Chapter 473: The Highest Form of Mistake
Evander had not been planned, nor had he arrived at any moment when one had particularly anticipated him. His family had never treated him as an unwanted child, and his people should have taken no small offence at the suggestion that their duke had been born a mistake, but their affection had done little to persuade him that his arrival had been anything other than an unexpected complication to lives already settled into their proper course.
He knew, of course, that this was no reasonable conclusion to draw from the mere circumstances of his birth. To know a thing, however, and to believe it, were not always one and the same, and Evander had never been especially successful in persuading himself of what he could not feel to be true in his own heart.
