"You don't want to get married?"
In Avril's bedroom, Zhao Si sat on the bed and asked her.
The girl nodded heavily, then shook her head. "It's not that I don't want to get married. I just don't want to marry some person I know nothing about."
"It sounds like you know a little about your prospective husband," Zhao Si said.
Arranged marriages existed in every era. Marriage and blood ties were good ways to maintain relations between different families.
With a sufficiently broad web of marriages, several countries could fight a war for ages, only to discover that it was a family feud.
If a country lacked an emperor or queen, it could even look through the family tree and perhaps find someone with the right bloodline in another country to take the throne. Of course, that was easy to say; putting it into practice still depended on the actual circumstances.
It was merely an option.
"I've asked around, too." Avril's head was almost buried in the floor. "I heard the man I'm supposed to marry is very old. Probably older than my father."
"Age... shouldn't be a problem, should it?" Zhao Si had thought the people of the Lands Between had already learned to disregard age.
They lived so long, after all. How much difference could there be between twenty and eighty? An eighty-year-old could do what a twenty-year-old could, and their appearance wouldn't change all that much.
There were old men and women, but Zhao Si didn't know how many years they had lived.
It was no exaggeration to say that Zhao Si had traveled throughout the Lands Between. He had seen more than many of its natives.
But he had clearly overlooked the thoughts of a genuine young girl.
"It matters a great deal," Avril said