The Reason for Marriage

a was startled by his sudden movement.
The heat of his hand on her arm brought memories of the night before flooding back.
The feeling was so intense and the memory so good that she felt the heat spread out from under his hand and throughout the rest of her body, and she did everything she could to not openly blush.

“It seems you’ve been working hard,” Daniel said.
He laughed as he looked at the dense genealogy parchment and paper spread out on the table, covered in handwritten notes.
Iveca stared at her husband, almost seeing him from outside her vision, in a third-person perspective.
A young king with a gentle, sweet, and beautiful appearance.
It only reiterated to her that she still did not know the true reason for this marriage.

“Let’s take a break from all this history, hmm?”

“Pardon?”

“You should be aware of the past, but you shouldn’t be tied up with it.” Daniel thumbed through the letters for a moment, releasing Iveca’s arm.
“When the royal family worries too much, they see the past rather than the future.
It is difficult to prepare for the future, but it is easy to show off the glory of the past.
But the easy way always leads to destruction, in the end.”

Suddenly, Iveca remembered Raina’s words.
He was the right person for this era. So why did such a person choose me?

Daniel pulled out a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.
She knew the branding from her days at the Bureau – whoever made this pen, also provided stationery for the offices there.

Daniel’s voice faded in and brought her attention back.
She glanced and saw he had uncapped the pen and drawn five circles on the parchment in front of them.
“These are all you need to memorize.
Since the Queen still has a lot of work to do in the future, I thought I’d save you some time.
There’s Queen Evena, who is said to have established a system of affiliated organizations 100 years ago, and King Karl who married her.”

No one in the Kingdom of Amethan did not know Queen Evena.
Evena, a commoner but a great wizard, had given a tremendous magical blessing to the Amethan palace and its affiliated organizations.
She was also cited as the biggest factor in the enrichment of Amethan for over a hundred years, by guaranteeing the independence of affiliated organizations and expanding employment for commoners, so that all could provide for the kingdom.
But now, as the mana was disappearing, the foundation she had built was beginning to erode.

“William, my first brother, who pledged his allegiance to the Emperor… Ruben, who insisted on technology instead of magic, and stood on the side of the rebels to abandon the empire.”

The last of the five circles he had drawn was around his name.

“Although I support the Emperor, I set up the Bureau of Technology because I could not trust magic anymore.”

Iveca felt a question bubbling up inside her, about the sibling Daniel had declined to mention and asked out of sheer curiosity.

“What about Princess Ashe?”

“No one knows about what truly happened to her.
So, it’s meaningless to discuss her.”

Daniel’s reply was gloomy.
Iveca saw as he twisted the pen in his hands that it was engraved, with initials.
E.J.

E.J.? She couldn’t stop questioning who that could be.
Presumably, it was someone else’s pen – you don’t gift a pen to someone with your own initials on it.
But who had it belonged to? And stranger still, was the fact that the pen was a ready-made one, that you could find from a supplier, or in a store.
If a precious person had presented it to the royal family, no matter how high-end it was, he would have chosen a custom pen over an off-the-shelf product that was commonly bought on the street.

He put the pen back into his pocket and smiled.
Iveca was surprised yet again by just how pretty that smile was.
The soft curved red lips, blue eyes like the sky, and blonde hair shining in the sunset were so beautiful that it was hard to take her eyes off of him.

“So stop memorizing genealogy…” He took her hand and slowly stood up.
“Let’s go memorize something else.”

“Something else?”

Daniel led her out of the room, and back into the room with the gorgeous bed they had shared the night before.
Iveca instantly turned red, but when Daniel casually pushed the painting hung on the wall next to the bed, she was so surprised that she felt her breath hitch.

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“What is this?” she said, puzzled.

“There are so many secret passages in the royal palace.
So that you can evacuate in case of an emergency.
Only the royal family knows the exact path, and if you don’t memorize it well, you might wander off and die.
There are many traps along the wrong path.”

“I see.”

He held her hand tightly and walked down the dark path that the painting had made way to reveal.
There was no light, so she could not see anything at all.
But the body temperature that connected them through his hand was warm and made her feel safe.

Raina’s words, about the Bureau’s trust in her husband, came to her as they walked, once again forcing Iveca to truly think about the situation she found herself in.
She didn’t know anything about him.
Iveca had to try to put together a lot of information about him from other sources.
Anriq, his escort, had been the closest to the truth so far, saying she should not believe as he would take advantage of her.
But Raina saw him as others did, wise and kind.
How should his wife judge him?