Endymion’s mouth opened and closed without any further success at speech at that counter and Oz’s impassable nature – taking marriage as some grand experiment was very him, but it was also surely bound to blow up in his face.

And what did Endymion get for trying to help save his brother from himself? Just mockery, it seemed! Indeed, it worked very well to derail his train of thought, because there was a familiar hot flush creeping down past his ears at that memory, and the mortifying realisation that Oz obviously thought himself superior here because he was getting married, at least. 

At first, he only offered a stunted mumble of outrage; it didn’t quite make it to anything intelligible. “Well, when I marry I won’t make the same mistakes as you,” he managed finally, cowed enough by the veela comment to call this a lost cause, and certain enough that when he married it would be for love and nothing less to sound confidently self-righteous about it. “And when you’re – trapped and discontented in – ten years, I won’t have any sympathy for you,” he warned. It was still a lost cause: Oz obviously didn’t care what he thought.

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