“My point, Madame, is that the pledge Caesar demands of you—that you not go after O.S. on your own—is easily kept; have me hunt for you.”

The lady frowned chidingly at Martin. “We’d dropped that, dear.”

“Enough, Martin.” MASON’s words were half sigh. “A Blacklaw’s promise would have meant something, but I put no value in the word of someone who’s been a Spaniard for half a day and already stained their king’s honor.”

Spain frowned, as I imagine Cassandra frowns when she watches her doomed brothers march to war. “I know small betrayals are habit for you, Madame, but once you become my queen they will also be high treason against the Spanish Crown, which I will be obliged to prosecute.”

«Majesté!» Madame offered a plaintive stare, but no argument: even she could not bring logic to her side.

“You are entering a law, Joyce.” His Majesty spoke firmly. “Of your own free will. You are taking vows of your own free will. There will be consequences to your actions henceforth, and nothing you do will manipulate me into lightening those consequences by the weight of one hair if you violate the honor—national and personal—whose preservation is the very reason I shall marry you.”

MASON gave a sour smile. “You can’t have everything, Joyce. You can’t become a European and keep acting like a Blacklaw. You can’t marry a Hive leader and still demand we treat you as Hive-neutral. You can’t promise to live as a strict Catholic and pretend you’ll maintain our polyamory. And you can’t use tricks and twists and seductions and technicalities of the law to snare us over and over and expect us not to snare you in return.”

“But I can still love you both.”

She got them. One could feel it in their strides, their breathing, as they hurried wordlessly away in opposite directions, Spain across the courtyard, Caesar out to the world. Love. If social mores have one purpose, it is to armor us against the instincts that Hobbes knows made wild life so brutish, and so short. Here are the two most civilized men in the world, who teach admiring billions the difference between savage and citizen, yet, as their eyes meet over Madame, her machinations regress them irresistibly: two rivals who can no longer share one mate. Their pulses race, their faces flush, and Caesar’s black-sleeved hand thirsts for Spain’s throat for a moment, as it does for mine. She did this to them, reader, planned it and enjoyed it. I dared pray in that moment that, if these two great men must fall, they will not fall for her.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Our Secret Truce

Written August 2–3, 2454

Events of April 15–23

Observed from Alexandria