.” Marcus folded his arms.

Avery shook his head in disbelief. “I didn't realize my own family was behind the attack. Why didn't anyone try… something less permanent? And why didn’t anyone tell me before this?” He pointed at the crude lines in the mud representing himself and the twins, and then swept his hand more broadly at the family tree.

Marcus shook his head sadly. “Maude is the eldest survivor of Hugh’s line and the only living grandchild of the old duke. She had no good reason to tell you that you were the natural heir to Mary’s claim. As for Roger… you’ll have to ask James why he didn’t tell you. He made me swear not to tell anyone. Death is an efficient way of resolving succession disputes. Case in point: You just killed a rival claimant and that makes you duke for now, but if you die without an heir, the whole question gets reopened. You have at least half a dozen different cousins who could justify a claim on the throne, and it’s possible one of them is ready to kill for it. Maybe even one who supported your claim against Richard’s, like Isolde.”

Avery’s heart sank. As Maude’s daughter, Isolde was like a sister to him. Would she really turn on him?

Marcus gestured at the diagram. “This is why you need to get married and produce an heir. Preferably more than one heir. The more heirs you have, the harder it is for some more ambitious member of our family to murder their way into power. And whatever you do, don't let your wife put the paternity of your heirs in question, or York will pay for it when you die.”

Avery shook away the dark thoughts, sorting with forced humor. “No second husband for my wife. Hadn’t planned on that anyway. Got it. And I need to get her pregnant right away, or one of my more ambitious cousins might try to murder me. Anything else?”

Marcus shook his head. The two men remounted in silence, riding down the hill at a sedate walk.

“Wait,” Marcus said, holding up a hand. “There is one more thing. The opportunity to marry the titled head of a family doesn't come along often, so you might be able to get a substantial dowry out of this. Being the father-in-law of the duke can create valuable opportunities.”

“Marriages for people like me are often all about politics. Usually, the daughter or granddaughter of someone very important, a peer or a key vassal. Marriages build alliances between families,” Avery said. “Is the treasury in such bad shape that I need a rich dowry?” Avery kicked his horse back into a walk.

“I wouldn’t say so,” Marcus said. “But it wouldn’t hurt. Compared to the population of the duchy, our tax revenues are quite limited, especially if I’m to try to bring our grain reserves back up against emergency, recruit the guard up to strength, and pay out pensions to the kin of those who fell to Richard’s forces. I’ve gone through Lucas’s office twice more, and the ledgers we found earlier seem to be the whole picture.”

Avery let his horse carry him forward for a long minute before he spoke again. “I don’t think a cash dowry of any realistic size would cover much of the deficit for long,” he said. “So, I won’t make that my goal. I need allies, not investors. For now, we’ll have to wait on expanding the guard. Expanding the granary reserves is critical, and paying out death pensions can’t wait much longer. Sure, widows and orphans may reap a small windfall from a corpse sale to a necromancer, but that’s just one payment one time, and it’s often not as large after accounting for the repairs needed after a battle death. I wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t take care of our own.”