Chapter 24: Home
The silence in the royal carriage was a physical thing. It pressed against Astrid’s ears, thick and suffocating, louder than the rumble of the wheels over the rutted track. Outside, the world softened into the muted greens and grays of the foothills, but inside, the space between them on the velvet seat might as well have been the Blackwood Pass itself.
Caius stared out the opposite window, his profile sharp against the glass. He’d been like this for days. Since she’d asked. Since he’d said yes.
He’d agreed, but it hadn’t been a conversation. It had been a pronouncement. She’d stood in their room, the letter still crumpled in her fist, and said, “I need to go north. To my mother.”
He hadn’t argued. He’d just nodded, his eyes distant, already calculating logistics. “I’ll arrange an escort. The roads should be clear this time of year.” As if she’d requested a holiday. Then he’d turned and left, retreating into a flurry of administrative work—meetings with grain factors, disputes over irrigation channels, the dry minutiae of kingship. He’d poured himself into it like mortar into a crumbling wall, building a barrier of duty between himself and the chasm of her leaving.
Now, he was escorting her himself. A prince’s duty. But he was a ghost in the carriage.
Astrid watched the muscle in his jaw twitch. She felt the baby move, a faint, fluttering pressure low in her belly, a secret she hadn’t shared. The sensation was still foreign, a whisper under the roar of her own confusion. It tied her to him in a way the alliance documents never could, and the knot of it was pulled painfully tight.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said finally, her voice rough from disuse. “The captain of the guard could lead the escort.”
Caius didn’t look at her. “And have your mother think I’ve packed you off like inconvenient luggage? No. The deal was an alliance. This,” he gestured vaguely between them, “is part of it. We present a united front. Even if the front is a lie.”
The word hung there. Lie.
“It’s not—” she began, but stopped. What was it? It wasn’t false. It was just… unformed. A reality without a shape.
“It’s fine, Astrid.” He finally turned his head. The charming prince was gone. In his place was someone older, wearier. The light in his blue eyes was banked, like embers buried in ash. “You need your home. I understand that. Go. Breathe the northern air. Let your mother… advise you.”
Advise you. On what to do with the heir he didn’t know existed. The omission was a stone in her throat.
The landscape grew harsher, the comfortable Eldorian farmlands giving way to rocky outcrops and stands of pine that clung to the slopes with tenacious grace. The air lost its floral sweetness, taking on a crisp, clean bite. With every mile, Astrid felt a piece of the courtly armor she’d been wearing crack and fall away. But beneath it, she wasn’t finding her old self. She was finding someone new, someone scared and anchored by a profound, biological weight.
They made camp at the edge of the Blackwood. The trees loomed in the distance, a dark smear against the twilight. This far out, they were just trees, not the skeletal sentinels of the deeper pass, but their presence was a cold reminder. The men set up tents, the sounds of hammers and low voices familiar, yet the mood was somber.
Astrid walked to the treeline, needing space from the clatter and Caius’s silent presence. She placed a hand on the rough, damp bark of an ancient pine. This was the beginning of her world. The scent of sap and decaying needles was an old song. She closed her eyes and breathed.
She heard his footsteps behind her, careful on the fallen twigs.
“I can feel you thinking from here,” she said, not turning.
“It’s a lot to think about.” He came to stand beside her, close but not touching. He was looking at the forest, not at her. “I’ve been reviewing the trade concessions. The timber routes your father wanted. They’re more feasible than my council believed. The engineering is sound.”
She blinked. “You’re thinking about timber.”
“I’m thinking about the future,” he corrected, a brittle edge to his voice. “A tangible one. One I can control. With maps and quotas and… timber.” He kicked a stone, sending it skittering into the dark. “It’s easier than thinking about the fact that my wife is running away from me, carrying a child she won’t acknowledge, to a place where I am, at best, a necessary inconvenience.”
The direct hit stole her breath. She turned to him. The twilight painted his face in blues and grays, hollowing his cheeks. “I’m not running. I’m going to think. Here, everywhere I turn, there’s an expectation. A role. I can’t hear myself.”
“And what will you hear in the north, Astrid? The howl of the wind? Your mother’s wisdom?” He finally looked at her, his gaze intense. “Will it tell you to keep it? To raise an heir in Eldoria? Or will it tell you there are herbs in the deep frost that can solve a problem before it truly begins?”
The blood drained from her face. The cold of the forest seeped into her bones. She had thought of it, in the darkest, most panicked moments. The thought had felt like a betrayal of her own body, a chilling practicality. To hear it from him, laid bare, was a violence.
“Is that what you want?” Her voice was a whisper.
“I don’t know what I want!” The words burst from him, stripped of all courtly polish. He ran a hand through his dark curls. “I want the alliance to work. I want not to feel like a villain in my own marriage. I want you to look at me like I’m a person, not a political sentence. And now there’s a child, which changes every calculation, and you won’t even… talk to me about it. You just leave.” He swallowed hard. “So yes, I think about timber. Because timber doesn’t look at me with fear in its eyes.”
She had no answer. The truth was a tangled knot. She was afraid. Afraid of the relentless court, afraid of the relentless north, afraid of the tiny, fluttering thing inside her that made her both powerful and terrifyingly vulnerable. Most of all, she was afraid that any choice she made would be the wrong one, trapping her forever.
“I’m afraid too,” she admitted, the confession wrenched from her.
The anger seemed to drain out of him, leaving him looking utterly exhausted. “I know,” he said, his own voice dropping. “That’s the worst part. I can see it. And I don’t know how to fix it. I can’t diplomacy my way into your trust. I can’t charm a baby into being wanted.”
“It’s not that it’s not wanted,” she said, the words surprising her. She pressed a hand over her stomach. “It’s that it’s a weapon. Don’t you see that? In Eldoria, it will be a tool. A guarantee. A chain. In the north…” She trailed off, thinking of her mother’s letter. A new kind of vow. “In the north, it will be a claim. On me. On my loyalty. Everyone will want a piece of it. Of me. And I will have to choose.”
Caius was silent for a long time. The woods were fully dark now, the first stars pricking the sky above the treetops.
“Then let’s not tell anyone,” he said quietly.
She stared at him. “What?”
“While we’re here. While you… think. Let’s just be Caius and Astrid. Not the prince and the princess with a royal heir on the way. Let it be yours. Ours. A secret. For a little while.” He gave a grim, humorless smile. “It might be the only thing that’s ever been truly just ours.”
The idea was a sudden, startling relief. A pocket of silence in the roaring noise. A space to breathe.
She nodded, slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath of the pine-scented air. “How much further to your mother’s hall?”
“Two days. Through the pass.”
He looked back at the dark line of the Blackwood. “Right.”
The next morning, they entered the pass. The fog was thin, a pale mist that clung to their cloaks. The trees here were the ancient sentinels, gnarled and watchful. The only sounds were the crunch of hooves on gravel, the jingle of harnesses, and the distant, lonely cry of a hawk. Astrid rode ahead, her body remembering the path instinctively. She felt a pang of something like grief for the version of herself who last rode here—lighter, unburdened, sure of her place in the world.
At midday, they reached the stone where they’d fought the Gloom. It was just a rock now, stained with lichen, innocent in the diffuse light. Neither of them spoke as they passed it, but the memory pulsed in the air between them—a shared nightmare that was, strangely, the most honest moment they’d ever had.
It was as they cleared the highest point of the pass that they saw the riders. Six of them, waiting on the northern slope where the fog broke. They sat on shaggy, rugged horses, clad in fur and weathered leather. At their head was a woman with iron-grey hair braided tightly back, her face a map of hard winters and shrewd decisions.
Astrid’s breath caught. Her mother, Jora of Nordane, had come to meet them.
And by the cold, assessing look in Jora’s eyes as they swept over Caius and his polished retinue, the brief respite of their secret was already over. The real world, with all its demands and sharp edges, was here to meet them.
Jora’s gaze was a physical pressure. It swept over Caius’s fine cloak, the polished silver on his men’s harnesses, and finally settled on Astrid’s face. The scrutiny left no room for their fragile secret.
“Daughter,” Jora said, her voice like gravel shifting. She didn’t dismount.
“Mother.” Astrid nudged her horse forward, feeling strangely like a child caught somewhere she shouldn’t be. “You didn’t need to ride out.”
“I know what I need.” Jora’s eyes flicked back to Caius, who had guided his horse forward with a diplomat’s cautious smile. “Prince Caius. The pass treats you well?”
“It’s remarkably… quiet,” Caius said. The charm was back, but it was strained, a thin veneer over the exhaustion. “A stark beauty. It suits her.”
Jora didn’t acknowledge the compliment. She looked at the Eldorian escort, a dozen men who seemed too bright and neatly arranged against the crumpled leather and fur of her own. “Your guard is sufficient for the return journey.”
A chill, sharper than the mountain air, went through Astrid. Caius’s smile froze.
“Return journey?” he asked, his tone carefully neutral.
“You’ve delivered her. The alliance is seen to.” Jora finally swung down from her saddle, her movements efficient and strong. She walked to Astrid’s horse and put a hand on its neck, looking up at her daughter. “She needs northern walls around her now. And quiet. Not the noise of a court, or the noise of a husband trying to fix what isn’t his to fix.”
The bluntness was a slap. Astrid saw Caius flinch as if struck.
“My lady,” he began, his voice tighter. “With respect, what is between Astrid and I is ours. The child is—”
“The child is in her body,” Jora interrupted, her voice low and final. “Which is currently on my land. She is breathing my air. She came for quiet. So let her have it. Go back to your stone castle and your timber quotas, Prince. Let her remember who she is without you shadowing every thought.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Caius’s knuckles were white on the reins. He looked at Astrid, a desperate, silent question in his eyes. Is this what you want?
Astrid opened her mouth, but no sound came. The relief at being home, the crushing weight of the future, her mother’s imposing will—it all collided inside her. She wanted him to fight. She wanted him to leave. The contradiction stole her voice.
She gave the smallest, most agonized nod.
He saw it. The light in his eyes, the one that was perpetually amused, guttered out completely. He looked from her to Jora’s unyielding face and back again. “I see,” he said, the words flat and hollow. He drew himself up in the saddle, the prince again, a mask of cool formality. “Of course. The lady’s comfort is paramount. I would not be an unwelcome shadow.”
He didn’t say goodbye to her. He gave Jora a curt, precise nod. “You have my regards, Lady Jora. And my… trust in your care.” The last word was pointed, sharp with unspoken accusation.
He wheeled his horse around, barking an order to his captain. The Eldorian party turned in a clatter of tack and a spray of gravel, heading back into the throat of the pass without a backward glance. Astrid watched until the fog swallowed the last glint of metal, the silence they left behind now a roaring in her ears.
“Come,” her mother said, her hand now on Astrid’s boot. “The hall is warm.”
The great hall of Nordane was not warm. It was a vast, timbered space heated by a central firepit, the smoke curling up to blackened rafters. It smelled of woodsmoke, roasting meat, and the earthy scent of packed dirt floor. It was not quiet, either. It was filled with the clatter of life—hounds snuffling, servants chatting, the distant ring from the forge. But it was a different noise. It was her noise.
Astrid stood by the fire, her travel cloak dripping melted frost. The fatigue she’d carried in Eldoria was still there, but it had morphed. Here, it was a permissible weakness.
Her mother approached, holding two cups of steaming cider. She handed one to Astrid. “He looked at you like a lost pup,” Jora said, not unkindly.
“He’s not a pup. He’s a prince.”
“He’s a boy, in a situation men twice his age would fear.” Jora took a long drink, watching the flames. “Sending him away was a mercy. For you both. Now you can stop performing. For him, for his court. You can just be scared.”
Astrid’s breath hitched. The simple acknowledgement, the permission in the words, undid a knot in her chest she hadn’t fully recognized. The heat from the cup seeped into her cold fingers.
“I don’t know what to be,” Astrid whispered. “A mother sounds like a stranger. A queen sounds like a cage. I just feel… trapped. By my own body.”
Jora nodded. “Good.”
“Good?”
“If you weren’t terrified, you’d be a fool.” Jora set her cup down and turned, placing her work-rough hands on either side of Astrid’s face. Her palms were warm and solid. “Listen to me. This is not a trap. It is a change of direction. A storm that reroutes the ship. You don’t have to become some soft, singing mother from a southern tale. You become a mother of Nordane. What does that look like? You get to decide. No one else. Not him. Not his kingdom.”
The tears came then, hot and silent, cutting tracks through the dust of the journey. They were not the violent sobs of panic she’d felt in Eldoria, but a deep, weary release. She leaned forward, her forehead touching her mother’s shoulder. Jora’s arms came around her, strong and unshakable as the mountains outside.
“I don’t know how,” Astrid choked out.
“You learn,” Jora murmured into her hair. “The same way you learned the sword. One brutal, honest day at a time.”
They stood like that for a long while, the fire cracking, the hall’s noise a distant blanket around them. For the first time since seeing the raven fly, Astrid felt the clenched fist of her future loosen, just a little. It wasn’t a solution. It was a space, carved out by her mother’s unwavering hands, in which to be afraid.
And then, as if responding to the sudden quiet within her, the baby moved again. A distinct, undeniable roll beneath her ribs. A reminder that the future, for all its fear, was already present, and had its own insistent momentum.