“A boy,” Orinne announced.
Mira was laughing and crying simultaneously, a sound that shouldn’t have been possible and was the most human thing I’d ever heard.
“Solian,” she said.
My throat tightened and my vision blurred at the edges.
“What the hell, Sol? Your face is wet,” Percy points out.
I was crying.
I, Solomon Theron, the man who’d maintained composure through centuries of warfare, political upheaval, and the systematic dismantling of my emotional responses, was standing at the foot of a birthing bed with tears running down my face because a woman named her son after me.
I didn’t wipe them.
Lucian looked. His gold eyes found mine across the bed. The expression on his face was not surprise. It was recognition. The look of a man watching me finally do the thing he’d been waiting centuries to see.
Percy stared. His hand reached across Mira and gripped my forearm.
The third contraction came. Mira screamed. The kind of scream that would’ve sent me through a wall if the source had been anything other than childbirth, and I gripped the bedframe and let the tears fall and did the only thing I could do: stay.
The third baby was quiet. No immediate cry. Three seconds of silence that stretched into an eternity, and in those three seconds every person in the room stopped breathing.
Then a small, offended sound. A hiccup that became a whimper that became a cry that grew until the room rang with it.
“A boy,” Orinne said, and her smile was the first genuine expression I’d seen on a woman who’d done this work for centuries.
“Percius,” Mira said. Her voice was barely there, shredded by effort, but the name carried clearly.
Mireille. Solian. Percius.
Three names. Three echoes of the people she loved, stamped onto the people she’d made. A girl named for herself. Two boys named for the men who’d followed her into darkness and back.
Orinne laid Solian in my arms.
The weight was impossible.
He weighed next to nothing. But the gravity of what I held, the concentrated potential of a life that shared my blood and carried my name and would grow into a person I’d teach and protect.
His eyes were open. Silver. Actual silver, ringed with the faintest edge of gold. My eyes in a face that carried Mira’s nose and the stubborn set of her jaw.
He looked at me with the raw, unfocused attention of a creature experiencing consciousness for the first time and finding it bewildering.
“Hello,” I said. My voice cracked. I let it.
Lucian held Mireille.
The king cradling his daughter with hands that had wielded swords and signed treaties and mapped wars, now supporting a head that fit in his palm.
Mireille had stopped crying. She stared at Lucian’s face with the intensity of a child who’d already decided this person belonged to her.
Percival held Percius. The boy was asleep against Percy’s chest, one tiny fist gripping the collar of his shirt, already possessive, already claiming territory.
Mira lay on the bed. Exhausted but radiant. Her copper hair was matted with sweat, her face blotched with tears, her body wrecked by the effort of bringing three lives into existence.
“Come here,” she said. “All of you.”
We converged.
