Chapter 14: Lessons in Kneeling
I woke to the familiar, heavy warmth. Not just from the furs, or from Ellie’s leg thrown over mine, but from within. A low, vital hum. I placed a hand on the hard, round drum of my stomach. Six months. It felt less like a bump and more like a geological event.
Next to me, Ellie shifted. Her blonde hair was fanned across the pillow, one hand resting possessively on her own swollen belly. In sleep, she looked like some mythic earth goddess. Then she blinked, those blue eyes focusing, and she smiled. It was a tired, contented smile. “He’s doing cartwheels,” she murmured, her voice sleep-rough.
“She,” Nancy corrected from my other side, without opening her eyes. She was curled into Mary’s back, one arm draped over her sister, her own rounded stomach pressing softly against Mary’s spine. “She’s practicing her ballet.”
Mary cracked one eye open. “Based on the localized seismic activity, I’d say it’s more like siege engine testing.” She stretched, wincing as the movement pressed her full, aching breasts against the sheet. “And my tits are going to explode.”
It was our new morning ritual. The four of us, a tangled knot of pregnancy in the center of the vast ice-carved bed. The room wasn’t as cold as it had been; our bodies, working overtime, had become our own geothermal vents. The glowing runes in the walls pulsed in a slow, steady rhythm that synced, unnervingly, with my own heartbeat.
I hauled myself up, which was now a two-stage operation involving strategic leverage. The liquid silver threads in the sheets slithered away from my heat. My breasts were heavy, tight, and dark nipples leaking faintly onto the linen. Lactation had hit us all like a truck last month. Another shared experience, another messy, intimate thread binding us.
Ellie sat up more gracefully, cradling her stomach. “We need to get moving. The Foundry Masters are expecting Mary at the ninth bell. And the valley stewards have yield reports.”
“And I have a sitting with the portraitist,” Nancy sighed, finally opening her eyes. She looked radiant, her curls a wild frame for her face, her skin glowing. “He wants to capture the ‘maternal divine aura’ or some such nonsense. I told him he’d better capture the fact I need to pee every ten minutes.”
We moved through the morning routine with a practiced, slow-motion efficiency. Helping each other dress was a necessity now—lacing gowns over bellies, tying supportive sashes, kneeling was a forgotten luxury. The elegant, restrictive court dresses had been abandoned months ago for softer, heavier woolens and expansive tunics from the southern traders. We looked less like ethereal queens and more like fertile pillars of a very pragmatic dynasty.
The changes in the kingdom were as palpable as the changes in our bodies. Six months of rule. The initial silence that fell after we’d… established our authority in the bedchamber had been one thing. The silence that came after the first harvest reports, after the new irrigation channels from the hot springs doubled the valley yields, that was different. It was the quiet of people being too busy prospering to complain.
Our critics hadn’t just been silenced; they’d been outmoded. Mary’s and my pet project—the 155mm howitzer, born from schematics in my old world’s memory and forged in Eldoria’s magical-heated blast furnaces—was a large part of that. It wasn’t just a weapon. It was a statement. A promise of obliterating force that meant we didn’t have to use it. The first successful test firing, sending a projectile of enchanted iron screaming into a distant glacial cliff and reducing it to gravel, had been the final word in most political debates.
Breakfast was a hearty, sprawling affair. Smoked fish, dark bread, cheese, and bowls of a rich, red berry that helped with the anemia. We ate in our private solar, the arched window open to the crisp air. Below, the capital unfolded, a cascade of ice-white spires and steaming chimneys. The metallic tang of the air was now mixed with the smell of burning coal from the forges and baking bread from the lower city.
“The third production line is operational,” Mary said around a mouthful of bread, her eyes scanning a parchment schematic. “We’re at ten guns a month. The reinforcing runes on the barrel are holding. It’s the recoil systems that are chewing through the damping crystals.”
“Increase the allowance for powdered dragonbone in the alloy,” I said, wiping a trickle of milk from my tunic with a grimace. My body had its own priorities. “It’s more expensive, but it’ll absorb the shock. Can’t have them shaking themselves apart after five rounds.”
Ellie listened, her artist’s mind translating our mechanics into impact. “And the crews? The men who fire them?”
“Training,” Mary said. “They love it. It’s precise. It’s loud. It makes a big hole. Very satisfying.” She gave a small, fierce smile. “They call them ‘The Queen’s Thunder’.”
Nancy reached over and placed her hand on Mary’s arm, her touch gentle. “Just make sure they call them from a safe distance, love.”
Later, I walked with Mary through the cavernous, thunderous heat of the Royal Foundry. The air vibrated with the song of hammers and the roar of magical fires. Men, bare-chested and gleaming with sweat, moved around the massive, sinister shapes of the howitzer barrels in various stages of completion. They bowed as we passed, their eyes respectful, even awed. They saw Mary not as a pregnant girl, but as the Architector of Thunder.
She stopped by a nearly-finished piece, running a hand along the cool, rune-etched metal. “It’s working, Amy,” she said, her voice low, almost lost in the din. “The math. The physics. It translates. This world… it accepts the logic.”
“It accepted us,” I replied, my hand resting on my stomach where a tiny foot delivered a sharp, approving kick.
The peace, the productivity, felt deep. Real. But as we left the forge, stepping back into the crystalline silence of the citadel’s upper corridors, I felt it. A tiny, cold needle in the base of my skull. The same feeling I’d get when a complex calculation was almost right, save for one unaccounted-for variable.
From a high, narrow window, I looked out past the city walls, past the fertile valleys, to the jagged, impassable peaks that formed our natural border. Eldoria was prospering. We were blooming, heavy with life and power.
But beyond those white teeth of rock, the world was still out there. Watching. And nature, I knew, abhorred a vacuum just as much as it abhorred a silent, prosperous kingdom that had been without rulers for a thousand years.
The howitzer was a good answer. But I knew, with a certainty as deep as the life stirring inside me, that someone was inevitably going to ask the question.