“Johan!” Vanka called after him.

“Find another chamber to sleep in tonight, wife,” he replied without looking back.

Wishing to get to his own wife, Mars pressed a Vanka who was staring forlornly after her husband, “Do you know how to find this Zee?”

“No, I…” Her head dropped, she studied the floor, and it seemed to take some effort for her to lift her eyes that were bright with unshed tears to his face. “He’s a Zee. He took what was offered. I-I found him comely. He…” She swallowed, shook her head then turned it, peering down the hall her husband had disappeared from, “He had the most beautiful silver eyes.”

At these words, Mars took pity on her.

“If you leave him, you’ll be welcome with us.”

Her gaze shot back to his. “I couldn’t leave my husband.”

So be it.

He dipped his chin and made to move around her, but she caught his forearm and he stopped.

“Are you really going to tell Silence?” she asked.

“I’ll endeavor to delay, as this night is not the time to share such news after the day she has had. But she did not leave us unaware that something was brewing, and if she presses, I will not lie to my wife.”

“You are a…a good man,” she said as if she didn’t believe her own words.

“You are a weak woman,” he replied.

She blinked and dropped her hand from his arm.

“But anyone is capable of change for as long as they’re breathing,” he went on. “I urge you to find your way to that. I would gather you’d be much happier, no?”

“He is a hard man, but he loves me,” she said.

“A man does not whore his wife to another man to gain an heir if he loves her. You became pregnant. Thus, the issue with conception is clearly his. But even if it wasn’t, you take life as it comes and find happiness in spite of lost dreams. You just build different ones.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she murmured.

“My father was murdered,” he retorted. “He did not meet my lovely wife, whom he would have adored. He will not meet my children. He will not bounce them on his knee and tell them stories of their papa when he was a boy. Or how beautiful their mother was in her red dress when she was first introduced to his people. It is not easy for me to say, Vanka. And if you think that of anyone, that your choices were more difficult or more desperate or more limited than theirs in whatever circumstances they might have as compared to yours, and that is the excuse you make for making the wrong ones, you’re far weaker than I thought.”

With that, he moved beyond her and down the hall, wondering how he would delay in telling his wife about this when just hours ago she’d talked three level-headed women, one who had taken an arrow through her shoulder, into storming a torture chamber in order “to watch.”