Wedding of Prince Tavard and Princess Armandra

The Wedding of Prince Tavard and Princess Armandra was the first great post-war state occasion of the new Kingdom of Castalshar. Tavard III, son of King Rard and Queen Grendine, married Princess Armandra, daughter of one of the leading Remeran mercantile-noble houses, in a deliberate political match designed to bind Remere to the Castali crown and project the kingdom's legitimacy at home and abroad. Princess Armandra was already pregnant with Tavard's heir at the ceremony.

The political stake

The wedding was less a love-match than the consummation of a treaty. Remere was the wealthiest of the three duchies in commercial terms; Remeran great houses held substantial mercantile interests that the Castali and Alshari aristocracy traditionally disdained but which fed the new kingdom's coffers. Armandra came as both bride and trade alliance.

For King Rard and Queen Grendine, the wedding accomplished four political goals at once:

• Locked Remere into the kingdom by binding House Remeralon to the Castali crown by blood.
• Produced a prospective heir to the heir, securing the dynastic succession (Armandra was visibly pregnant at the altar).
• Established the kingdom's legitimacy in the eyes of the great nobles, the lesser nobles, the clergy, the mercantile houses, and the commoners by performing royalty at scale.
• Signalled to the still-unsubmissive Alshari Coastlords that the new kingdom was a fact, not a temporary arrangement.

The thousand in attendance

The hall held over a thousand guests. Minalan, newly elevated to magelord and mage-baron of Sevendor, was seated in a position of recognition (his Bronze Eagle of Sevendor and Royal Arcane Order honours both still recent). Pentandra attended in her capacity as steward of the Arcane Orders. The full senior leadership of the Horkan and Hesian Orders was present. The Remeran contingent dominated one wing; the Castali greater nobility filled the other; the Alshari delegation, constrained in size, sat awkwardly in the centre under the eye of the royal court.

Anguin in the third row

Two events at the reception altered the course of the kingdom. The first was the moment Minalan, scanning the crowd in the third row back on the left, identified a fifteen-year-old in a blue velvet tunic standing beside an old priest. The boy was glaring, sad and angry, at the groom. Pentandra, queried mind-to-mind, identified him:

Min, that's Anguin. Heir to what's left of Alshar.

— Pentandra to Minalan

Minalan misheard the name as Enguin. Pentandra had to correct him: Enguin had been Anguin's great-grandfather (the Black Duke, a tyrant who reigned seven years), and the Alshari were touchy about the pronunciation. Minalan absorbed the political situation in a single beat: the boy's father had been assassinated at Timberwatch, his mother had been assassinated in her palace, his duchy was in rebellion, and his aunt and uncle held him as a virtual prisoner under the public name of protection.

Pentandra was sceptical:

Min, after this ceremony he's going to inherit a broken duchy in deepest turmoil. One with no tax revenue for the last three years, no infrastructure, and no resources outside of trees and rocks. He's absolutely screwed. I pity him, but he's in no position to be a help to us.
I was thinking perhaps we could be of help to him.

— Pentandra and Minalan, on Anguin

Minalan dispatched Pentandra to the reception with a single instruction: get to know the Alshari Duke. The brief was non-romantic (Pentandra was already in love with Captain Arborn and notably uninterested in seducing a fifteen-year-old anyway). The conversation that began that evening became the Alshari restoration project that consumed the next decade.

Tavard at the altar

Minalan's private read of the groom was unsparing:

I didn't like the arrogant, narcissistic little prick. The fact that he looked far more like his murdering bitch of a mother than his insanely ambitious father may have had something to do with it. He wasn't stupid, but he did have a far too high opinion of himself.

— Minalan, on Prince Tavard

Tavard had recently led the cavalry charge at the Battle of Poros and accepted Sire Koucey's chivalric surrender, allowing the gurvani slave-train to walk back into the Penumbra with nearly half a million captives. The minstrels had been paid generously to call him a puissant and valiant knight. Minalan, watching the wedding, knew exactly how much the popular account had been edited.

The treaty, the tone

The reception's second weight-bearing exchange was the public framing of the post-Poros peace as a real treaty rather than a tactical pause. Tavard and his court spoke of peacetime. Minalan and the Arcane Orders, in private, used the phrase we have a treaty with deliberate sarcasm:

The "treaty" that the Prince Heir forced on the goblins and their human confederates at sword point extracted no real concessions, it wasn't enforceable, and it in no way would keep the goblin hordes from pursuing war with humanity -- and every High Mage knew it.

— Minalan, on the political fiction

The wedding cemented that political fiction at the highest level. King Rard wanted peacetime for political reasons; the Remerans wanted peacetime for commercial reasons; the Arcane Orders wanted whatever would let them rebuild and prepare. The Sheruel-Korbal alliance, undeterred, was simultaneously closing on Anthatiel as the wedding feasted.

Downstream consequences

The wedding produced three structurally important developments:

• The infant Prince Heir (the son Armandra was carrying) was born within the year. He was the original Prince Heir of Castalshar — though by the events of Marshal Arcane and Preceptor, that line would be entirely upended by the swapped-baby kingmove arranged after Armandra's affair with a Kasari lover and Tavard's mistress's pregnancy.
• Princess Armandra herself, devout to Trygg and not particularly bright per Minalan's read, became a fixed feature of the Castali court who would later receive direct theurgic blessing from Trygg at Sevendor's Briga's Day during the events of Necromancer. Her devotion to the All-Mother shaped Tavard's court reception of clergy for years.
• Most importantly, the Anguin project. Minalan's decision at this wedding to have Pentandra cultivate the Orphan Duke set in motion the Vorone reclamation, the Court Wizard era, the Restoration of Enultramar, the rise of the Magelaw, and ultimately the entire post-rebellion shape of the Kingdom of Castalshar.

Pentandra summarised it later, dryly, that Tavard's wedding was probably the most important political occasion of his life and he never knew it. The ceremony bound Remere to the crown, but the reception bound Alshar to the magi.