He stared at the bandage and then at me, and something close to fury broke through his exhaustion. Not fury at me, exactly. Fury at the sight of what I had done to keep him alive. Fury at the idea that he had arrived here only to drain more from me.
“You gave me your blood.”
“Yes.”
His jaw tightened. “How much?”
“Enough.”
He looked as though he wanted to shake me and gather me against him at the same time. “You should not have had to do that.”
“No,” I said quietly. “But you should never have had to cross half the world alone while bleeding through winter either, and yet here we are.”
The words stopped him. For a moment he only looked at me, and in that look I saw everything he had not yet said. The guilt. The anger. The knowledge of what had happened after he left. The knowledge that he had not been there.
His voice was lower when he spoke again. “I should not have gone.”
“You had to go.”
“I left you with him.”
The room seemed to contract around that one word. I knew without asking which him he meant.
“I thought the realm mattered. I thought duty would be enough to keep everyone sensible.” His mouth twisted at his own stupidity. “I thought if I did the thing I was supposed to do, I could come back quickly and nothing would break while I was gone.”
I moved from the chair to the bed before he could say anything else and sat beside him. He looked half-stricken when I touched his face, as though he did not trust himself to ask for that much and was startled to be given it anyway.
“You came back to me,” I said.
“Too late.”
“No.”
The word came more forcefully than I intended. I softened my hand against his cheek. “Not too late.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and leaned into my palm with a weariness so deep it made me ache. “I have hated myself every mile,” he said.
I bent toward him until my forehead rested against his. “Then stop. I have done enough of that for both of us.”
A sound left him then, quiet and rough and almost broken. His hand came to the back of my neck, not pulling, only holding, as though he needed to be certain I would not vanish if he loosened his grip.
When he kissed me, there was nothing restrained in it. No courtly caution, no attempt at dignity, nothing of the prince who knew how to keep his feelings banked behind cold composure. It was hunger and relief and grief all at once, months of absence collapsing into the space between our mouths. I kissed him back with everything I had, because there had been too many nights when I thought I might never do it again, too many mornings when I woke with his name already aching in me.
By the time we drew apart, I was shaking. His hand remained at the back of my neck. Mine had found its way over his heart. We stayed like that for a while, close enough that words felt almost unnecessary.
Then I took his hand and guided it down. He frowned faintly at first, not understanding, and then the children moved beneath his palm. He went very still.
Then it happened again. Different. A second movement, unmistakably separate from the first.
He looked up at me.
"Two," I said.
The word moved through him slowly, then all at once. Understanding filled his eyes so quickly that it almost undid me again, his expression open in a way I had not seen before. The joy that crossed his face was so unguarded I had to look away for a moment simply to survive it. When I turned back he was still watching me, that same astonished happiness present, and beneath it something quieter. More fearful.
“Are you afraid?” I asked him.
He considered that honestly. “For them,” he said. “Yes.”
