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Lord Korak reflected. What the Princess said made sense, but he wondered if she meant it. Perhaps she really did love him (he was handsome, after all) and was using this as an excuse to convince him to give her pretty speeches. Yet it did not matter what her real motive was, as long as it accomplished his purpose. And his purpose was to become king.
If only he had better purposes!
He hurled the thought from his mind with great force. It was something his mother was always saying, whenever he would speak of his plans and hopes to her. Hope was hardly the right word for such plots. Ambition was better. That was something else she told him, one day when she was angry. How she looked when she was angry! He had a lurking suspicion that for all her frailty and weakness of old womanhood, she was much stronger than he. If he struck her on the cheek she would fall, and a blow from her would feel as nothing, yet she seemed to have the power to harm him in a way that he could not recover from, or refrain from harming him. And she refrained.
Why did he always think of her at times like this? Why did her annoying speeches of morality come into his mind?
His mother did not matter. What mattered at the moment was that Pashtia saw they cared - even if they didn't. He stood and went to the Princess, and, taking her hand, kissed it, and said: "Whatever you say, my love."
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