Chapter 22: The Siege of Pleasure
The cold of the throne room was a different creature than the cold of the armory. It was a patient, leaching cold that seeped up from the marble through the soles of your boots and settled in your joints, a cold that had watched centuries of petitioners come and go. It smelled of ozone and old stone.
Ellie and Nancy sat side-by-side on the twin thrones of blackened ice. They looked less like seated monarchs and more like two brilliant flowers grafted onto a glacier. Ellie, in a gown of deep blue velvet, her long blond hair woven with silver threads, her hands resting on the armrests with a calm I knew was sheer willpower. Nancy, beside her, wore emerald green, her curls a dark cascade over her shoulders. The elegant cut of her dress did little to hide the firm, rounded swell of her pregnancy. Both of them had that luminous, heavy quality, their bodies working the profound, silent alchemy of creating life and food.
From my post at the base of the dais, the .308 bolt-action rifle slung across my back was a comforting, familiar weight. Mary stood mirroring me on the other side, her eyes scanning the cavernous room not with awe, but with a practical assessment of sightlines, cover, and choke points.
“You see, Your Majesties, the drainage from his upper field runs directly through my root cellar,” droned a bearded farmer from the southern valley, his hands wringing a woolen cap. “It’s turned my potatoes to mush.”
Ellie leaned forward slightly, a gesture that made the petitioner straighten up. “Bjorn, your family has worked that upper field for three generations. The drainage pattern is documented in the geothermal surveys. You knew this.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Your neighbor’s root cellar,” Nancy cut in, her voice warmer but no less firm, “is on the original land grant. Pre-dating your field’s irrigation ditch by fifty years.” She shifted, a faint wince crossing her features before she smoothed it away. I saw her hand press briefly, discreetly, against her side. “The solution isn’t litigation. It’s a shared drainage pipe. The royal engineers can draft the plans. You’ll split the cost of materials and labor.”
The farmer blinked, the legal wind knocked out of his sails. “Oh. A shared pipe. That… could work.”
“It will work,” Ellie said, sitting back. “Next.”
As a dispute over a betrothal dowry began, Mary sidled a half-step closer to me, her voice a low murmur only I could hear. “Direct fire from the 75s on the eastern ridge. They’d have a clean line down the King’s Road for two thousand meters.”
“Too clean,” I murmured back, my eyes on the towering, arched entrance. “They’d mass for a frontal assault there. We want them to commit, then funnel them. Use the howitzers with time fuzes. Airburst over the road itself before they even form ranks.”
Mary’s lips quirked. “Shred the officers and the mages in the back. Let the front ranks run into the APDS from the guns hidden in the ice grottos.”
“Exactly. The bolt-actions are for cleanup. Anything that gets through the funnel.” I adjusted the strap on my shoulder. The rifle’s potential was obscene in this context. A common soldier’s breastplate was tissue paper. A knight’s full harness was a decorative tin can. We’d tested it on scrap. The .308 round didn’t punch a neat hole; it shattered plate, sent razor-sharp fragments inward, and turned the body behind it into a ruin of hydrostatic shock.
“It feels unfair,” Mary said quietly, not with pity, but with the cold satisfaction of a solved equation.
“The audience with the Trade Guild was unfair,” I reminded her. “Their arrogance was their armor. We’re just using better steel.”
On the throne, Nancy shifted again. This time, Ellie noticed. She reached over without looking, her fingers finding Nancy’s on the armrest, giving them a squeeze. A silent conversation passed between them. Ellie gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod to the chamberlain, who stepped forward.
“The court will adjourn for a brief recess,” the chamberlain announced.
As the petitioners bowed and began to murmur among themselves, Ellie rose, helping Nancy to her feet. “We need to walk,” Ellie said to us, her voice carrying a strain that hadn’t been there a moment before.
We fell in beside them, moving through a side arch into a narrower gallery lined with frost-rimed tapestries. The moment we were out of sight, Nancy’s posture slumped. She let out a long, hissed breath, both hands cradling the underside of her belly.
“Little engineer is practicing their kicks on my spine,” she grumbled, but she was smiling.
“Here,” Ellie said, guiding her to a stone bench. She sat beside Nancy, a hand moving to the back of her dress. With a practiced tug, she loosened the laces. “Better?”
“Gods, yes.” Nancy leaned into her, closing her eyes. A faint, damp patch was already visible on the velvet over her left breast. My body responded sympathetically, a dull ache of fullness in my own. The mechanics of it were simple, hormonal, yet it tied us together in this moment as surely as any strategy.
Mary crouched in front of them, her engineering focus transferred to a new system. “The pressure is asymmetrical? More on the right?”
“Today it is,” Nancy said, opening her eyes. “Yesterday they favored the left. It’s like they’re doing laps.”
Mary nodded, filing the data away.
“The guns are ready,” Ellie said, looking up at me. Her blue eyes were clear, sharp. “But are we? Truly?”
I knew what she was asking. It wasn’t about mechanisms. “The alternative is their terms. Their disrespect. Their assumption that we are decorative and occupied.” I glanced at Nancy, at the life she carried. “We are building a world for them. It will not be a world built on apologies.”
Ellie held my gaze, then nodded once. She turned her head, her lips brushing Nancy’s temple. “You’re leaking, my heart.”
Nancy looked down. “So are you.”
It was true. Two dark, spreading blooms on the blue and green velvet. A mundane, mammalian reality in the midst of frozen grandeur. Ellie laughed, a soft, real sound that echoed off the tapestries. “Well. We can’t go back in there like Rorschach tests.”
“Feed the engineers,” Nancy said, looking at Mary and me. “You’ve been standing there for hours looking tactical. It’s practical.”
There was no refusing the logic, or the gentle command in her eyes. We moved further down the gallery to a recessed alcove with a window overlooking the glacial spires. Ellie and Nancy sat on a padded ledge, and we knelt before them. It was not like the baths. This was quieter, simpler. A function of care.
I leaned into Ellie, nuzzling aside the fabric of her gown. She smelled of vanilla and cold air and milk. When I took her nipple into my mouth, the warm, sweet rush that followed was an immediate relief, a pressure valve opening. I swallowed, one hand steadying myself on her thigh, the other coming up to cradle the weight of her breast. Her fingers threaded through my hair, not guiding, just resting.
Beside me, Mary was with Nancy, her head bowed, her movements steady and devoted. The only sounds were their soft swallows and the distant, eternal wind keening around the towers.
After a few minutes, the unbearable pressure eased into a comfortable, warm flow. Ellie tapped my shoulder. “Enough. You’ll make yourself sick.”
I pulled away, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Mary did the same. The fraught energy of the throne room had settled into something dense and ready.
“Plan,” Ellie said, as we helped them refasten their gowns. “Not just for the field. For here. The second the first shell fires, this citadel becomes a target.”
“The lower vaults,” Mary said immediately. “The ones carved into the bedrock beneath the hot springs. They’re defensible, and the geothermal heat is independent of the surface. We can move the essential staff, the archives, the nursery.”
The word ‘nursery’ hung in the air. It was no longer an abstract concept. It was a room that needed to be secured.
“We do that today,” I said. “While the court thinks we’re debating drainage pipes.”
Nancy stood, squaring her shoulders, the nurturing softness gone, replaced by a fierce, protective clarity. “Then let’s go debate some more. We have a pipe to sell.”
As we walked back toward the throne room, the weight of the rifle on my back felt different. It wasn't just a tool for a battlefield miles away. It was the first line of defense for the two women walking ahead, for the life growing within one, for the family that had built a new grammar from insult and steel. The cold air no longer felt leaching. It felt charged, like the moment between the trigger pull and the shot, a breath held in anticipation of the undeniable, oncoming roar.