Chapter 15: The Weight of Crowns
The cold of the throne room seeped through the soles of my boots, a familiar, grounding ache. Mary and I stood flanking the dais, not sitting today. Standing was better, even with the new, awkward center of gravity. We were in leathers, practical and stiff, our swords—good, plain steel—hung at our hips.A silent statement. The petitioners saw the gravid queens on their ice thrones, and they saw the two of us, armed and watchful, a promise of consequence.
Ellie and Nancy held court. It was their rotation. Ellie listened to a wool merchant’s complaint about tariffs, her head tilted, sunlight from the high window catching the gold in her unbound hair. Her pregnancy had softened her in a way that looked powerful, not vulnerable. The dark blue gown draped over the full curve of her breasts, the proud swell of her belly. She was a figure from a fertility fresco, warm and immovable.
Next to her, Nancy was a younger echo, but fiercer. Her curls tumbled over her shoulders as she leaned forward to examine a sample of disputed fabric, her fingers tracing the weave. The movement pulled her own gown tight across her body. There was a glow to her, a vibrancy that had matured from girlhood into something formidable. They looked… complete. Regal in a way that was innate, not performed.
“Look at them,” I murmured, my voice low enough only for Mary to hear.
She didn’t turn her head, her eyes scanning the crowd. “I am.”
“It’s like the pregnancy didn’t soften them. It… amplified them. They were always fire. Now they’re a forge.”
Mary’s lip quirked. “They look like queens. We look like bodyguards who got kicked in the stomach by a mule.”
A snort escaped me before I could stifle it. She wasn’t wrong. My leather jerkin strained across my middle, making me feel like a stuffed sausage. My back was a rigid rod of protest. Where Ellie and Nancy were all flowing curves, Mary and I were angular lines interrupted by a sudden, unplanned geometry. Awkwardly swollen sticks was precisely it.
“You remember that time,” Mary whispered, her gaze still forward, “after the first frost, when Nancy couldn’t get the fire started in the west sitting room?”
“She was frustrated. Cursing at the kindling.”
“Ellie came in. Took the flint from her hands. Just… held them. Breathed on her fingers to warm them. Then she showed her, slowly. Not how to strike the stone, but how to lay the tinder. The patience of it.”
I remembered. The orange light finally catching, washing over both their faces, their bodies close. “Nancy looked at her like she’d hung the moon.”
“Sometimes,” Mary said, her voice dropping even lower, a rough whisper barely shaped by her lips, “I think about that.That patience. That focus. But in here. With the fire already built. And no clothes. Just… that warmth. That absolute attention on you. On every part of you.”
Heat flushed through me, sudden and sharp, pooling low in my belly, beneath the baby’s flutter. It wasn’t just the image. It was Mary saying it. Her practicality folding into a desire so specific it felt like a blueprint. My own mind supplied the rest: Ellie’s hands, which could soothe a frightened petitioner or chart the lines of a new tapestry, tracing the tension from my shoulders, my neck, lower. Nancy’s mouth, which could debate grain yields, finding a different use.
I adjusted my stance, the leather creaking. “Christ, Mary.”
“You started it.”
On the dais, Ellie settled the wool dispute with a compromise that left the merchant bowing, appeased. She shifted in her throne, a small, graceful adjustment of her weight, and her hand came to rest on the curve of her stomach. The gesture was so casually possessive, so utterly sure. My throat tightened.
“Later,” I muttered, forcing my eyes back to the crowd. “After lunch. The royal armory. We need to start on the new projectile weapons. The bows are obsolete.”
Mary gave a single, sharp nod. “Recoil management on a rifle that can be handled by someone smaller than a barn door. That’s the problem. The howitzers are ours. But the guards need something between a sword and an artillery piece.”
“Bolt action. Simple.Strong. We can work with the new steel from the forced-air chill batches.” Thinking of mechanisms was a cooling relief. A problem with a solution. “A straight pull. Maybe a rotating bolt head.”
“Easier to train. Less to go wrong in the cold.” She was already there with me, in the space of gears and tolerances.A sanctuary.
The final petitioner was dismissed. Ellie stood, Nancy rising beside her. The court bowed as one. As we fell in behind them to process out, the formality of the throne room gave way to the quieter hum of the corridor.
“You two were whispering like conspirators,” Ellie said, without looking back, her voice warm with amusement. “Plotting a coup?”
“Just noting the efficient handling of the wool crisis,” I said. “A masterclass in rule.”
Nancy laughed, linking her arm with Mary’s. “You looked so serious. All strapped in and scowling.”
“We were thinking about tensile strength,” Mary deadpanned.
The royal armory wasn’t a mere storage closet. It was a vaulted hall adjacent to the main forge, stone-walled and smoky, lined with racks of spears, walls of shields, and barrels of aging crossbows. The head armorer, a woman named Kera with forearms like knotted rope and a missing pinky, met us with a grunt that passed for greeting.
“The queens in the flesh,” she said, wiping her hands on a soot-blackened apron. “The smiths said you’d be down. Talking about ‘bolt actions.’ Sounds fiddly.”
“It is,” I said, heading for a cleared workbench. “Fiddly and deadly. We need to replace every bow and crossbow in the armory within the year.”
Kera whistled. “Big ambition.”
“Necessity.” Mary unrolled a schematic we’d been sketching in stolen moments. “Look.The cartridge feeds from here. A spring-loaded magazine. The bolt handle rotates and pulls back, ejecting the spent casing. Push forward, turn, lock. Simpler than a falling block. Faster than a lever.”
Kera leaned in, her skepticism giving way to sharp interest. “Where’s the firing pin?”
“Integrated into the bolt head. Here.” My finger smudged the charcoal line. “Trigger sear engages here. The trick is the extraction. The chamber has to be perfectly machined or it jams in the cold.”
We fell into it, the three of us. Kera brought samples of the new alloy, cold-forged and bluish. We argued over spring tension, over the angle of the grip, over the optimal length of the barrel for accuracy versus maneuverability in the castle corridors. The world narrowed to the feel of metal, the scent of oil and stone, the sound of our voices bouncing in the cavernous space. For an hour, we weren’t pregnant queens. We were engineers solving a puzzle.
Mary, holding a prototype bolt assembly, looked up at me. “We’ll need a range. To test.”
“The old tiltyard. Tomorrow.” I could feel the vibration of the main forge through the floor, a steady, powerful heartbeat.This was creation. This was control.
The gong for the midday banquet echoed down the stairwell, distant but insistent.
Kera took the bolt assembly from Mary. “I’ll start the forge for the first receiver. See if the theory holds metal.”
“It will,” Mary and I said in unison.
We found Ellie and Nancy already in the small family dining annex, not the Great Hall. A concession to our collective exhaustion. The table was laden with simple, hearty food: dark bread, roasted fowl, a pot of stewed winter roots. They had changed into softer, loose gowns. Ellie’s hair was braided over one shoulder. Nancy was pouring ale into four cups.
“Success?” Ellie asked, pulling out a chair for me.
“Maybe,” I said, sinking gratefully into the seat. “The metal liked the design. That’s half the battle.”
“We talked of tensile strength,” Mary said, taking her place next to Nancy. Their knees touched under the table. “And other things.”
Nancy’s eyes flicked to Mary’s, a question in them. Mary just gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of her head.Later.
We ate. The talk was of inconsequential things: a singer Ellie wanted to bring to court, a strange dream Nancy had, the way the light fell through the ice-crystal window at dawn. The domestic rhythm of it was as vital as the forge’s fire. This was the other half of the machine. Not the public performance of the throne room, or the focused creation of the armory, but the quiet, intersecting web of our shared lives.
Ellie’s foot found mine under the table. Nancy leaned her head on Mary’s shoulder for a moment, breathing her in. The babies moved within us, a silent, shifting chorus.
Outside, the endless winter tightened its grip. Inside, for now, we were warm, and we were together, surrounded by the weapons we were building and the fragile, ferocious peace we were growing.