He frowned. "Surely you love your children." He replied, flicking her necklaces. "You come to their weddings, make sure they do fine with the lives they choose. You're not a heedless animal." His hand moved down and around her hip, lazily.

"And you see how well that works," she replied. "She's like her father. Thinks everything comes to doom in the end. So she's signed herself on for a marriage with a tragedy already built into it. If she'd dropped him cold this summer, both of them would have already found someone else by now. But instead she kept danglin' hope in front of him, so he stuck around."

"Well, it's not like he's enchanted. He stayed around even though he knows the risks and the whole tragedy bit. At least they're honest about it." He looked back down at her. "They could be too stupid to care." His mouth twisted again. "So there's that."

"I'm not so sure he's not," she said. "That whole family's got some ganconner wiles to it. Could be that neither of them realise what's happening." She shrugged again. "Then again, he's an Italian and she's a redhead. You don't need magic with that combination."

He laughed. "I've no idea what an Italian is. I always thought he was a Cecelian with some Wreath blood in him. Are these Italians good lovers, then?"

"I forgot, you wouldn't have been to Italy." She laughed. "Yes, yes, so it's rumoured. Plus you've never been exposed to their opera. Three-four hour long ballads where rape, murder, and suicide is the best thing that can happen to your marriage."

He laughed and his whole body shook. "So he think's he's getting off easily then, with only dying while his wife is in her prime or becoming a horrible beast. For him," He giggled, "It's a happy ending!"

"She's no better. She gets it from this end, where it's idealised that people fall in love, one of 'em croaks early, and the other half of the pair swears off love forever and mopes around the hilltops. Like that child needs an excuse to mope." She shook her head. "What really happens is what always happens: you get married, you stay together longer'n any god ever intended, the fire goes out of things, but for reasons of personal affection and property division you stay married and there's usually an unspoken agreement to look the other way when your spouse finds a lover."

He stopped laughing. "Ever the cynic. What about my parents? They had an arranged marriage when they were young, raised my brothers and I, and get along fine now. They're best friends, and I never saw either take a lover." He said, stubbornly. "I'm sure they're privately horrified about me, but still. Not everyone has a roving heart."

"Not everyone expects to be married three hundred years to the same person," she pointed out. "Not on your side, anyway. It's comfortable as hell havin' someone who you so well, but after the first hundred years, you already know the punchline to all his jokes and there's no story you can tell him because he was there for most of 'em. So you go elsewhere."