Chapter 8: The Change of Two Lives
The candlelight in Dr. Whitmore's study flickered as he pressed cool fingers along the curve of my spine, tracing the line where my shoulders had once been broad and angular. Now they sloped with a softness that still surprised me each morning when I caught my reflection in the polished bronze mirror.
"Remarkable," Whitmore murmured, more to his journal than to me. The nib of his pen scratched across the page. "The clavicles have narrowed by nearly two inches since my last measurement. The trapezius muscles have all but atrophied. I would venture the bone structure itself is reshaping."
I sat on the edge of his examination table, the white silk of my robe pooling around my thighs. The room smelled of dried lavender and something sharper, an alchemical tang that clung to the leather-bound texts stacked in precarious towers along the walls.
"Is that good?" I asked, my voice smaller than I intended.
Whitmore looked up, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles. The candlelight caught the silver of his hair, turning it to liquid mercury. "It is unprecedented. Whether that constitutes 'good' depends on one's perspective." He paused, and something almost gentle crossed his weathered face. "For the child, it is likely necessary. Your body is making space, remodeling itself to accommodate the impossible."
I thought of the faint pulse I had felt beneath Raevor's palm on that night he knelt before me. I thought of the small, growing weight low in my belly that the maids had begun to notice.
"How much more will it change?" I asked.
Whitmore returned to his journal, his pen scratching steadily. "I do not know, my lady. I am documenting what I observe, not predicting it. The magical mechanisms at work here exceed my training as a physician." He set down his pen and regarded me with his deep-set eyes. "But I will observe it all."
---
The months passed like water through fingers.
By the second month, my waist had narrowed so dramatically that my old gowns hung loose, and Helena had new ones commissioned with a nipped silhouette that made me look like the women in the tapestries that lined the great hall. The maids whispered about my glow, about how my skin had taken on a porcelain quality that caught the light.
By the third month, my hair had grown past my shoulders, a cascade of soft brown that I had taken to wearing loose. The pads of my fingers had become delicate, my hands smaller, my wrists so slender that Raevor could encircle them with his thumb and forefinger with room to spare.
I stood before the mirror one evening, tracing the line of my jaw, the softness of my throat. The face that looked back at me was not the face of the village boy who had been mocked for his delicate features. It was something else entirely. A woman's face, beautiful and strange, with his mother's eyes.
What would Mother think, if she could see me now?
I touched the silver locket at my throat, the one she had pressed into my hands before I left. My father's necklace. I had never taken it off.
---
On quiet evenings, Raevor and I would sit by the fireplace in his chambers, the flames casting dancing shadows across the stone walls. He would read from ancient texts while I worked on my embroidery, a skill Helena had insisted I learn for the sake of propriety. But more often than not, I found myself watching him instead of my stitching.
"You're staring," he said one night, not looking up from his book.
"You're beautiful," I replied, and was rewarded with the faintest flush of color across his pale green skin.
He set down the book and turned to face me fully. His massive form seemed to fill the room, his horns curving back from his temples, his slit pupils catching the firelight. "I have been thinking about names."
My needle paused. "Names?"
"For the child." He shifted, and for a moment, the cold, guarded lord looked almost uncertain. "I have no experience with such things. I was raised to be a soldier and a scholar, not a father. I do not know what a child needs, or how to care for one, or what to call them."
I set down my embroidery and moved to sit beside him on the chaise, pressing my shoulder against the warmth of his arm. "I don't know either. In my village, children were named for grandparents, or for saints, or for the season they were born in."
"What season will this one be born in?"
I considered. "Spring, I think. The healers say the pregnancy runs nine months, and we are already past the first."
"Spring." Raevor repeated the word as though tasting it. "A time of renewal. Of new life."
"Aislin," I said softly. "There was a girl in my village with that name. She was kind to me when others were not. She used to share her bread with me at harvest festivals."
Raevor's tail curled around my ankle, a gesture of affection I had come to recognize. "Aislin. It has a gentle sound."
"And if it's a boy?"
He was quiet for a long moment. "I had a brother once. Before the plague took him. His name was Draven."
"Draven," I repeated, and something in his expression softened.
"I have never spoken of him to anyone," Raevor admitted. "It feels strange to speak of him now, to a human, in this castle, in this life we have built."
"I'm glad you told me," I said.
He pulled me closer, his massive hand pressing against the curve of my belly. The child fluttered beneath his palm, a sensation that still made my breath catch. For a long time, we sat in silence, listening to the fire crackle and the wind howl against the windows.
"I am afraid," Raevor said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "I have faced armies and plagues and the extinction of my entire race, and I have never felt fear like this. The thought of losing you, or losing the child, is unbearable in a way I could not have anticipated."
I turned in his arms, pressing my forehead against his chest. "I'm afraid too. But we're afraid together. That has to count for something."
---
It was in the seventh month that Whitmore summoned me to his study with an urgency that made my heart stutter.
"Madam Avery." He gestured to the examination table, and I settled onto it with practiced ease, lifting my gown to reveal the swollen curve of my belly. The child had grown considerably, a heavy weight that shifted when I moved, and the maids had to help me rise from chairs now.
"I have made a discovery," Whitmore said, his voice tight with barely contained excitement. "During my examination last week, I noted the formation of soft tissue between your testicles and your anus. I have been monitoring its development, and I believe it is forming a canal."
I blinked. "A canal?"
"A birth canal." Whitmore set down his journal and fixed me with his intense stare. "Your body is adapting, Madam Avery. It is creating the structures necessary to deliver this child, structures that did not exist in your male anatomy. The same magic that made this pregnancy possible is now reshaping the very fundamentals of your physiology."
I felt the blood drain from my face. "Is that possible?"
"I have witnessed you carry a dragon's child in a human male's body. I have watched your hips widen, your shoulders soften, your body produce milk before the child has even been born. I have learned to stop asking what is possible." He picked up his pen again. "I am simply documenting what is."
---
By the ninth month, my body was a landscape I barely recognized.
My breasts had grown full and heavy, and milk leaked from them when the child kicked too hard. My hips had widened until my gait became a gentle sway that Helena praised and I found mortifying. My belly was enormous, a taut globe of life that Raevor could not keep his hands from.
"It's time," I whispered one evening, as we sat by the fireside. The child had been still for days, but tonight I felt a deep ache in my lower back, a pressure building low in my body.
"Time?" Raevor looked up from the text he was reading.
And then the warmth spread between my thighs, soaking through my gown, and I felt the unmistakable rush of water.
"Avery." Raevor's voice was suddenly sharp, his slit pupils dilating as he took in the spreading stain. "Is that..."
I nodded, clutching his arm as a wave of pressure rolled through me. "I think the child is coming."
The fire crackled. The wind howled. And far above us, in a stone chamber crowded with ancient texts, an old physician in wire-rimmed spectacles reached for his journal, ready to record the impossible.