She shrugged apologetically. “Well . . . why another line? I should think that five are enough to handle.”

“I’m breeding them as an alternative to oxen, for heavy plowing. Thick hides, broad feet, smart enough to read what’s around them. Won’t win any races, but could pull for a week. The first lot is trained and waiting in the Westfields, ready to be loaned out any time.”

“Loaned?” she said. “Why ‘loaned’?”

“Because it’s unlikely any of my farmers could afford one,” he said frankly. “And they’re horses, not oxen. They need more particular care than an ox or a mule. So I’ll be loaning them out with a drover who will also act as groom and keeper, and we’ll see how that goes. One horse, one drover, to a village in each sort of terrain. It’s early days yet, and I don’t have so many of them that I can’t absorb them all into the Duchy farms, then sell the rest to my lords and end the experiment, except for the ones I’ll keep around to send to the Emperor.”

This was all small talk, really. He was not asking the question he really wanted her to answer, which was “How are the children?”

It was a question fraught with pitfalls, because officially, he and Isla were childless.

Neither of them had been prepared to surrender one or more of their children into the Emperor’s household where they would become, as Kordas himself had been, hostages for their parents’ behavior. So all three of Isla’s pregnancies and births had been conducted in absolute secrecy, with only three people being aware of the truth: Cestin, Delia, and Kordas’s cousin, Hakkon Indal. The last was a necessity because the children were supposed to be Hakkon’s bastards. And they were being raised not by Isla and Kordas, but (officially) by a nursemaid, a tutor, and a body-servant hired by Kordas to tend to all of the children in the manor. There was quite a little pod of those children, and Kordas was doing as his father and grandfather and all those who had come before had done: rearing all the children in the Ducal household with the same education, whether they were the offspring of servants or those with nobler blood, with the eye to putting them in training for positions of responsibility in the Duchy when they were old enough.

Mind, he and Isla were not absent from the boys’ lives. He saw them often, and made a point to visit the nursery where they all lived. Isla spent some time with all of the children, every day.

She probably spends more time with them than the parents of other nobles spend with their offspring.