It was the way, at least among Citizens and Patricians. The Alliance frowned on cloning and artificial insemination, and reproduction was done the natural way. It was another duty, to preserve and enhance the family’s gene pool, to breed ever stronger and more capable heirs.

She’d had the higher social standing in both pairings, which meant the children had been raised as Regulli, the fathers assuming the roles of junior parents. Even if she died, the children would remain on the estate, raised by the family retainers to assume their places as the next generation of Regulli.

A dark thought pushed into her mind, and she wondered if she had more to offer the children dead than alive. She’d mourned her own mother, then in due course, her father. Yet the losses had hardened her, strengthened her to face the challenges of war, of leadership. She wondered how much of what she was now had been born in that pain. The children were Patricians, and as much as she loved them, she knew duty would rule their lives, as it had hers.

She turned and looked back at the house, a great manor, expanded massively, first by her grandmother and then her father. Perhaps when she returned, she would take a more extended leave, add her own mark to the property. The family was wealthy, indeed it had bled so much on the Alliance’s battlefields it had accrued massive spoils of war, though few of its sons and daughters had survived to spend the treasure they had fought to amass. She wouldn’t dote over the children, even if she was able to spend more time with them. She promised herself that. It was not the Alliance’s way, and the last thing she wanted was to strip away their strength, to send them one day to war as weaklings.

But perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad for them to actually know their mother…

Katrine sighed softly. The ways of the Alliance were indeed hard. But they were as they had to be. The alternative to strength was slavery…the Palatians knew that from bitter experience.

Her eyes caught the sun rising, dawn in all its brilliance.

Sunrise at Litora Montis, one of nature’s great spectacles…

And time to leave as well…