The minister of war snorted. The magus didn't recognize this as high praise, and he said stiffly, "I've been told that his father wanted him to be a … - Megan Whalen Turner

You have heard the queen's advice. My gift is below. Would you wait to see it until you have decided what you will do with hers?

The dandified Attolian who had spoke, a patron, but not a baron by any means, glanced at the queen to see if she approved, but she was looking the other way. The king shrugged his shoulders slightly and said, "I could send you to ask them."
The man laughed. "It would be a long trip, Your Majesty. I would so much rather hear the answer from you."
"Oh, the trip would be much quicker than you think," said the king pleasantly. "Most of my male cousins are dead."
The silence that had begun at the head table had spread to the edges of the hall. The Attolian's smile grew uncertain.
The king didn't smile back. Those who understood shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

"I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite."
Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.