Chapter 14: Death Toll
The world had narrowed to a red-hazed tunnel of pain and Elara’s voice. “Push, Lyra. Now. Everything you have.”
Lyra pushed. She gave it everything. Her body shuddered with the effort, muscles she didn’t know she had screaming in protest. A guttural sound tore from her throat, raw and animal. For a second, there was a terrifying, overwhelming pressure, a sense of something monumental giving way.
Then nothing.
The pressure vanished. The frantic energy in the room froze.
Elara’s hands were still. Her face, previously a mask of calm command, went slack with a sudden, terrible blankness. The silence was louder than any scream.
“Elara?” Darian’s voice was a blade of sound in the quiet.
The midwife didn’t answer. She was staring between Lyra’s legs, her brow furrowed. One of her assistants made a small, choked sound and turned away.
“What?” Lyra gasped, her head falling back against the sweat-drenched linen. The reprieve from the pain was seductive, but the silence was wrong. All wrong. “What is it?”
Elara finally moved, her actions swift but tense. “The shoulder.” Her voice was clipped, professional, but a thread of something else ran beneath it. “It’s stuck. He’s not moving.”
A cold that had nothing to do with the room seeped into Lyra’s bones. Stuck. Her mind, fogged with exhaustion, understood the word in its most primitive sense. Trapped. Her son was trapped inside her.
“Get him out,” Darian said. It wasn’t a request. It was the low, vibrating order of a king used to impossible things bending to his will.
“I am trying,” Elara snapped, her focus absolute. Her hands worked, her face a grimace of concentration. “Lyra, you must push again. Now. Harder than before.”
Lyra tried. She dug her heels into the sheets, ground her teeth, and summoned a force from the very dregs of her soul. A weak, shuddering effort was all she could manage. It was like trying to lift a mountain with bare hands. The great, wrenching contractions that had powered her for hours were faltering, becoming irregular, lazy tremors.
“I can’t,” she wept, the admission a defeat more complete than any lost battle. “There’s nothing left.”
Elara looked up, meeting Darian’s eyes over Lyra’s body. A silent, horrifying conversation passed between them. The midwife gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
Darian’s face drained of all color. The hand still clutching Lyra’s went rigid, then began to tremble. She had never seen him tremble. Not when facing a drawn sword, not when hearing of an army at his gates.
“No.” The word was flat. Final.
“My King, if we don’t deliver him soon…” Elara trailed off. The rest hung in the air, in the smell of blood and fear. He will die. And she will follow.
“Do something else.”
“There are… maneuvers. They carry risk. To the queen.”
“What risk?”
“Breaking the bone. To free him. Or… hemorrhage.” Elara’s voice was quiet, clinical. Each word was a stone dropped into still water.
Lyra felt the decision looming over her, a second crushing weight. She turned her head, her vision swimming. Darian was staring at her, but his eyes weren’t seeing her. They were scanning an invisible battlefield, calculating losses, strategies. The King was present. The man was being buried alive inside.
“Do it,” Lyra whispered.
His silver eyes snapped to hers. “Lyra—”
“Do it!” The shout cost her, a sharp pain in her side. “You get him out. However you have to. You bring him into this room.”
It was her order. Her command. The last one she might ever give.
Darian held her gaze for a second longer, then gave Elara a single, sharp nod.
What followed was a kind of violence. Elara’s hands moved inside her, a purposeful, brutal mechanics. Lyra screamed, a high, thin sound that tore at her throat. The pain was different now—sharp, specific, bright with malice. Darian’s face floated above her, a pale moon. He was whispering, but she couldn’t hear the words over the roaring in her ears. She could only see his mouth moving, see the sheer, undiluted terror in his eyes. It was the vulnerability he’d shown in the baths, now magnified into a blinding, paralyzing light.
There was a sickening, internal pop. A sensation not of pain, but of profound, structural wrongness.
Then, sudden slipperiness.
A rush.
A small, limp, blueish body slid into Elara’s waiting hands.
The room held its breath.
The baby lay perfectly still on the bloodied linen. He didn’t cry. He didn’t move. His chest was silent.
“No,” Darian breathed. The word was shattered.
Elara acted. She cleared the tiny mouth with a finger, turned him over, struck his back with the heel of her hand. Once. Twice. A third time, sharp and sure.
Nothing.
Lyra’s world ended. It didn’t shatter; it simply dissolved into a silent, white void. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t blink. She was just… gone. The months of strategy, the fear, the ache, the hope—all of it vanished, leaving a hollowed-out shell.
Elara’s assistant was crying openly. Darian had released Lyra’s hand. He was standing, backed against the wall, his fists clenched at his sides, his gaze locked on the tiny, still form. He looked like a man witnessing the fall of his entire world.
Then Elara bent her head. She covered the baby’s nose and mouth with her own mouth and breathed. A small, gentle puff of air into still lungs. She paused, watched the unmoving chest. She did it again.
Another pause. A lifetime.
A jerk.
A tiny, wet cough.
A shudder ran through the small body. Then a weak, grizzling cry, thin and reedy as a newborn kitten’s, filled the terrible silence.
The sound was a spear through the void. Lyra gasped, the air burning its way back into her lungs. She craned her neck, a desperate, aching movement.
Elara was wiping the baby, her hands now tender, her face transformed by a radiant, fierce triumph. He was crying in earnest now, a proper, angry wail, his skin flushing from blue to a furious, healthy red. She wrapped him in a clean blanket and turned.
But she didn’t bring him to Lyra.
She crossed the room and placed the writhing, wailing bundle directly into Darian’s arms.
He jerked as if struck. He looked down, his expression one of pure, uncomprehending shock. His arms, so strong, so capable with a sword, were utterly stiff, locked at the elbows. He held the baby like he was holding unstable explosives.
“Your son, my King,” Elara said softly, before turning back to Lyra, her attention now on the aftermath, on the slowing, ominous flow of blood.
Darian stared. The baby’s cries softened to hiccupping gulps. One tiny, starfish hand escaped the swaddle and waved blindly in the air. It brushed against the leather of Darian’s vambrace.
Lyra watched, through a haze of gathering darkness at the edges of her vision, as the man she married broke.
His rigid arms slowly, infinitesimally, folded inward. He brought the small weight closer to his chest. One shaking hand came up. He stared at his own fingers, calloused and scarred, as if they belonged to a stranger. With an awe that was almost horror, he extended a single finger.
The baby’s hand closed around it. The grip was astonishingly strong.
A shuddering breath racked Darian’s frame. He bent his head, his brow touching the blanket. His shoulders curled around the child, forming a fortress of one. A low, broken sound escaped him—not a sob, but something deeper, torn from the bedrock of him.
Lyra wanted to speak. To reach out. But the white void was returning, tinged with gray at the edges. Elara’s voice sounded far away, urgent, talking about pressure and herbs. The pain was a distant, persistent throb.
Her last sight, before the darkness pulled her under, was of Darian, the ruthless King, on his knees by the fire, silently holding their son, whispering words only the two of them could hear. Not a king and an heir. A father, meeting his son in the ruin of everything, and finding, in that tiny, defiant grip, a reason to rebuild.
A father, meeting his son in the ruin of everything, and finding, in that tiny, defiant grip, a reason to rebuild.
Lyra floats in and out of consciousness, feeling light as a feather, unaware of the panic that has gripped the room.
The world receded to a murmur of water, to the warm, cedar-scented steam of the baths. She was weightless there, cradled by dark water and Darian’s steady silence. A good dream. She tried to stay in it.
“The shepherd’s purse isn’t working.” Elara’s voice, usually so composed, was frayed. It came from somewhere beyond the warm water. “The bleeding isn’t slowing. It’s worse.”
“What does that mean?” That was Darian. But his voice was wrong. It was stripped bare, hollowed out by a fear she’d never heard in him before.
“It means her womb is tired. It won’t clamp down.” There was a rattling of instruments, a slosh of water. “I need to massage it. Directly. Hold her. She’ll feel this.”
Lyra felt hands on her belly, but they were distant, impersonal pressures. Then a deep, internal agony ripped through the warm haze of the dream. It was a raw, scraping violence that stole what little breath she had.
She cried out, a thin, ragged sound.
“I know, my queen. I know. Breathe.” Elara’s words were gentle, but her hands were relentless, working inside her with a terrible, necessary purpose. The pain was a red tide, pulling her under again.
She surfaced to the sound of her son’s crying. It was a robust, healthy sound now, full of insult and life. That sound was an anchor. She blinked, her vision swimming.
Darian was still by the fire, but he was no longer kneeling. He stood rigid, the baby held securely in the crook of one arm. His other hand was clenched on the mantelpiece, knuckles white. His eyes were fixed on Elara’s bloody work, his face a carved mask of helpless fury.
“You have to stop the bleeding.” It was an order, a king’s command, but it cracked in the middle.
“I am trying!” Elara shot back, sweat dripping from her brow. “This is how you stop it!”
Lyra felt a profound, warming gush between her legs. It felt endless. The linen beneath her was soaked, a shocking, vivid red that was spreading too fast. Elara’s assistant pressed down on her abdomen with both hands, her own face pale.
“Darian,” Lyra whispered. He was at her side in an instant, his free hand finding hers. His skin was ice cold. She looked from his terrified eyes to the furious, scrunched face of their son. “His name,” she breathed, the words slurring. “We never chose.”
“Don’t.” The word was a plea, raw and broken. “Don’t do that. You choose it with me. Later.”
“Now. In case my campaign… ends here.” She managed a weak tug at his hand. “Think of something stubborn. And brave.”
He looked down at the baby, who had quieted, as if listening. Darian’s throat worked. When he spoke, his voice was rough gravel. “Kael.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. After his general, the blunt, loyal man who wrote with terrible handwriting. “Kael.” She tested it. It was a strong name. A fighter’s name. “Good.”
Another wave of weakness dragged at her. The room dimmed, the edges fading to a soft gray. The sounds became muffled, as if she were submerged in that bath again. Elara and her assistant were speaking in hurried, technical whispers about pressure and packing and things Lyra didn’t understand.
Darian was speaking too, his mouth close to her ear. He was talking about the ledgers from the western merchants’ guild, about how he’d found the discrepancy she’d flagged. He described the look on Pellam’s son’s face when he got the marshal’s orders for the Fever Marshes. He was constructing a wall of words, a rampart of the mundane, to keep the silence at bay.
She heard him, but the words lost their meaning, becoming only a low, reassuring hum.
The last thing she felt, as the feather-lightness took her completely, was the wet, warm press of his lips against her temple and the distant, hungry cry of their son, Kael, insisting on his place in the world.