Because Cordelia could see it. Beneath the bluster and the legal citations and the obsessive, suffocating need to control everything and everyone around him, she could see the thing her father never talked about and everyone in the family knew. The fear. The deep, grinding, centuries-old fear that he was not enough — not powerful enough, not clever enough, not Caelan enough — to hold this family together. The fear that his daughters, his beautiful, brilliant, terrifying daughters, were better than him, and the only way to manage that was to marry them off before anyone noticed.
"Father," Cordelia said gently. "I love you. You know that I love you. But I am not going to marry a man who collects human skulls and writes gloomy poetry and has, according to Livia's rather thorough research, been personally responsible for the deaths of at least three previous courtship candidates who failed to meet his standards of — what was the phrase, Livia?"
"Aesthetic submission."
