Chapter 11: The Reunion
The first fingers of dawn found them like that, tangled in each other on top of the rumpled duvet. Kerr hadn’t made it to the bed proper the night before; they’d collapsed onto it from the edge, locked in a frantic, desperate embrace that had more to do with grounding than grace. Dried sweat painted pale salt maps across their skin in the gray light. Her head lay pillowed on his bicep, his face buried in the riotous mane of her hair.
For a long time, the only sounds were the distant calls of the waking city and the slow, steady rhythm of her breathing. Anora felt impossibly deep in sleep, a complete surrender he’d never seen in her before. Not as queen, not even as his lover. The line of tension that usually ran from her brow to her jaw was gone. In its place was a softness, a profound and unguarded peace.
His hand rested on the impossible, hard curve of her belly. It wasn’t the gentle swell of a few months ago. This was a different topography. A firm, warm planet under his palm. He shifted his head, just a fraction, to look at her.
Maker’s breath, she was stunning.
She’d always been handsome. Now she was something else. Her cheeks were fuller, her lips swollen from sleep and their earlier, frantic kisses. The thin linen of his old tunic was rucked up around her thighs, stretched tight and damp in places across her breasts. They were bigger, heavier, blue veins tracing faint, delicate paths beneath pale skin. Her nipples, darker now, pushed against the worn fabric.
It did something to him. Something primal and possessive that coiled hot in his gut. The fear and filth of the Deep Roads felt like a story told by someone else. This was real. The mess of her hair, the smell of their sweat and her skin, the absolute, mammalian fact of her, blooming with his child. His breath hitched, a sharp inhale.
She must have felt it, the minute change in his body against hers. A deep sigh escaped her lips. Her eyes, greener than any forest, fluttered open. She looked up at him, her gaze unfocused, sleepy, then soft with a recognition that had no politics in it.
“You’re staring.” Her voice was husky, shattered by sleep.
“And you’re ruining my tunic,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble. He ran the back of a single, calloused finger from the underside of her breast down over the taut swell, tracing a slow arc. “It’s clearly not up to its new duties.”
She snorted, a deeply unqueenly sound, and pressed back into his warmth. “A fair criticism. We’ll requisition you a bigger one from the royal stores. The one with the billowing sleeves. You’d look divine.”
His chuckle vibrated through her. He spread his palm wide over her navel, feeling the solid weight. “Divinely uncomfortable. You didn’t mention the siege, love. Your notes were… diplomatic.”
Anora closed her eyes again, but a small smile touched her lips. “Dealing with paranoid arl-consorts is slightly less dramatic than fighting talking darkspawn. I thought it beneath your notice.” She covered his hand with her own, lacing their fingers. “You missed Gwaren’s petition for a lower harbor tax. Twice, actually.”
“Criminal of me.”
“I held the court together,” she said, her tone shifting, the humor fading into raw honesty. “But Maker, Kerr. I was counting stones on the ceiling. Every messenger sent my heart into my throat. Loghain would have had a dozen apoplexies. I was… terrified I’d do it wrong.”
He kissed her temple, the taste of her skin the only thing in the world. “You never do it wrong. The realm was safe. You were safe. That’s all that ever mattered.”
They fell into a comfortable silence. His thumb began to move in slow, deliberate circles on her skin. He felt the shift then, deep inside her. A slow, rolling push from within, not a kick, but a whole-body rearrangement.
Her breath caught.“There. Did you feel that?”
He had. Awe, cold and clean, washed through him. “They’re moving.”
“They never stop,” she said, the queenly exasperation a thin veil over pure wonder. “It’s like a tiny tavern brawl. Right under my ribs. Round-the-clock revelry.”
He slid lower, careful, shifting his huge frame so he could press his ear to her belly, displacing her hand. He closed his eyes. The world narrowed to this. The scent of her, the faint, deep rhythm of her heartbeat, the more complex symphony beneath—the whispery rush of her blood, and then… a soft, distinct thump against his cheekbone.
He laughed, the sound muffled against her skin. “One of them just kicked me in the face.”
“See? Ill-mannered already.” Her fingers threaded through his hair, not to pull him away, but to hold him there. “A trait, no doubt, from your side.”
“The Cousland charm is just… vigorous.” He nuzzled the spot, feeling another answering push. “You said ‘they.’” He lifted his head, his eyes searching hers. The joke from last night—her pained ‘you have no idea’ after a particular bout of clumsy, tearful love-making—returned with sudden, startling clarity. “Anora. Plural?”
She bit her lip. A sliver of the old, calculating mask flickered, then melted into a beautiful, terrifying vulnerability. She nodded, her eyes glistening. “I thought I was just… large. But the midwife confirmed it. Two distinct heartbeats. Strong, like war drums.” A shaky breath. “So, congratulations, Your Majesty. You and your … remarkable enthusiasm are about to father two heirs.”
For a long, suspended moment, Kerr could do nothing but stare. The concept wouldn’t cohere. One child was an abstract responsibility, a future king or queen. Two was a pack. A litter. A monumental, overwhelming stroke of sheer biological luck.
He tried to form a joke, something about covering his bets.Nothing came. Instead, a guffaw of pure, unadulterated shock burst from him, a loud, startled sound that made her flinch and then grin.
“Fucking Void,” he breathed, the profanity a prayer. He collapsed back onto the pillow, his hand returning to her belly as if it were the only thing anchoring him to reality. A slow, wide grin spread across his face. “Holy Maker, Nora.”
He thought of the Broodmother’s pit. The warped, perverted multiplication in the dark. He looked at the beautiful, powerful swell of Anora, and the contrast was so stark, so fundamentally good and right, it left him breathless.
“I’m sorry,” he finally managed, his grin still wide and foolish. “That one’s on me. Truly. I must have… misheard the ratios.”
She smacked his arm. It felt like being tapped with a feather. “Be quiet, you oaf.” But she was laughing too, a free and genuine sound he hadn’t heard in months.
He rolled back onto his side, propping his head on his hand, his gaze sobering. “Alistair’s got Amaranthine. The Vigil’s standing. I left him a fortress full of lunatics, but they’re our lunatics. He won’t be needing me to pull him out of any more holes filled with philosophers who want to talk while they eat you.” He traced a gentle line over her prominent navel. “Ferelden has frontiers enough right here.”
Her whole body seemed to soften, the last invisible thread of queenly steel dissolving. She finally, truly, relaxed into the mattress and into him, the relief a physical force. “You swear it?”
“Void take me if I’m lying.” He leaned in, kissing her with a slow, deliberate tenderness that felt more potent than their earlier frenzy.“One crown. One city. One screaming, chaotic room with two cradles. I’m not going anywhere.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down so his chest pressed against the side of her belly. Her breasts pushed against him, full and soft and heavy. “Good,” she whispered against his lips. Her hand wandered down his flank, over the scarred, tight muscle of his stomach, and then lower, her fingertips tracing his hip bone. “Because I wasn’t finished welcoming you home.”
He was already hard for her again, had been since the moment he’d woken up. The evidence now pressed insistently against her thigh. The sheer, gorged weight of him made her lips part in a breathy gasp of recognition.
She shifted her hips, and the tunic’s hem slid further. He shuddered. Her touch was confident, possessive, dragging down his back in a long, warm sweep to cup him fully, making him groan against her mouth. The familiarity of it, after weeks of nightmares, threatened to undo him completely.
A new intimacy hung thick in the morning air, richer than lust. He saw the new pink-blue stretchmarks like starbursts across her hips. He felt the triumphant heaviness of her belly between them. The physical proof that had anchored her here, scared and alone. He saw them all, and he worshiped every mark with his mouth. Not with the desperate ardor of the night before, but with slow, searching devotion. He kissed her until she arched off the bed with a ragged cry, her fingers clutching at the sheets, then his hair.
They built it slow. Fumbling with care around her new geography. When he finally moved between her thighs, the feeling was staggering. She was softer, hotter, wetter than he remembered. The pressure from within against the tip of him as he entered caused her to bite his shoulder, a sharp, exquisite sound in his ear.
He couldn't move much, her belly made a frantic, rocking thrust impossible. Instead, he found a different rhythm. Slow, grinding, impossibly deep invasions where he could hold her and fit his hand over the moving curve of their children. With each of his slow pushes, she could feel their stirring.
She gazed up at him, no longer queen or heiress. Her eyes reflected the sunlight beginning to fill the room—golden, wide, primal. Over her shoulder, the great royal canopy of teyrn-bear and roses, stitched during her father’s reign, rippled.
Outside the massive door, pacing started the moment the low rhythmic groan of the ancient oak bed ropes. A sharp, polite knock followed.The muffled voice of Seneschal Varel followed. “Your Majesties? The Council is convened, and the Arl of Redcliffe is most… insistent.”
Kerr’s reply was a single word, a raw, commanding syllable that held no courtly deference. It rolled from him like a battlefield order, and Varel’s retreating steps were immediate.
Anora stifled her laugh against his shoulder, then choked it off with a sharp cry as he made a deliberate roll of his hips.
Later, as a pool of honeyed sunlight crept across the rumpled bed, Kerr watched a similar sunbeam light dust motes dancing over a now sleeping Anora’s stomach. One hand lay splayed possessively across the apex of her thighs, sticky with the fragrant pine-scented soap from a sponge bath that made his broad, bloodstained body practically glowing. He listened to her breathing, deep and even.