Chapter 16: Duck
The secret became a rhythm. Wake in the grey dark. The lurch. The frantic, silent scramble to the basin. The acidic burn in her throat and nose. Then the clean-up, the mint leaf chewed to pulp, the careful application of powder under her eyes to mask the lingering pallor.
Mara, her maid, was dismissed each morning with a hissed, “Leave the tray. I’ll ring later.” The girl’s curious looks were met with a glare that brooked no argument. Sloane’s chambers became a fortress of solitude for those first fragile hours.
She attended the War Council. She had to. Felmont was dead, but his network was a hydra; cut off one head, and two more whispering loyalties needed rooting out. She took her seat beside Ronan, the high-backed chair feeling like a trap.
“The shipments from the southern passes have resumed,” General Holt was saying, his finger jabbing at a map. “But the tariffs collected are still fifteen percent below the ledger’s noted totals. The discrepancy is moving. Someone else is skimming.”
Sloane normally would have been leaning forward, slicing into the conversation with a pointed question. Now, she just listened. The fatigue was a dense fog banking her mind, making every thought swim through tar. The words were dull echoes. Skimming. Tariffs. Loyalties.
“Princess?” Lord Valerius, a weasel of a man who had opposed her presence on the council from day one, addressed her. “Your insights on Eldorian border tax law were… instrumental in deciphering Felmont’s schemes. Do you see a similar pattern here? A legal loophole?”
They were all looking at her. Ronan’s gaze was a physical weight on her profile. She had fought so hard for this scrap of respect, this right to sit here and not just be a ornamental bride. To be seen as shrewd. As an asset.
Now, her mind blanked. The figures on the parchment blurred. A slow, sickening sweat prickled under her arms. She grasped for a thread of thought, but it slipped away, drowned out by a pounding behind her temples.
“The loophole,” she began, her voice dryer than she intended. She cleared her throat. “It’s less about law and more about logistical blindness. The counts in the southern provinces self-report. No independent verification.” It was a basic, obvious point. Childishly simple.
Valerius’s thin lips curled in a barely-concealed smirk. “Ah. Yes. A foundational principle of governance. Thank you for the… clarification.”
Heat flooded her cheeks. She felt Ronan shift beside her, a slight tensing of his shoulders. She didn’t look at him.
For the rest of the session, she was a statue. She watched the play of power, the subtle alliances forming and reforming in the wake of the scare. She saw the glances thrown her way—some curious, some pitying, some satisfied. The sharp-tongued foreign princess had finally been worn down. The reality of Solas had defeated her. They thought she was bored. Or stupid. Or both.
The chamber pot in her room was her only confidante.
Three days after the council humiliation, Ronan cornered her in the Long Gallery. The setting sun poured through the high windows, painting the portraits of his grim ancestors in bloody light.
“You’re ill,” he stated. No greeting. He stood in her path, arms crossed, blocking her retreat to her rooms.
“It’s nothing. A lingering chill from the rain that night.” She made to move past him.
He didn’t budge. “You’ve been ‘lingering’ for a week. You pick at your food. You look like you haven’t slept. You were miles away in council.” His voice was low, analytical. “Is it your ankle? The healers said—”
“It’s not my ankle,” she snapped, the irritation flaring hot and welcome. Anger was better than the hollow, nauseous fear. “It’s bad stew, or tiredness, or perhaps just the thrilling company I’m forced to keep. Take your pick.”
His grey eyes narrowed. He was studying her the way he studied battle maps, looking for weaknesses in the terrain. “You’re lying.”
The directness stole her breath. “How dare you.”
“I dare because this isn’t just about you.” He took a step closer, his voice dropping further. “You gained a measure of trust here by being useful. By being smarter than them. Now you sit there silent, looking like a strong wind would knock you over. Valerius and his ilk are circling. They think you’re broken. They think this alliance is already failing. That makes you a liability. That makes us vulnerable.”
Each word was a hammer blow. He wasn’t concerned for her; he was conducting a threat assessment. Her illness was a strategic flaw. A chink in the armor of their political union. The truth, the horrible, burgeoning truth, pressed against her ribs, a scream begging to be let out.
It would ruin everything. The scant respect she’d earned would evaporate into condescension and whispered jokes about her “condition.” She’d be seen as a broodmare, her opinions forever softened by the perceived irrationality of her state. A liability. Just as he said.
The injustice of it, the sheer loneliness of it, rose in her like the morning sickness. She wanted to claw at him. She wanted to fold in on herself.
“I am not broken,” she ground out, her hands clenched at her sides. “And I am no one’s liability. My mind is my own. If I am quiet, it is because I am listening. Something you might try, instead of always assuming you see the whole board.” The deflection was weak, and they both knew it.
He just stared at her, frustrated. The weariness in his own face was more pronounced up close. The execution, the clean-up, the constant vigilance—it was weighing on him, too. But he wasn’t hiding a fundamental, life-altering secret that could upend their already precarious world.
“See a healer, Sloane,” he said finally, the command edged with something that wasn’t quite concern, but wasn’t pure calculation either. It was the tone of a commander who couldn’t afford an ailing soldier. “Whatever this is, fix it.”
He walked away, his boots echoing on the polished stone.
She stood there, swallowing back the familiar, bitter tide. She couldn’t fix it. This wasn’t a wound to be stitched or a poison to be purged. This was a countdown. Each day, each hidden bout of sickness, brought her closer to a moment where the truth would be undeniable. Where she would have to look at the strategic, brooding King of Solas and tell him the alliance was now permanently, physically sealed. That the enemy princess was carrying his heir.
The thought didn’t bring fear this time. It brought a cold, clear rage. At the situation. At her body for betraying her. At him, for being the other half of this equation and yet standing on the other side of a vast, unbridgeable moat of duty.
She wouldn’t see a healer. A healer would know. A healer would talk.
But she couldn’t do this alone. Not forever. The isolation was cracking her apart from the inside. She needed a single ally. Someone outside the mechanisms of this court.
That night, she didn’t ring for Mara. She sat at her small writing desk, staring at a single sheet of parchment. Finally, her hand steady for the first time in days, she dipped her quill and began to write.
‘Dearest Kael,’ she started, using her older brother’s childhood nickname. ‘If you are receiving this, the royal couriers have not intercepted it. I write with a need for counsel that cannot be given by anyone within the walls of Solas…’
The confession poured out of her, not the full truth, but the edges of it. The sickness. The fatigue. The terrifying suspicion. She asked not for solutions, but for clarity. For the memory of home. She sealed the letter with her personal signet, the Eldorian fox, not the joint seal of the alliance.
It was a risk. A massive one. But as she handed it the next morning to a young, terrified groom from her own personal Eldorian guard—a boy whose family hers had protected for generations—with instructions to ride for the border and use only their private channels, it felt like the first real breath she’d taken in weeks.
She was still alone. But she had thrown a line out into the dark. Now, she just had to wait, and hope the anchor held.
Now, she just had to wait, and hope the anchor held.
The wait was a physical ache, a hollow space beneath her ribs that even the nausea couldn’t fill. Each morning’s sickness felt more violent, a personal rebellion her combat training hadn’t prepared her for. She moved through the castle like a ghost, the vibrant echo of the princess who had fought assassins in an apothecary’s shop utterly muted.
Council resumed. The air in the chamber was stale with parchment dust and old ambition. Ronan was dissecting a report about grain stores, his voice a flat, relentless drone. “The shortfall in the eastern silos correlates with the payments to Felmont. He wasn’t just stealing coin; he was hedging against a famine he might have engineered.”
Sloane tried to focus on the words, on the maps. She forced her spine straight, gripping the edge of the wooden table. A trickle of cold sweat traced a path down her back beneath her layers of silk and linen. The smell of the general’s strong leather polish suddenly seemed overwhelming, sweet and caustic.
“Our priority must be resecuring the supply lines before the harvest moon,” Ronan continued, his gaze sweeping the table. It lingered on her for a fractured second. “Princess, your thoughts on the Eldorian granary protocols? Could we apply a similar oversight model here?”
All eyes turned to her. Lord Valerius’s were bright with ghoulish expectation. She opened her mouth to speak, to summon that sharp, analytical part of her mind. But a wave of dizziness washed over her, sudden and vertiginous. The room tilted. The faces blurred into pale, featureless ovals. The carved falcons on the rafters seemed to shift, to swoop.
She felt the color drain from her face, a cold, rushing vacancy. Her knuckles were white on the table. She swayed, just a fraction. It was enough.
Ronan’s voice cut through the fog. “Sloane?”
“Excuse me,” she managed, the words thick. She pushed back from the table, the chair legs screeching against stone. She didn’t look at anyone. “A sudden illness. Please, continue.”
She didn’t run. She walked, one foot deliberately in front of the other, her vision tunnelled on the double doors. The silence behind her was absolute, then a low murmur erupted in her wake. She heard the rustle of parchment, Ronan’s curt command to proceed without her. Her retreat felt less like a withdrawal and more like a rout.
The hallway was a cool, dim relief. She leaned against the cold stone wall for a moment, breathing through her nose, fighting the tremors in her legs. The walk to her chambers was an eternity. Servants melted out of her path, seeing the frozen determination on her face.
She finally reached her door, shoved it open, and closed it behind her with her full weight. The familiar, safe silence of the room enveloped her. She slid down the length of the door until she sat on the floor, heels digging into the rug, forehead on her knees. The humiliation was a live wire in her chest. She’d fled. In front of all of them.
A soft crunch under her hip made her start. She shifted, her fingers finding a folded piece of parchment on the floor. It must have been slipped under the door. The wax seal was a stark, familiar blood-red, stamped with the bounding fox of Eldoria. It was unbroken.
Her brother’s reply.
Her hands shook as she broke the seal, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room. The handwriting was Kael’s, swift and angular, no formalities.
Sloane—
Got your message. Stop panicking. First, see the castle midwife, not a royal healer. Find the one the servants use. They’re discrete, loyal to people, not titles. Pay her in silver, not gold. Don’t be a princess about it.
Second, whether it’s bad stew or something else, you need to know. You can’t strategize blind. It’s the first rule we learned.
Third, and listen carefully—if it is something else, you tell him. Not as a confession. As a tactical report. He’s a strategist, Sister. Present the facts, the potential outcomes, the logistical challenges. He’ll respect that. He might even help. The man who took down Felmont in two days isn’t an idiot. He’s your ally, however inconvenient that feels.
Whatever it is, you’re not alone. I’m here. But you’re also there. So stand up. Find the midwife. Then decide your next move.
—K
She read it twice, the words bypassing her panic and speaking directly to the soldier underneath. A tactical report. She almost laughed, a wet, shaky sound. Kael always did reduce world-shattering problems to manageable steps. See the midwife. Know for sure. Then tell the king.
The anchor had held. It hadn’t pulled her out of the storm, but it had given her a rope to cling to, a direction to swim. She wasn’t just a vessel for a secret anymore. She was a commander with poor intelligence, and her first recon mission was inside her own body.
She folded the letter carefully and stood up, her legs steadier now. She walked to the hearth, lifted a loose floor tile where she hid things not meant for prying eyes, and slid the parchment inside. Her next move was clear. Find the woman the servants trusted. Pay her in silver. Get the facts.
Then, she would have to walk into Ronan’s study and deliver the most unsettling tactical report of his life.
The resolve was cold iron in her veins, a welcome change from the queasy uncertainty. She waited until dusk, when the castle was in a fluid state between day's duties and night's formalities. Guards changed, kitchen staff hustled, and shadows grew long in the courtyards.
She chose a heavy wool cloak, nondescript and grey, from a chest of spare garments meant for messengers. She pulled the hood deep over her raven hair, the coarse fabric scratching her cheeks. Her hand lingered on the dagger she always kept at her hip, its familiar weight a comfort. Then she left it on the dresser. A princess might travel armed; a woman seeking a discreet midwife certainly would not.
Slipping into the corridor, she moved not like royalty but like a scullery maid avoiding notice, keeping to the walls where the torchlight was weakest. She used the service stairs, narrow and smelling of damp stone and old tallow. The final postern gate was manned by a young guard, his nose buried in a crumpled letter.
She passed him with a murmured, "Errand for the kitchens," her eyes downcast. He grunted, barely looking up, and she was through, the cool evening air hitting her like a physical pardon.
The city unfurled before her, a tapestry of smoke and fading light. She followed the directions Mara had whispered that morning, after a promise of extra coin and a plea for absolute silence. "The place with the green door," Mara had said. "By the tanner's yard. There's a candle in the window at dusk if she's receiving."
The tanner's yard announced itself long before she saw it, a pungent, animal odor cutting through the usual scents of woodsmoke and baking bread. The streets here were narrower, the buildings leaning in as if sharing secrets. She found the green door, the paint peeling like sick skin. In the grimy window, a single thick candle flickered, its flame guttering in the draft from the street.
She knocked, the sound too loud in the quiet lane.
The door opened a crack, revealing a sliver of a face—wrinkled, shrewd eyes set deep in a map of lines. "You're late," the woman said, her voice like grinding stones. She didn't ask who Sloane was. She just opened the door wider and gestured her in.
The shop was one room, cluttered with drying herbs, ceramic jars, and the faint, astringent scent of concoctions Sloane couldn't name. It was clean, but in a utilitarian, unforgiving way. There was no pretense of comfort.
"Sit," the woman said, pointing to a stool. She was already moving, washing her hands in a basin of water. "You know why you're here. You know what I do. The question is, do you want to know for sure?"
Sloane's throat tightened. She could still leave. She could cloak this fear in darkness forever. "Yes," she said, the word leaving her like a stone dropped into a well.
The examination was swift, impersonal. Cold hands, practiced pressure on her abdomen, a terse instruction to provide a sample in a chipped ceramic cup. The woman moved to a small workbench, adding drops from various vials to the cup. The room was silent save for the pop of the candle and the distant, rhythmic thump from the tannery next door.
Sloane watched, her hands clenched in her lap. The seconds stretched.
The woman peered into the cup, gave a slow nod, then turned. Her expression didn't soften. There was no congratulation, no sympathy. Just fact.
"You're with child," she stated. "Early. Six weeks, maybe seven. The sickness will get worse before it gets better." She dried her hands on a rag. "You'll need ginger root. Steep it. Pay me now."
The world didn't tilt. It simply solidified around the statement, hard and unyielding. All the fear, the suspicion, the desperate hope that she was wrong—it all condensed into this brutal, clinical truth in a smelly room above a tannery. She was pregnant. Ronan’s child grew inside her.
She fumbled in her pouch, pulled out several silver coins—too many, but she didn't care. She dropped them on the bench. The woman swept them away without counting.
"Tell the father," the midwife said, as if reading the storm behind Sloane's eyes. "Or don't. But bodies have a way of announcing these things themselves. You can't hide a war inside your own skin forever."
Sloane stood, her legs wooden. She pulled the hood up again, the coarse wool now feeling like a shroud.
The walk back to the castle was a blur of shadow and sound. The truth was no longer a specter in her mind; it was a physical presence, a new and terrifying tenant in the center of her being. The midwife’s words echoed. You can't hide a war inside your own skin.
She re-entered through the same postern gate, the same guard nodding her through. The castle's interior warmth felt oppressive, the rich tapestries now seeming like gaudy lies. She shed the cloak in her chamber, letting it pool on the floor like a shed skin.
She stood at her window, looking out at the pinpricks of light in the city below. The tactical report was no longer theoretical. The intelligence was gathered, confirmed, undeniable. She had the facts. A life. An heir. A permanent, biological seal on a political alliance. A vulnerability. A weapon. It was all those things.
Tomorrow, she would have to walk into Ronan's study. She would have to look into those intense grey eyes, so often focused on maps and troop movements, and redirect their focus to her. To them.
But for tonight, the war was hers alone. She placed a hand on her still-flat stomach, a gesture that felt foreign and terrifying. The truth was a cold stone in her chest, but beneath it, under layers of dread and strategic calculation, something else flickered, unwelcome and tenacious. A fierce, untamable spark of possessiveness.