Chapter 21: Terrified.m
The longest day of the year arrived, heavy and honey-thick with heat. Light pressed against the castle windows, relentless, bleaching the color from the tapestries.
Eleanor felt it in her bones.
It wasn’t pain, not exactly. It was a full-stop. A final, whispered command from a body that had been issuing gentle protests for weeks and was now done asking. She sat in the nursery, Lucian sprawled across her lap in a post-luncheon doze, a warm, damp weight. She breathed him in. Boy-sweat, and grass from the gardens, and the faint, clean linen scent that was purely his own. She committed it to memory, each detail—the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, the ridiculous curl that escaped over his ear, the way his fist rested, loosely clenched, against her chest.
Panic, her old enemy, stirred like a sleeping serpent in the cage of her ribs.
Alistair was at the border, two days’ hard ride to the east. A dispute over timber rights, crucial, boring. He’d left three days ago, his parting words a flat directive to Corvin. “Send for me if there is any change. Any.”
This was a change.
She moved Lucian gently to the pile of cushions, his little body molding into them without waking. Standing was a negotiation. Her staff, the elegant dark wood, felt like the only thing tethering her to the floor. The corridor outside the nursery seemed to stretch, a tunnel of echoing stone. She focused on the pattern of the flagstones, one after the other. The panic whispered. You won’t make it. This is how it starts.
She made it to the infirmary, a small, sun-washed chamber off the royal apartments. Corvin was grinding something with a mortar and pestle. The sound stopped when he saw her face.
“Your Majesty.”
“It’s back,” she said. Her voice was calm. It felt disconnected, like something heard from another room. “The feeling. From before Lucian. Only… more.”
He didn’t ask questions. He guided her to the narrow cot, his hands professional and swift. He took her pulse. His own face grew still, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond her wrist. He listened to her heart, the cold disc of his instrument moving over her robe. The silence between the metallic shifts was absolute.
“The child?” she asked, her hand moving to her belly.
“The heartbeat is strong. For now.” He set the instrument aside. “Yours is not. It is rapid and… threadier than I would like. The weakness has accelerated considerably.”
“The solstice,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Last time it was the winter one.”
“I do not trade in solstice myths, Your Majesty. I trade in blood and breath. And yours is concerning.” He washed his hands in a basin, his back to her. “We must induce rest. Absolute. For weeks. And we must consider… other interventions.”
“What interventions?”
He turned, drying his hands slowly. “There is a physician in the Free Cities. An expert in conditions of the blood, particularly in childbearing women. His methods are… unconventional. But he has success where others fail.”
“Bring him.”
“It is not so simple. He does not travel. And you cannot.” He gestured to her, to the staff leaning against the cot. “The journey would kill you. The King would never allow it.”
The panic uncoiled fully, filling her throat. A door was closing. The same damned door. “So my option is to lie here and hope?”
“Your option,” Corvin said gently, “is to lie here and fight with the only weapon you have left: stillness. Conserve every scrap of energy for the child. We manage the symptoms. We hope the balance holds until the birth.”
Hope. The word was ash.
He prepared a draught, bitter and smelling of valerian. “This will help you sleep. Deeply. I will have servants move a bed into the nursery, so you may be near the Prince. But you are not to rise from it. Do you understand?”
She understood. She was being shelved, tenderly, like a cracked vase. She drank the draught, the bitterness a fitting taste.
They moved her to the nursery on a litter, a humiliation she was too tired to fight. Lucian watched, wide-eyed, from his nursemaid’s arms. “Mama boat?” he asked.
“Yes, my love. Mama’s boat for a little while.”
They set the bed by the window where she could see the sky. Lucian’s toys were moved to a corner, the practice sword placed carefully on her nightstand, within sight. The draught pulled her under like a stone into deep water.
She surfaced, hours later, to dusk. The room was murky, blue-gray. A figure sat in the chair beside her bed, a solid shadow against the dying light. Not Corvin.
Alistair.
He still wore his riding leathers, dust ground into the seams. His hair was wind-whipped, his jaw dark with stubble. He must have ridden through the night, killed his horse. He stared at her, his face in the half-light unreadable as stone.
“You’re back,” she whispered, her tongue thick.
“Corvin’s bird found me yesterday afternoon.” His voice was gravel, worn raw. “I left the treaty to my chancellor. It’s probably ashes now.” He didn’t move. “You didn’t send for me sooner.”
“It happened quickly. There was no ‘sooner’.”
He absorbed that, his eyes never leaving her face. “What did he tell you?”
“Rest. Hope. That there’s a physician in the Free Cities who might know something, but I can’t travel to him.”
Alistair’s gaze flicked to her belly, then back to her eyes. Something in his expression fractured, just for a second—a hairline crack in the ice. It wasn’t fear. It was fury. A deep, incandescent rage at the helplessness, at the facts that refused to yield to his will.
“Right,” he said, the word a short, hard clip.
He stood then, the movement sudden. He walked to the window, bracing his hands on the sill, looking out at the first stars. The muscles in his back were rigid. For a long time, the only sounds were Lucian’s soft snores from his crib and the ragged rhythm of Eleanor’s own breath.
“I’m not losing you,” he said finally, not turning around. The words weren’t possessive. They were a statement of logistics, as if discussing a fortification that couldn’t be allowed to fall. “And I am not losing another child. This is not the equation.”
“You can’t command this, Alistair.”
He turned. The fury was banked now, replaced by that frightening, absolute calm that preceded his most ruthless decisions. “I am not commanding you. I am assessing the battlefield. If you cannot go to the physician, the physician will come to you.”
She blinked, trying to clear the drug-induced fog. “Corvin said he doesn’t travel.”
“Everyone travels,” Alistair said, a cold, dark certainty in his tone. “Given the right motivation. A king’s summons is one thing. A king’s ransom is another. A king’s threat…” He let the sentence hang. He picked up the practice sword from her nightstand, weighing it. “You hold the line here. You be still. You fight with that stubborn silence you’re so good at. Leave the rest to me.”
“Alistair… the Free Cities are weeks away. Even if he agrees…”
“Then he’d better ride fast.” He placed the sword back in her hand, closing her fingers around it just as he had before. But this time his hand lingered, his thumb pressing once, hard, against her knuckles. A brand. A promise.
He left then, moving with that prowling stride, already shouting for his captain of the guard, his scribe, his master of coin. His voice, sharp and clear, echoed back down the stone corridor, already weaving a net of gold and steel to cast across a continent.
Eleanor clutched the wooden sword. Outside, full dark had fallen, swallowing the long solstice light. The panic was still there, cold in her gut. But alongside it now was a spark, a tiny, defiant echo of his fury. He was turning the world inside out for a chance. It was terrifying. It was something to grip.
She watched the doorway where he’d vanished, and for the first time in days, she felt not just the slow sink toward an end, but the brutal, forward pull of a beginning.