He’s looking at my hand.
Looks up at me.
Hand. Me.
Neither of us breathes. Only the wind moves through the grass. A bird calls from the oak above. Below the hill, the young grain sways in its neat green rows, growing, growing, reaching for a sun that finally bothers to shine.
“Elara…” My name is barely a sound on his lips. “When was the last time you bled?”
“I don’t…I don’t remember.” My palm presses flatter. “When we visited the lowlands? Before that? I…I don’t know!” I all but mewl. “We were so busy with the constant traveling then.”
“That was nearly two months ago…”
He stares at my stomach. I watch his face become a country at war with itself—borders shifting, defenses rising and crumbling in the same breath. Fear tightens the corners of his eyes. I know its shape on him by now: the way it locks his jaw, the way his shoulders brace as if against a blow.
But beneath it, something else is fighting to surface. Something bright and desperate, pushing against his ribs the way those crocuses pushed through frost.
His mouth opens. Closes. His breath comes in short, uneven pulls.
Then the fear cracks.
Not gone. Just…yielded to. Allowed to exist alongside the brighter thing rather than in place of it. His eyes go glassy. His jaw unclenches. And something I’ve never seen on his face before settles there: raw, trembling, terrified wonder.
His hand hovers over my belly. “May I?”
I nod.
His palm settles against my stomach. Broad. Warm. Trembling despite the steadiness of his arm. He holds it there, barely breathing, eyes fixed on the place where his hand meets my body as if he’s listening for something too small to hear.
“I can’t feel anything,” he whispers.
“Vale… It would be the size of a seed,” I say. “If it’s anything at all.”
“A seed.” The word leaves him reverent and awed. He lowers himself slowly, carefully, until his lips press against my belly through the linen. The kiss is so soft I barely feel it, and yet it reaches somewhere so deep inside me that my eyes sting. “I didn’t think it was possible.” A shaky exhale against my belly. “After all these months, I thought…I thought perhaps Death simply couldn’t.”
A pause. A swallow. And quieter: “But here you are, little seed.”
My hand finds his hair. I thread my fingers through the black curls and hold him there, against the place where something astonishing might be taking root inside the wife of Death.
Above us, the oak rustles. Below us, the fields stretch out in green and gold. And between us, on a sun-warmed blanket on a hill where nothing is rotting and everything is reaching for the light, the smallest, most terrifying, most extraordinary thing in the world begins.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Death
Something is wrong with my wife.
The sensation hits mid-stride between realms—a sharp, jagged pull against my heartstrings that has nothing to do with a soul departing and everything to do with the one soul I can’t bear to lose.
It yanks me sideways, dissolving the shadows I’m traveling through and stitching me back together in the palace hallway outside the royal chamber with enough force to crack the flagstone beneath my bony heel.
Miss Hampshire startles backward, her hand flying to her chest. “Saints alive!”
Of course, this woman recovers faster than most mortals would at the sight of a half-skeletal god materializing from thin air. Still, her complexion goes rather gray, probably because she’s seen me one too many times throughout our past.
“What’s happening?” I stride toward the double doors. “Is the baby coming?”
