“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I mean, this isn’t the sort of thing Alfred and I ever had to think about before, Lord Clinkscales.” She lowered the stylus and glanced at it, smiling crookedly as she saw the deep tooth marks she’d imprinted in the plastic, then looked back up at Harrington Steading’s Regent. “It wouldn’t be easy to stand the thought that we were somehow trying to… replace her,” she said much more softly, and Clinkscales nodded.

“I know that, My Lady. But you wouldn’t be doing that. No one could do that. Think of it instead as helping her see to it that the chain of command for her steading remains intact.”

“Um.” She realized she was nibbling on the stylus again and lowered it once more. “But that brings up two more points, My Lord,” she said. “The first is whether or not it would be fair to my nephew Devon. Not that he ever expected to inherit anything like this, but he’s already been informed by the College of Heraldry that he’ll inherit her Manticoran ‘dignities,’ although he won’t be officially confirmed as Earl Harrington for several months yet. But if Alfred and I agree to your request, I imagine that title, too, would legally pass to our new child… which would mean taking it away from him in the name of someone who hasn’t even been conceived yet.”

She shook her head and made a face, then sighed.

“I’ll be honest, My Lord. I wish to God that Alfred and I didn’t have to worry about any of this. That we could be confident that any children we might have would be born because we wanted them for themselves, not because there was a slot somewhere they ‘had’ to fill! And, frankly, a part of me resents the fact that such an intensely personal decision on our part should be of any concern at all to anyone else… or have such repercussions for so many other people!”

She brooded down at her blotter for several seconds, then shook herself with another, deeper sigh.

“But however much I may resent that, and however it may affect Devon, there’s another, even more important point I think Alfred and I will have to consider.”

“And that point is, My Lady?” Clinkscales asked gently when she paused once more.

“Whether or not it would be fair to the child,” she said very quietly. “What right do my husband and I have to bring a human being into the universe not for who and what she might become but because a government, or a ruler—or us, God help us!—decided what she would have no choice but to become, even before she was conceived. My daughter chose to accept the office of Steadholder; do Alfred and I have a right to unilaterally impose that same choice on someone we haven’t even met yet? And how will that someone react when she realizes that we did… and why? Will she decide we did it only for political reasons, and not because we wanted or loved her in her own right?”