“Yes.” Miss Hampshire steps into my path with the speed and precision of a woman who has spent decades blocking doorways from people far more intimidating than Death. Her nubs plant themselves flat against the oak. “But you are not going in there.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is woman’s work.” Her chin lifts, her jaw set in that immovable line I’ve watched her deploy against ministers, priests, and at least one king. “You have no business being in that room.”
A sound tears from my throat that rattles the sconces. “My wife is suffering through the birth of our first child. I will be at her side when she?—”
“Looking like this? In your…evening attire?” Miss Hampshire gestures at me—at the exposed ribs, the skull, the cloak of living shadow pooling at my feet. “You’ll send the maids into hysterics, and the midwife will drop the babe out of fright.” She straightens her apron. “But that is beside the point. No king has ever been present for a birth. It is tradition.”
“It was also tradition to slit queens’ throats,” I grind out, “and we seem to have moved past that.”
Miss Hampshire opens her mouth. Closes it. Her eyes narrow into slits so thin I’m genuinely impressed she can still see me through them.
I don’t wait for her rebuttal.
The shadows swallow me whole for the briefest of seconds. Just long enough to weave bone into flesh, hollow sockets into green eyes, and ancient terror into the borrowed calm of Vale. Then I step through the door as though it isn’t there at all…
…and straight into a battlefield.
Two maids scramble between the bed and a table laden with linens, hot water, and instruments I refuse to examine too closely. A stout midwife with rolled sleeves and an expression of seasoned authority kneels at the foot of the bed, her hands steady even as the woman in the bed is decidedly not.
Elara lies propped against a mountain of pillows, her shift soaked through, her hair plastered to her temples in dark, wet ropes. Violent red flushes her face, her teeth bared, her hands fisting the sheets with a grip that has turned her knuckles into white ridges.
I’m at her side in three strides, my hand finding hers. “I’m here.”
“Oh, wonderful.” The words come out in a snarl punctuated by a gasp that bows her spine off the pillows. “The man responsible for this finally shows up!”
I flinch at her shout. “I came as fast as I?—”
“You came fast the night you put this child inside me, too, and look where that got us!”
One of the maids chokes on something that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. The midwife doesn’t even blink. Presume this is the way of mortals and childbirth. One of many things I have yet to learn, to experience, so I borrow the stout woman’s calm.
“You’re doing beautifully,” I murmur.
Elara crushes my fingers with a strength that would concern me if I weren’t fairly certain I deserve it. “Nothing about this isbeautiful!It feels like I’m being split apart by a…a battering ram wrapped in—oh god?—”
Her words dissolve into a groan so guttural it vibrates through the bed frame. The midwife leans forward, murmuring instructions I can barely hear over the roaring in my skull.
Saints…maybe this is woman’s work.
“Push now, Your Majesty,” she says. “Bear down.”
Elara bears down with a scream that could strip paint from walls. Her hand in mine becomes a vise, her nails biting crescents into my palm. “You’re the worst husband alive.”
A surreal chuckle tumbles from my lips. “You’ve called me worse.”
“Breathe, Your Majesty,” the midwife says, calm as a pond. “We’re nearly there. One more.”
“You said one morethreeone-mores ago!”
I brush the hair from her face with my free hand, wincing when another contraction hits and her grip threatens to rearrange the bones in my fingers. “Shh…you can do it.”
“Push!” the midwife commands.
Elara, to my surprise, complies.
And the sound that leaves her is not a scream. It’s something older, deeper. A sound that belongs to the beginning of things. Her body curves around the effort, every muscle drawn taut as a bowstring, her breath suspended in a moment that stretches so thin I’m convinced time itself halts for a moment.
