If you don’t want to have sex with either of them, then you might as well marry the one who won’t want to have sex with you either, her brain reasoned. This was an excellent point, except she didn’t know Nadashe’s sexuality, aside from “ambitious.” Nadashe would marry Cardenia, if that was on offer. Would she want everything else that was supposed to come with it? Possibly. But that’s not what Cardenia wanted.

Not that you couldn’t get sex if you wanted, anyway. Which was also a thing. Political marriages were what they were, and the House of Murn, which controlled the sex work guild, had a thriving presence on Xi’an. She could very easily get as much service as she could stand. Certainly she wouldn’t be the first emperox to do so. She knew that from the Memory Room, where she foolishly asked the simulation of her father about his imperial marriage, and Attavio VI revealed the extent of his own extracurricular activity.

This squicked out Cardenia, not for the fact of the sex, but because she, like most people, preferred not to picture a parent going at it. Cardenia wasn’t opposed to sex work or getting sex that way, if one were feeling a need and it was the easiest way to deal with it. But she didn’t want that as the default for her. Or to have lovers on the side doing the job of a spouse. If she was going to be married, she wanted a spouse who would be the focus for all of that. Call her old-fashioned.

And beyond all this nonsense about sex, the issue of children: conventionally solvable with Amit Nohamapetan, technically solvable with Nadashe, but leaving unanswered the question of whether she wanted children with either. She didn’t care for the Nohamapetans much. She had no doubt she would love any child she had, but she was worried that she wouldn’t like them, if the Nohamapetan personality set was the dominant one.

And none of any of that changed the fact that when it came right down to it, Cardenia didn’t want to marry either Amit or Nadashe Nohamapetan, not only because she didn’t find either attractive but because she resented being forced into a political marriage at all. She resented the Nohamapetans for pressing a claim that she had not been party to. She resented the executive committee for tacitly and explicitly promoting their suit. She resented the political realities with the guilds that made a marriage to a Nohamapetan a prudent move, in terms of the emperox retaining and exercising power. She resented her brother for dying, and she resented her father for suggesting that she didn’t have to marry a Nohamapetan, after all, when every other person, faction, and reality itself, strongly suggested otherwise.