“Colsar—” I start, though the word comes out unsteady, more breath than sound.
His hand closes more firmly at my hip, holding me where I am, anchoring me as I shift against him, the contact pullingsomething more intense from me this time, something I cannot soften or hide.
He understands without asking. My head tilts back, my body giving in to the slow build he creates, the earlier conversation still present somewhere at the edges but slipping further away with each passing second, replaced by the heat of him, the certainty of him, the way he draws me fully into the moment without effort.
For a brief stretch of time, everything else falls away. The palace, the court, the tension waiting beyond these walls, all of it recedes, leaving only the quiet, consuming awareness of his hands, his mouth, the steady pull of something that belongs entirely to us.
Whatever comes next will come.
But this?—
this is ours.
The next morning, Hyverin comes to see me.
He does not linger. His hand closes around my wrist, reading what lies beneath the surface with a brief pause that belongs to calculation rather than uncertainty.
"Two weeks," he says. "If the body follows its natural course."
My breath stills.
"The child is ready. The lungs are developed. There is no weakness here."
"It has not been—" I begin.
"The child is not fully human," he cuts in, his tone unchanged. "It does not follow a typical gestational pattern." Something unreadable passes through his expression. "Should the unexpected occur, know that the child will survive it."
A small pause. "There is no cause for concern."
Then he is gone.
The door closes and neither of us moves.
Colsar looks at me. "Does he know there are twins?”
"Aunt Jularin says yes," I reply, keeping my voice low. "But that he is too loyal to say it aloud. For fear of being overheard."
Colsar nods once. His expression shifts, and I know exactly what he is doing. Two weeks. The wards. The road to Shalvar. Everything that stands between where we are and somewhere safe enough to bring children into the world.
Two weeks is not enough time.
Morrath
SEVRIN
The sky over Morrath is red. Deeper than fire. Deeper than sunset. Saturated and wrong. It presses down over the land like a wound that never closed, and the ground beneath it is black and gray, stripped of anything that might have once been called living. Stone. Ash. Bone. The wind carries the sound of it before the palace even comes into view.
Screaming. Interrupted. Dragged. Cut short. The kind that is worse for not being constant.
Sevrin does not slow.
A figure cuts across the sky. Then another. Red bodies, black wings, the sound they make somewhere between a screech and a roar, stretched too far in both directions. One dives low enough that the cook flinches.
Sevrin does not look up. "She is not for you," he says mildly.
The creature pulls back at once. The palace rises out of the landscape like something forced upward rather than built. Dark stone, too tall, too narrow in places and too wide in others, following no rule anything human would recognize.
A figure descends as they approach.
