"How many times did I stand here just like this?"

Lorekeeper Eovin looked up. He had been sitting at his desk in the Archmage's Tower, his head bent over his work and now, just as he had when Matei was a child, he smiled. There was more frost at his temples now than there had been all those years ago, but he otherwise looked much the same. "Not very often," he said.

Matei cocked his head. "Your recollection must be poor. I thought it was your job to keep an empire's memories."

"So it is." Eovin stood, setting aside his quill as he did. "You seldom stood there just like that; you're thinking of Mhera. You were halfway across the room in search of sweets by the time you thought to greet me."

Laughing, Matei stepped into the room. "Aha; now I remember. I should have known better than to doubt you." He looked over at the polished wooden table upon which many a tea tray had stood in its time. "No treats today, I see."

"I have gotten out of the habit of having children visit," Eovin said, "and to be honest, I had expected you to be otherwise occupied...Your Grace."

Matei sighed, approaching the bookshelves that lined the lorekeeper's circular domain. "Please, don't start that."

"I won't, if it pleases you. Not yet. But it will have to be started, Matei, and soon."

"I'm unequal to this task." Matei stared at the spines of the books without seeing them. Here, the lorekeeper and many generations of his predecessors had compiled the hopes and happenings of an entire realm and the world in which it lay. To think of sitting on the throne of Penrua was to be so bold and arrogant as to consider himself a peer of the countless rulers who had come before him.

Did he feel himself unworthy? Or was he reluctant to join a long line of heartless men who had been unworthy themselves?

"Are you truly unequal?" asked Eovin, his tone gentle. "Or do you simply shrink from the challenge and the responsibility?"

"Simply." Matei laughed without humor. He reached out to touch one of Eovin's curiosities, a golden globe with two pearls representing the moons of Arc on rings around it. With a tap, he set the rings to spinning, orbiting the small, shining globe. So small, and yet so impossibly vast. "Yes—such a little thing, fear."

Eovin smiled. "It is, at the end of the day. Fear can be conquered."

"Then conquer it." Turning round so that he faced Eovin, Matei dropped his hand from the shelf. "Is it not your burden before mine?"

Eovin's face flooded with color. "My son..."

"No." Matei raised a hand to cut Eovin short, but he kept his tone level and soft. "No. I think we are well past that, Master Eovin. I am a man, and although I have lacked a father these thirteen years past, I have not felt the want of one. When I had one, he served me little; I have learned to do without."

By now, Matei knew that Eovin was an expert dissembler and a master of deception. He had pretended loyalty to the rose and stars his entire life, all while supporting the cause of the Arcborn, which had been passed down to him from generations of his forefathers. In secret, he had recorded their histories, ensuring that they would not be lost to time. He had also carried on an affair with the empress under the nose of the most powerful man in Penrua, all without being suspected.

Yet Eovin had apparently set aside his pretending; Matei's cool words clearly impacted him. "Will you at least let me speak my mind, Matei? Just once. I beg you. Then, you may leave the whole matter alone, and if you wish to resume as we were—teacher and student, friends, acquaintances at least—then so be it."

The lorekeeper's expression was bleak, and Matei saw the marks of despair and long suffering around his eyes and mouth. Matei struggled with the competing desires to listen to Eovin's words or to refuse him the chance to speak; the time for frank discussion of their complex connections was past. It was more than thirteen years overdue. What could Eovin say now that would change the terrible impact of his silence?

If Matei's own curiosity did not win out, though, compassion for the man who had been a lifelong friend and ally did. "Very well, but if we are to sit and talk, let's do it like gentlemen."

Eovin caught his meaning. "Unless you want to wait for half an hour while I go down to the kitchens, I'm afraid we must do without tea, but—"

"Wine will be fine." There were two chairs at the small table near the window. Matei crossed the room and chose one of them, looking up at the heavy velvet curtains that framed the lead-paned window. "Your raven?"

"Around. I have taken to opening the window for him of late, so he can hunt. There is not much food to be had in the palace." Eovin brought a decanter and two goblets over to the table. He poured for them both before seating himself.

The two men pretended not to look at one another, stealing glances out of the corners of their eyes as they sipped their wine without talking. Although Eovin did not seem inclined to break the silence, Matei did not speak; if Eovin would have his say, Matei would not prevent him, but neither would he lend any assistance.

"I never wanted to bring her dishonor."

Her. Matei was surprised. After all this time, after all these years, he had thought he had healed from the pain of his mother's death. But now he knew with certainty that the Golden Empress had not died of a lengthy illness, as the realm had been led to believe. No; her husband had killed her and, by taking his own life so many years later, he had escaped from any true punishment for her murder. Perhaps it was so painful now because Matei finally knew the full truth he had always suspected.

"I was married once," Eovin said. "I do not think I ever told you that; it would have been well before you were born."

The abrupt shift in the conversation was not half as surprising as this information. "What?" He had never known and would never have guessed that Eovin had been married. The first emotion to follow his surprise was anger. How could Eovin have shamed Esaria, made the emperor a cuckold, and risked breaking his own wife's heart? Matei was not unsympathetic; he knew better than many that Korvan had not been a loving husband or father. Still, the more this story unwound, the more foolish and selfish Eovin's actions seemed.

The lorekeeper was quiet for a while; the memories seemed to weigh on him. There was a shadow in his eyes that had not been there before. "Her name was Oarra. She was young when she died. We had been married less than a year."

Matei's anger faded; such a short marriage made it unlikely that Eovin had been with the two women at once. Since he had learned the lineage of the lorekeepers, a question had niggled at the back of Matei's mind. Now, at last, came the opportunity to ask it. "That's tragic, Eovin. I am sorry. Was she a Starborn woman?"

"No. From the beginning, my fathers have married Arcborn women, mingling magic blood with magic blood since the days of the Separation."

"How?" Matei asked. Eovin's was the first Arcborn face Matei had ever seen not to bear a marke; how could the lorekeepers have taken Arcborn wives for centuries without being discovered?

"Deception." He sighed. "Lies upon lies. It is a complicated matter for a lorekeeper to take a wife. When I came of age, I embarked upon a pilgrimage, purportedly to collect information from the far reaches of the empire for our histories; by tradition, a lorekeeper's first contribution to the knowledge of the ages is such a document, a journal from his travels. But the secret purpose of the pilgrimage is to secure a wife—an Arcborn wife, a woman from somewhere far enough afield that those in the Holy City would never suspect."

"Never suspect? Not even by the marke on her face?"

Eovin chuckled. "You will be astonished by the simplicity of the solution, Matei. Do you know of the charmed rings and broaches Starborn women wear to smooth their faces or color their hair?"

Matei frowned. "Useless spells bought with the blood of our brethren. Certainly, I know them."

"Such a charmed ring, used as a marriage band, is effective in hiding an Arcborn woman's marke. It is highly illegal, of course; most Arcborn women cannot afford such trinkets, and the punishment for their use is a public whipping. But I convinced Oarra to consent to wearing one. I convinced her that I could not live without her, that she had my heart entire, and I begged her to return to the capitol with me. I promised her a life of comfort and my love in exchange for her lie."

"And thus an Arcborn peasant became your Starborn wife," Matei echoed. His mind reeled. "Oarra never knew who you truly were?"

"Never. She believed our deception was because of my boundless love for her. But, while I did have tender feelings for her—she was a sweet girl, kind and mild of nature—my marriage to her was for one purpose only, and that was to secure the future of my line. Of our line. It was as it has always been for my forefathers: our sacred duty was to bear sons to carry on the blood and the work, to hold our secrets for the next generation."

"But she died before you had a child." Seeing the expression on Eovin's face, Matei realized, for the first time, how lonely a path he had walked.

"Yes; in fact, she died giving birth to a stillborn daughter." Eovin closed his eyes for a moment. "I was lost, Matei. I did not love her, not in the way the poets talk about love. I honored her and cherished her; I treated her kindly, and I made every effort to be a good husband to her. When she died I grieved her, and I grieved the daughter I never knew. And I felt that all was lost. You must understand how difficult it was, how dangerous, to take a wife. To think of another pilgrimage, another deception, was too much for me. I knew it was my sacred duty, but I could not bear to do it—not in the year that followed Oarra's death, nor the one that followed that."

"Nor the one after," Matei said. "You never took another wife. That much I know, unless you hid her well."

"No; I never took another wife...because by the time I might have, my heart was no longer mine to give."

Matei knew without asking that the topic had shifted. Eovin spoke now of his mother, the empress Esaria.

"I told you before that she meant more to me than my own life, and it was true." Eovin looked down into the depths of his wine, as if he could see the events of his past replaying in ruby refractions. "I would have given up anything to see her happy and well. You must believe me. Had I thought she might be in danger, I would have stopped at nothing to save her."

"Tell me what happened to her. Tell me about the night she died."

@AnnaQuin07 has been kind enough to beta read Duty-Bound for me, and I just want to drop a note of thanks to her for revealing more of (and helping to shape some of) Eovin's character.

How do you feel about Matei's interaction with Eovin in this chapter? If you were him, would you have acted the same?