So Dudley wanted Jane to get married and produce an heir.
Edward couldn’t imagine his cousin Jane with a husband and a child, even though she was sixteen years old and sixteen was a bit spinsterish, by the standards of the day. Books were Jane’s great love: history and philosophy and religion, mostly, but anything she could get her hands on. She actually enjoyed reading Plato in the original Greek, so much so that she did it for fun and not just when her tutors assigned it. She had entire epic poems memorized and could recite them at will. But most of all, she loved stories of E?ians and their animal adventures.
There would be no doubt that Jane would support the E?ians.
It was widely rumored that Jane’s mother was an E?ian, although no one knew what form she took. When they were children Edward and Jane’s favorite game had been to imagine what animals they would become when they grew up. Edward had always imagined he’d be something powerful and fierce, like a wolf. A great bear. A tiger.
Jane had never been able to decide on her preferred E?ian form; it was between a lynx and a falcon, as he recalled.
“Just think of it, Edward,” he remembered her ten-year-old voice whispering to him as they’d stretched out on their backs on some grassy knoll, finding shapes in the passing clouds. “I could be up there, riding the wind, nobody telling me to sit up straight or complaining about my needlework. I’d be free.”
“Free as a bird,” he’d added.
“Free as a bird!” She’d laughed and jumped to her feet and run down the hill with her long red hair trailing behind her and her arms spread out, pretending to fly.
A few years later they’d spent an entire afternoon calling each other names, because Jane had read in a book that E?ians often manifested into their animal forms when they were upset. They’d cursed at each other and slapped each other’s faces, and Jane had even gone so far as to throw a stone at Edward, which actually did rile him, but they had remained stubbornly human throughout the whole ordeal.
It’d been a great disappointment to them both.
“Sire?” Lord Dudley prompted.
Edward shook off the memories. “You want Jane to get married,” he surmised. “Do you have someone in mind?”
He felt a twinge of sadness at the idea. Jane was easily his favorite person in this world. As a child, she’d been sent to live with Katherine Parr (King Henry’s Wife #6), and so Jane and Edward had spent hours upon hours in each other’s company, even sharing many of the same tutors. It had been in those days that they’d become fast friends. Jane was the only one who Edward felt truly understood him, who didn’t treat him like a different species because he was royalty. In the back of his mind he’d been holding on to the idea that perhaps someday he’d be the one to marry Jane.
This was back when it was slightly less frowned upon to marry your cousin.
“Yes, Sire. I have the perfect candidate.” Dudley began to pace back and forth across the room, stroking his beard. “Someone with good breeding, a respectable family.”
“Of course. Who?” Edward asked.
“Someone with undeniable E?ian magic.”
“Yes. Who?”
“Someone who wouldn’t mind the red hair.”
“Jane’s hair isn’t so bad,” Edward protested. “In some lights it’s slightly less red, and rather pretty. . . .”
“Someone who could keep her in line,” Dudley continued.
Well, that made sense, thought Edward. Jane was notoriously willful. She refused to be pranced around court like the other girls of noble birth, and openly defied her mother by bringing a book to certain court functions and passing the time in the corner reading instead of dancing or securing herself a future husband.
“Who?” he asked.
“Someone who can be trusted.”
This was starting to seem like a very tall order indeed. “Who is it?” Edward raised his voice. He disliked having to ask a question more than once, and this was four times now. Plus Dudley’s pacing was making him feel a bit seasick. Edward pounded his fist on the side table. Blackberries went flying. “Who is it? Blast it, Northumberland, just spit it out.”
The duke stopped. He cleared his throat. “Gifford Dudley,” he muttered.
Edward blinked. “Gifford who?”
“My youngest son.”
Edward took a moment to absorb this information, adding up all of the criteria Dudley had given him: someone from a respectable family: check; someone who could be trusted: check; someone with undeniable E?ian magic . . .
“John,” he blurted out. “Do you have E?ian magic in your family?”
Lord Dudley lowered his gaze. It was a dangerous thing to admit to E?ian blood, even in today’s more civilized age, where you might not get burned at the stake for it. While being an E?ian wasn’t technically illegal any longer, there were still so many people throughout the kingdom who shared Mary’s opinion that the only good E?ian was a dead one.