My Kingdom for Your Love
"Just tell me, please, that this was all a mistake," Roald told his wife through numb lips, hating how cold his voice sounded, because, when addressing his Lianne, he was supposed to be warm and gentle. Then again, the crimson veil of rage covering his eyes was making him doubt that the lady before him was his beloved Lianne. What she had done made her seem like a stranger—someone he had never loved and whom he could never have loved if she was capable of such a heinous act of betrayal. "Please tell me that you never intended it to happen."
"I can't tell you that, my lord." Lianne closed her eyes, blinking back the tears that already had attached to her eyelashes like icicles, making them sparkle in the firelight. "This is a miracle, and I've prayed for this."
"Then at least tell me you were wearing your anti-pregnancy charm when you did this," he said, trying to keep his voice level, when all he wanted to do was stride across the royal parlor and shake her until she realized how foolish and callous she had been. Until he had hurt her as much as she had wounded him. Then they could see if she still loved him despite that pain the way he loved her even though she had just stabbed him in the back with a dagger because she had shot him in the heart with the deadliest arrow so many years ago. Only his memory of how he and his sister trembled in the nursery, cringing every time their father shouted and hit their mother (and it was way too many times, though once would have been more than enough) and his conviction that Jonathan, despite the deception of his mother, would at least not have a father who manhandled women, pretty monsters though they were, kept his feet firmly planted in the carpet where he was.
"I didn't want anything to come between us, Roald," whispered Lianne, gazing at him beseechingly, begging him to understand what to him would be forever incomprehensible.
Her softness only infuriated him. He wanted her to raise her voice. He wanted her to argue. He wanted her to scream. Gods above, he just wanted her to prove that she was as madly in love with him as he was with her. He needed to know that, whatever happened, he would always be first in her heart.
"You've lied to me, my lady, and you've betrayed my trust," snapped Roald, his eyes ice as he stalked into his bedchamber. Before shutting the door with a distinctly not regal slam, he tossed vindictively over his shoulder, "Madam, you may consider yourself out of excuses for your disloyalty to your husband and out of my good graces."
Collapsing on his bed and burying his forehead in his palms, he pretended that he couldn't hear the heart-wrenching sounds of her sobs over the din of his own weeping echoing in his ears as he remembered…
They were so giddy with relief that Lianne had survived this labor and with joy that they finally had a son instead of a stillborn that it seemed cruel for Duke Baird, after Jonathan had been rocked to sleep in a cradle, to announce, using the gentle tone all healers deployed when providing patients with news that could shatter their lives and families, "Your Majesties, after this difficult pregnancy and labor, it would be unwise and unsafe for Her Majesty to attempt to give birth to another child. We could not guarantee her survival or that of the child."
"I know my duty." Stoically, every inch a Naxen, Lianne pushed herself, panting with the effort, up from her mound of pillows. "I will provide my husband with a spare to go with his heir. If I have to, I will die to give my husband another child."
"Don't talk nonsense, Lianne, my love." Roald squeezed her hand, knowing that it wasn't nonsense to her, and wishing that he could explain how it was nonsense to him. "You've given me a healthy, handsome son, and your first duty is to love and support me. Even you, marvelous though you are, can't do that from the dead, my dear. I'd rather have a loving wife than another child."
"You can get another loving wife to give you another child if I die trying to give you one," Lianne pointed out, her voice as cracked as her dry lips.
"You're delirious." Shaking his head, he held out a glass of water, and she sipped from it, dainty even in her distress.
Satisfied that she was replacing some of the fluid that had been sweat out of her, Roald turned back to Baird and ordered, "Please give her an anti-pregnancy charm, Your Grace."
"No," Lianne burst out desperately, defying Roald for the first time since they had begun courting so long ago when neither of them could have imagined the pain, disappointment, and horror of losing a child in the womb, where a baby was intended to be protected and nourished.
"Wear it for me," urged Roald, taking the amulet that Baird proffered.
Roald could see the conflict etched into the lines on his wife's exhausted features. Within her, two duties were at war. She knew she was obliged to obey her husband, submitting herself to his will with humility and graciousness, no matter how much she disagreed with his decision. Yet, she had also been raised to believe that it was a wife's most important job to provide her husband with many heirs. For a queen, with the future of a realm depending on her ability to give birth to children, that responsibility would be magnified to a weight on her shoulders, crushing her like a wagon full of bricks.
Anxiously, Roald watched her, wondering which duty would emerge the victor. Finally, she bowed her head, and, as tears streamed down her cheeks in rivulets, allowed him to drape the anti-pregnancy charm, which she had to regard as an ironic mark of her failure to be fertile, around her neck. However, even as she acquiesced to his will, he sensed that she would defy him and try to conceive another child with him. She would think it more important to give birth to another child than to remain by his side. She would place love for her country above love of him, and he, who loved her more than words could hope to express, almost hated her for that.