“Are you quite so sure they wouldn’t want to marry you?” I asked.

Paul crossed his booted legs and smiled. “Of course not. We’ve known each other all our lives. Neither one of them wants to marry anyone. Celia just wants to study her Bible, and Hildegarde intends to become a knight.”

This was news to me, though maybe it shouldn’t have been. “But women can’t be knights!” Or, for that matter, wizards, I added to myself. But Antonia had said she was going to be a wizard.

Paul laughed. “Try telling that to Hildegarde. I’ve never had any luck changing her mind.”

So far I hadn’t been able to work in any discussion of the fact that a king without an heir should not imperil himself for a joke. But fathers, I told myself, had to act responsibly even if no one else did. “Aren’t there any adult princesses who would consider marrying you, even if the twins won’t?” I asked. “After all-”

He didn’t give me a chance to finish. “Of course there are, Wizard,” he said, looking at me levelly. “Last winter, when I spent several months in the great City by the sea with those relatives of Mother’s, there were ladies enough who would have been more than willing to marry me or, for that matter, do anything else I wanted.” He shook his head in disapproval-or a good imitation. “Incomprehensible, of course,” which I thought showed a remarkable lack of insight. “Not a few of them even had royal blood! I expect wizards don’t get proposals like that, so you won’t know how startling it can be.”

I prudently kept silent.

“So of course there are women of appropriate rank who will have me-the problem is that I wouldn’t be willing to marry any of them. If I ever do decide to get married, it’s going to be to someone who excites me to the very core of my being, someone who feels as though she and I were two halves of the same whole, waiting from before our births to be reunited: not just someone who would be politically appropriate. So what do you think, Wizard?”