"Your Majesty, the last item of business is the succession, or more to the point, the lack of a royal heir." Eamon Guerrin, Arl of Redcliffe, strove to keep his tone as neutral as possible, only the shuffling of the reports in front of him betraying his nerves. He deliberately did not look toward the head of the table where the King had suddenly straightened in his chair or to his left where his brother, Bann Teagan Guerrin, sat, giving him a quelling look. Silence stretched, hovering. It was Eamon who broke it, clearing his throat and finally turning to meet the firmly set jaw and warning glance of his King.
Alistair Theirin, King of Ferelden, watched Eamon swallow hard. He did not glance toward Teagan but was vaguely aware that this line of discussion made the Bann distinctly uneasy. Finally, with a grim firmness in his voice that brooked no argument, Alistair replied, "That is not open for discussion." Before Eamon could voice his disagreement, Alistair scraped back his chair and rose. "Now if you will excuse me, I've promised to take luncheon with the Queen."
Alistair had almost reached the door when Eamon decided he could not let the matter of the Queen rest. "And most likely those brats she fosters." Teagan's mutter of disgust was lost in the King's furious response.
Turning abruptly on his heel, Alistair stalked back across the floor and grabbed Eamon by the front of his doublet, lifting him halfway out of his chair. Eamon gulped audibly, his Adam's apple bobbing at the look of barely leashed rage in the King's changeable hazel eyes. When Alistair shook him like a mabari with a rat, he nearly squeaked in alarm. The King's voice was biting. "Do not make me repeat myself, Eamon. Aalish is your Queen. She bears the Crown Matrimonial. She is the Hero of Ferelden, the Warden Commander of the Grey in Ferelden, the sodding Arl of Amaranthine. The woman has more titles than I do. What makes you think you, or anyone, has the right to discuss her lack of a child?" Alistair shoved his face closer to Eamon's, his voice dropping to a dangerous hiss. "Do you think, Eamon, that maybe you're hurting my wife?"
With a sound of disgust, Alistair dropped Eamon back into his chair and strode from the room. Eamon watched him go, realizing with a sudden sinking sensation that the King might forgive him for caring about the succession, but the man could not forgive someone questioning the woman he loved.
Teagan refused to look at him as they both collected their papers and rose.
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Alistair's anger carried him out of the keep, across the bailey, and into the refurbished Warden Compound. The sound of children's laughter halted him at the open door indicated by a servant, however, and he did his best to rearrange his features, to smooth out the forbidding frown, to take a deep, calming breath. Bile continued to churn in his gut, however, and his heart squeezed painfully as he stepped into the room.
His Queen, his wife, his love, sat surrounded by a group of children, her lovely face lit with joy, her slender, capable hands moving expressively as she told them some fantastic story. Her beautiful gown of darkest royal blue was crushed beneath several child-sized bodies, one of which was wiggling in her lap, drooling and gnawing on a piece of her bright copper colored hair. These were the children she fostered, children of all races whose families had been lost in the Blight, in the civil war, to bandits or raiders or any number of foul tragedies that could befall families in Ferelden; among them, too, were a few noble bastards. When she'd asked him to give her leave to restructure the old Grey Warden compound in the keep to suit as a school and dormitory of sorts, he'd consented readily. When she was in residence in Denerim, she spent much of her free time here, helping with lessons, sharing mealtimes, telling stories, teaching basic self-defense and some archery to the older children, even seeing off those old enough to be trained in craft or war.
She loved them, these children, and yet they were breaking her heart. For three years now, Alistair was the one who had to watch her blanch as her courses heralded another month without a royal heir, who held her in his arms at night after a loving that was more mechanical than passionate, who felt her pulling away from him as months turned into years and still they had no child to call their own. He knew she heard the whispers of the court, the comparison to former Queen Anora, the speculation that the line of Calenhad would die if Aalish remained Queen. A Cousland always does their duty. Her duty was to give him an heir. She was failing.
He was terrified she was going to force him to set her aside.
A quick bark of welcome and a hard nudge to his knees from behind revealed Alistair's presence to the room, forcing him out of his reverie. He reached down and stroked a hand down Sarim's back as Aalish's mabari pushed past him into the room.
While the children rushed him and the dog with cries of, "Doggy!" and "King Alistair!", Aalish handed the toddler in her lap to a hovering servant before rising. Realizing her gown was beyond a simple smoothing, she tucked the strand of slobbered hair behind her ear and watched as her handsome husband's easy smile bloomed. He crouched among the rabble of excited children and dog, touching hands here, tousling hair there, charmed by little faces and little voices.
Yearning filled Aalish, rising up from the pit of her stomach and closing gentle hands about her throat. Her husband was so good with the children, patient and amusing and kind. She knew that he visited them even when she was not in Denerim, knew he brokered some of the placements for the children personally with the noble houses. He deserved his own child to cuddle and kiss and spoil, to teach to ride a horse, to carry a sword, to stand as his heir. She was his Queen, his wife, his lover, and she was failing him.
There was a child, somewhere, that was his. His and not hers. Morrigan's child. For Aalish, there had only ever been Alistair. One night. One night she gave him away, sent him away to lie with the witch she called sister, to save them both, and he made a child.
A better woman than she would be bitter, because the Cousland that had been Aalish before the Blight knew what her heart refused to countenance: she was going to have to let him go.
The nurserymaid's calls to luncheon shook Aalish from her darkening thoughts. With happy squeals and laughter, the horde of children and one mabari tumbled out of the room, leaving the King and Queen of Ferelden facing each other across a wide chasm of shared disappointment and regret.
Finally, Alistair rose, straightening his doublet, and smiled, crookedly. "Food. My favorite." When she didn't respond in kind, instead moving toward him with a strange expression of mingled sorrow and intent in her dark blue eyes, Alistair felt his terror from before return with force, weakening his knees. "Aalish…"
Whatever he'd been going to say was lost as his wife wound her arms around his neck, her slender form melting against him in a way that recalled cold marches and warm campfires, a shared tent and fevered couplings in the dark. His hands spread over her lower back, fingertips kneading gently, his head lowering at the urging of her hands. The kiss began as warmth and love and quickly turned into something wilder, darker, passion stirring. When he lifted his lips from hers, looking dazed and flushed and needy, Aalish murmured softly, "Let's have luncheon in our quarters." Then she nipped his lower lip in her strong white teeth, her hips moving restlessly against him. "Maybe excuse ourselves from the rest of today's duties entirely."
It had been months since his wife approached him without first consulting the strange charts she'd been given by some quack surgeon, months since making love had been about their need for one another rather than the country's need for an heir. They used to laugh when the mechanics of a position from one of her books was impossible, used to spend lazy mornings simply touching each other in breathless wonder that they lived and were together, used to find empty hallways and shaded bowers in which to find quick, shuddering release, clothes mussed, her cries muffled into his shoulder, his hands leaving marks on her creamy skin.
He wondered, uneasily, if this was her way of saying goodbye.
He did not even hesitate, his long, slow caress of her spine causing her to arch, a soft purr of pleasure easing from between her lips. His voice was roughened when he murmured near her ear, "Days. We need at least two."
She kissed him again, wild and fierce, wrenching a low growl of need from Alistair's throat. The sound thrilled through her, leaving her breathless, aching, needy. This. She would have this, would have him, them, before she made him let her go.
"You speak to the seneschal and I will make sure we have plenty of wine and cheese." She tugged lightly at the back of his hair, tilting her head for the glide of his tongue between her lips. The air between them filled with the rustle of cloth and quick breaths as fingertips sought the secret places known to lovers, bodies straining against one another, mouths tangled.
A respite for air, amusement coloring Alistair's voice, "Bossy." He nipped at the column of her neck, his hands sliding down to cup her bottom, stroking beneath the curve, relishing her little gasp. Not to be outdone, Aalish raked her nails lightly through his hair, eliciting a shudder of his big body against hers. "Three days, my Queen. I think we deserve three days."
"Go, now, and we can be…quarter bells." She nipped the curve of his ear as his hands wandered up her sides towards her breasts. "Our chambers at quarter bells. Four days."
With one last, desperate kiss, they parted.
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It was a little more than quarter bells before Aalish was able to find the royal quarters. Alistair was there before her, standing at a window looking out into the courtyard below. He'd removed his doublet and his boots, leaving him clad only in a loose cream linen shirt that tied at the neck and wrists and a pair of brown linen trousers that hugged his lean hips and powerful thighs. Something about his bare feet was unbearably intimate. The sun was high in the sky, setting fire to the gold streaks in his light brown hair, gilding him as he stood, forearm braced on the upper sill of the window, his strong profile turning toward her as she closed the door behind her. A sudden, fierce urge for parchment and charcoal seized Aalish, the need to record this moment, to hold it close, inside of her, in the long, cold years that stretched out, barren and empty like her womb.
Something of her desperation must have shown on her face for Alistair strode toward her, cupping her face in his long-fingered, scarred swordsman's hands, his touch tender, his eyes deep, the color of loam, mysterious. "Aalish. Love. Give me this week. Give me…" Words failed him, as they so often did, so he let his fingertips trace her beloved face, this woman who was his wife, his Queen. His calluses brushed over high, regal cheekbones, the fine arch of dark red brows, the pale seam of the scar that started near her left temple and disappeared back, just over and behind the upper curve of her ear, the smoothness of her cheeks and strong line of her jaw, until finally his fingertips traced her lips, lightly, his breath hitching as the tip of her tongue appeared, tasting him.
"A week." She whispered it against his fingertips, a promise, the only one she could give. He did his best to understand.
The first time was slow, tender, as if they had not loved and been lovers for half a decade. Later there would be desperation, lust and love tangled together with bitterness, scratches left on skin, love marks marring flesh already marked by the scars of battle, tittering, titillated servants as the Queen and King loved desperately throughout the keep. Now, though, now, kisses were feather light, fingertips gliding rather than grasping, her dress and underpinnings pooling at her feet like a dream, his shirt and pants and smallclothes lost somewhere in the dance as they moved toward their bed, the one they had always shared, even while only betrothed, their united front brooking no argument. His name on her lips as his mouth closed over the aching tip of her breast, his answering groan when her fingertips stroked over his most sensitive flesh, their mingled sighs of surrender as he sank into her, the fast beat of their hearts as they rose and fell together, reaching for completion, for sanity, for each other; these were the only sounds in the room as the King and Queen of Ferelden began their long seven days of goodbye.
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"What d'ya mean, cancelled? I came to see the King and I'm seein' him!" The crowd of merchants and lower nobility milling in front of the keep stirred uneasily, eyeing the slender male figure at the top of the steps balefully. This was not the first time they'd been forced to listen to Teagan's excuses. He dearly hoped it was going to be the last.
Teagan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling the headache brewing behind his eyes. He disliked acting in the King's stead at the best of times; the last four months had been particularly exhausting, however.
First had been the week when the King and Queen had been "indisposed" so they could be caught in ever more compromising positions in several different rooms of the palace and even, Maker preserve him, the rose garden and the stable.
Afterward, the Queen had simply vanished back to Amaranthine, claiming Grey Warden business. The King had refused to speak her name for weeks as his mood grew increasingly more morose. Eamon had broached the subject of the Queen and the succession again in council meetings three months after her departure, when the whispers had spread that the Queen would not be returning. The talk was that the King planned to set her aside, and Eamon took heart from the rumors, his voice firm as he reminded the King of his duty to the crown.
Alistair's blow had sent Eamon sprawling, blood filling his mouth from his broken nose.
For two days the King was missing, refusing to be found, leaving Teagan with a furious Eamon and a restless court.
When Alistair had returned, unshaven and haggard, he'd demanded a small contingent of guards ready themselves to accompany him. When Teagan asked where he was going, he'd said, flatly, his eyes dark and unreadable, terrible in their grief and promise, "To fetch my wife."
Just last evening, as the sun began to slide behind the horizon, the King and his guard had returned. Before him on his horse sat the Queen, her lovely face grave and mutinous and so sad, returning to Denerim slightly more than four months after her departure. Still, for all of that, she appeared to be in blooming good health, her copper hair catching fire in the gloaming, her creamy skin luminous, even a hint of roundness to her slender figure.
Teagan had only sighed inwardly when the King had informed him there would be no courtly duties for him or his Queen for another day.
Now, facing the rabble, he raised his hands, palm out, and lifted his voice, "Friends, friends, please. I apologize but the King and Queen have only just returned. The Queen, in fact, is indisposed and requires the King's presence."
"She's indisposed, huh? That mean she's finally got one up the spout?" Laughter and shouts of, "An heir!" and "Long live the King!" spread through the small crowd. This was apparently some sign to disperse. Releasing a gusty sigh, Teagan turned back into the keep and nearly turned right back around when he realized his brother, Eamon, was glaring at him from the hallway, some faint green and yellow tracings around his eyes reminding everyone of the folly of questioning the King about the Queen.
"You should not give them hope where there is none."
Teagan frowned as Eamon stalked toward him, his fists balled at his sides. "Give them hope…oh. The up the spout comment." He shrugged the concern away. "They are young yet. An heir will come."
"The Queen is barren!" Teagan took a step back and away from Eamon as his brother attempted to stab him in the chest with a bony finger. "There will be no heirs from the Cousland Grey Warden! He should have left her to rot in Amaranthine!"
Before Teagan could reply to such treason, there was the sound of someone moving hurriedly up the passage from the royal apartments. Both men turned to find an agitated female servant headed in their direction. "Bann Teagan, Arl Eamon! The King and Queen are havin' a terrible fight! He broke a basin and she's cryin' like someone broke her heart. I sent for a healer but maybe you should come!"
Eamon gave Teagan a glowering, superior look. Teagan just sighed again, rubbing his hand over his face. "Say nothing, Eamon. Let's go interfere where we should not."
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The healer, Hedwig, a mage from the Kinloch Circle who'd been in the Crown's service since not long after the end of the Blight, had been summoned in much the same way: "The King is yellin' at the Queen!" Surprised and concerned, especially when the maid could provide no other pertinent details save the Queen's tears and the smashed basin, Hedwig asked her friend, Juniper, a mid-wife, to accompany her. There'd been a thought that the Queen might prefer to have more female company if the King was in a rage.
When they arrived, they found the Queen curled up in the middle of the bed, sobbing as if her heart was broken. The King was sitting next to her, his face in his hands, his shoulders slumped dejectedly. Nearby, crockery was in fact spread about the floor as if someone had thrown it against the wall, water seeping into the stone. Hedwig was shocked when the King looked up at her with wet hazel eyes, despair and fear warring in his expression. She bobbed what was probably an impertinent curtsey, as did Juniper, trying not to gape. "Your Majesties. The maid asked us to come."
The King nodded and tried a wobbly smile for the maid who gawped, clearly disapproving. He dragged a hand through his already disordered hair. "Yes, thank you. The Queen…well." He ran an unsteady hand down the Queen's side and pressed a kiss to her temple. "Aalish. Please. Let the healers look."
"No! They're just going to tell me I'm … that I can't … you're going to have to … I can't bear it!" Everyone save the King took a shocked step back as the Queen rose up in the middle of the bed, looking fierce and a little wild, her puffy face tear-streaked and set into forbidding lines, her nightdress slightly askew from one shoulder, hair tangled and unkempt. The look she shot her husband could have seared a lesser man; the King only gave her a sad, loving smile. This stoked the fires of the Queen's temper as she screamed at him, "You should have left me in Amaranthine, Alistair!"
Juniper shared a significant look with Hedwig and approached the bed, hands out, palms up.
"Now, dearie, just tell us what might be the matter. It's put you in a frightful temper, it has."
When the Queen only glared out of drenched, snapping sapphire eyes and hissed dangerously, Hedwig said in a tone that brooked no nonsense, "Your Majesty! You're acting like a spoiled child!"
Aalish winced, her face blanching, hearing her mother's chiding tone in the healer's voice. Though she continued to look calamitous, she didn't protest as Hedwig surrounded her with a soft blue glow, her magic probing and sorting out old injuries and heartache from new.
Juniper urged the King into a chair while the maid scuttled about, cleaning up the mess of crockery and spilled water. No one noticed when she slipped out. After a long, tense moment, the Queen made a little sound in the back of her throat that sounded like despair, holding out her hand toward the King with a beseeching look. Juniper waved him back as he started to rise. "Just 'til she's finished, dearie. Don't want her magic mistakin' ya fer the Queen." Alistair subsided with a grunt of unease as Aalish trembled.
Satisfied that she was correct in her diagnosis but feeling the King and Queen might prefer a second opinion, she turned away from the Queen, the blue glow fading. "I'm finished, but I'd like your opinion, Juniper." She smiled gently at the King. "Your Majesty, if you don't mind stepping out, Juniper…"
"No." The King rose, tall and straight and a little forbidding, even as the Queen reached out for him again with a pleading gesture, adding her own voice to his.
"No, please. Whatever…whatever you need to do, Alistair stays. I need…please."
Another significant look passed between the two women. Juniper nodded, once, and this time urged the King over to the head of the bed, where he immediately took the Queen's hand, squeezing. The Queen never looked away from Juniper, her face drawn and anguished. Hedwig helped the Queen lie back, gently positioning her with knees bent, her nightdress providing only a bit of modesty. Once everyone was where Juniper needed them to be, Hedwig laid a hand on the Queen's forehead, gently cooling her with a little magic, urging her to relax.
From her position near the Queen's knees, Juniper began speaking in a soft, low tone meant to calm and lull the patient as she set about examining her with deft, sure, gentle hands. "Take big deep breaths, Yer Majesty. Look up at that handsome husband o' yours. Isn't it just wonderful how he's worried about you, even after you threw that basin at his head?" Juniper chuckled when both monarchs shot her a surprised glance, the Queen's edged with shame, the King's with disgruntlement. "Yes, well, when a woman is with child, her temper is uncertain. Seems bein' a Queen doesn't change that." Juniper slid from the bed, patting the Queen's knee lightly and pulling down her nightdress as she did so. "Yer right as rain, yer Majesty, and so are the babies."
"The…what did you say?" Aalish looked from one of the women to the other, trying not to hope, trying not to feel anything even as her heart began to beat a thunderous tattoo in her chest and she clung to Alistair. He leaned in close, his own heart an unsteady thump thump thump near her temple, his hand tightening around hers. He knew she was going to break soon, knew she was very nearly out of strength.
Three months, two weeks, and seven days. He'd been able to leave her in Amaranthine for only that long, wallowing in her misery, in her grief, certain he would see sense and do the right thing for Ferelden and hating him for it. Even as she raged and trained with her Wardens, even as she slept little or not at all, as she'd handled reports and letters and orders for armor and weapons and draperies, she'd found herself in disgustingly good health. Her hair grew at an alarming rate, her skin soft and supple, her appetite enormous, even more so than her usual Grey Warden needs, her belly rounding from her gluttony. And her courses had trailed from trickles in the beginning to nothing. The one Grey Warden female she'd managed to ask without choking had simply nodded knowingly, patting her on the back in sympathy, confirming her worst fears: the Taint had finally consumed her womb completely.
Then he'd come, riding up in his armor, sweeping her up into his arms and into her rooms, brooking no argument as he'd stripped her bare, as he'd kissed and fondled and claimed her with the hard thrust of his body, with lips and teeth and tongue, with the rough croon of his voice in her ear. "Mine, Aalish. You're mine, my wife, my Queen, my love, my heart, mine." She'd been helpless to resist him, to resist herself, and so she'd come home with him to Denerim.
This morning, though, when he'd turned to her in the dawn, his lips gentle but insistent on her throat, his clever hands stroking over her skin, murmuring into her ear how beautiful she was, how they would continue to try for an heir, Eamon and the court be damned, she'd come undone. Exhaustion, pain, despair, her aching, desperate want to carry his child inside her body had seen her scrambling away from him, wildly.
"This is torture for me, Alistair! I've stopped having my courses completely. The Taint has taken what little hope I had left. You can't keep asking me to bear it, to let you touch me knowing Ferelden needs you, needs you to have a wife who can give you children."
His voice, his beloved, velvet voice carried a note she'd never heard from him before, final and sure and without hesitation, "I will have no wife, no Queen, but you, Aalish."
"What pretty words!" She heard the awful sneer in her voice, actually felt the way her face contorted and yet she couldn't stop. She had to make him see. "How long will they last in the face of Eamon's insistence, as you grow closer and closer to your Calling without someone to take your throne? This is duty, Alistair, the awful, heavy weight of it, what we felt during the Blight, why you took the throne!"
He stalked toward her, his gait even and measured, his expression closed and set and grim. She saw, suddenly, what she had not even when he came to fetch her: he was tired and sad and furious with her. "If this were about duty, you would have been calm and reasonable and, when those didn't work, simply went around me. It would have been easy enough to bend the Bannorn to your will."
He was careful not to touch her as she cowered away from him, his voice flaying her nerves like a whip, lying bare that he was still her partner, her equal, that he knew her. "Do you think I can't see how you look at the children, the yearning in your beautiful blue eyes? Do you think I don't know you want a family, the family that was taken from you, small bodies to hold, scraped knees to bandage, sticky kisses?" His voice deepened, his look of utter sorrow, of devastation, easing under her defenses, shattering her. "Our baby, love. I know how much it hurts you that our baby isn't growing under your heart."
The nearest object was the pretty porcelain ewer, the one that had been Queen Rowan's. She felt the weight of it in her hands only moments before she heaved it at him, the sound of it smashing into stone obscene. She couldn't curb the note of hysteria in her voice. "I can't have babies! No babies for us, for Ferelden! Don't you understand, Your Majesty King Alistair? You have to set me aside because I'm not strong enough to leave you again!"
"I can't let you go, Aalish!" His voice rose to meet hers, the hands that captured her shoulders nearly bruising in their grip, his eyes molten gold and green, desperate. "You can't leave me again. I forbid it!" He buried his face in her hair, his big, warrior's body shaking as he held back his pain, his voice thick with tears, whisper soft, fierce, and tender, "I want our baby ,love, so much. I ache to see you grow soft and round, to watch you nurse him at your breast, to hear you sing silly songs to her. But if I have to steal a child, if we have to pretend someone else's child is ours, we will, because I'll abdicate my throne before I let you leave me again."
The maid who came to stoke the fire found the Queen sobbing on her husband's shoulder, a broken basin, and a King whose voice was sharp when he ordered her to go. Certain the King, who'd been in a foul mood for nigh on four months, had done something to the Queen, the maid had scurried away to find help.
Alistair's voice, breaking a little, recalled Aalish to the present: "Did you say my wife is with child?"
"Not just one child, Your Majesty, but two. Explains why she's already expanding around the middle."
The King sank onto the bed and pulled his Queen into his lap, all in one motion. Aalish and Alistair stared at each other, hope warring with long months and years of disappointment. "But I feel wonderful. I thought women who were with child felt ill or tired or…"
"Or don't have their courses for four months and feel robust and hearty and eat like a starving druffalo." When Aalish flushed and Alistair laughed unsteadily, leaning his forehead on his wife's shoulder, Hedwig patted him lightly on the back. One forgot, she supposed, that the King and Queen of Ferelden were young, yet, had been achingly young when they defeated the Blight. And they had no family but each other. It was plain they'd held out little hope there would be a royal heir. Though her heart ached for what the last few years must have been like, Hedwig kept her voice brisk and businesslike.
"You're well gone with child, my Lady, at least four months. Sometimes with twins it's hard to tell, but yours are well seated."
"What about the Taint? And we've been trying for so long. Are we sure…will they…" Aalish swallowed hard and clutched at Alistair, new fears slipping into the gaping maw of the old ones. "My mother had a hard time carrying." Alistair stroked a soothing hand over her tumbled copper hair, lifting his head, his expression mirroring his Queen's.
"Sometimes it just takes longer than we expect to have a child. While certainly the Taint is present, the babies are well protected from it in their little nest, healthy and secure. You are outside the time when we would even hesitate to tell anyone such glad news. As for your mother, her difficulties are not likely to be yours, from what I see." When the King and Queen looked unconvinced, caught somewhere between boundless joy and desperate worry, Juniper interjected her own opinion.
"Known some Grey Wardens in my time. Most of 'em don't want ta have babies, world and their work bein' dangerous and all, so they don't. Easy enough not to have babies. Harder sometimes to have 'em. You two are havin' em. As fer yer ma, knew her some too, when she was a sprout." Aalish's eyes widened as Juniper nodded. "Lady Eleanor had some fevers when she was young. Didn't make her less strong, mind you, but it caused some problems when she was carryin'. Not a likely problem wit' you."
Aalish lifted her face to her husband's, to her King's, to the father of her children just as he raised a shaking hand to cup her cheek. "Babies," he mouthed at her, wonder lighting his hazel eyes, turning them a dull bronze ringed in summer green. Before she could respond, a knock on the door heralded it opening to admit Teagan and Eamon.
Eamon's sly smirk settled into a moue of distaste when he saw the King and Queen smiling and clutching each other like drunks in the middle of their tumbled bed as the two old crone women looked on with twin expressions of indulgence. Teagan, however, took the first deep breath he had in months. "So it's to be a celebration instead of a pyre?"
Both healers laughed. "Yes, Bann Teagan. Babies mean celebrations, especially when they'll be the heirs to a kingdom."
"Congratulations, Your Majesties! This is wonderful news!" When Alistair only waved a hand toward the door vaguely, clearly wanting everyone to leave, Juniper gathered everyone up and started shooing them toward the door.
"Let's leave the dears to catch a breath. Out, out!"
Once the door closed behind a squawking Eamon, a smiling Teagan, and smug healers, Alistair took a deep breath, blowing it out in a noisy, shaky gust. She smiled up at him and nuzzled his throat. "You look like the cat that ate the pigeon." Her voice was teasing and still rough from the vestiges of her tears. His chest rumbled under her cheek with his shocked chuckle.
"I feel a bit like that." Tilting her chin up with a fingertip, he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers, his voice dipping into a lower register, full of wonder. "We're having a baby, you and me."
"Two babies, Alistair. We're having two babies."
Aalish cuddled closer to an amazed and humbled Alistair. He squeezed her, gently, and then slid a hand over her abdomen, gently cupping the small mound there, pressing a kiss to her temple, his voice a conspiratorial whisper, "Do you think it was the stables?"
Laughter, full, rich, uninhibited, burst out of Aalish, chasing away the last shadow. She was going to have babies with the man she loved, with her King. They were going to be a family. "I think you're a very bad man, King Alistair Theirin."
He chuckled again, turning her gently until she sat astride his lap, legs wrapped around his waist, their babies safe and loved in her belly between them. "I think I'm a very lucky man, Queen Aalish Theirin."
Just as he lowered his mouth to hers, she whispered, "I think it was the stables, too."
They were still laughing when they sank back into the bed.