Chapter 8: Loverless – Mama

What does any girl dream of on her wedding day?

Maybe she thinks of the world she is leaving behind, the family she will never be quite the same part of again. Maybe she dreams of the world ahead, the world she has been waiting and longing for, now close enough to touch. Maybe she dreams of the face of the man of her dreams when he sees her for the first time.

Freya wandered around the clearing where she and Merlin had chosen to be married, because Freya didn't want to be married in a great hall with strangers staring at them and Merlin really didn't care where he got married, as long as it was to her. If the clearing was brighter, cleaner, clearer than it really should have been, if the grass was greener and the flowers smelled sweeter, that was probably due to the fact that Merlin had been sneaking out "to pick herbs" more often recently than he had in years. Maybe he did care more than he let on, Freya thought, laughing.

She was idly picking wildflowers as she wandered around the clearing, just looking around. Hunith, Merlin's mother, had made a bouquet for her already, but Freya couldn't help gathering a handful of the unusually large, colorful blooms.

"What are you planning to do with your hair?" Gwen asked her suddenly. Her voice was so close that it made Freya jump a little and look up; she hadn't realized Gwen was so close. But she knew Gwen well enough by now not to be afraid.

"I hadn't planned anything," she admitted.

Gwen, her own hair a cloud of intricate braids and curls, smiled at her. "Would you let me do it?" she asked.

Freya hadn't expected that offer. "Please, if you like," she said.

Gwen took Freya off to the side and began weaving the wildflowers she had picked into a deceptively simple braid that crowned her head. "I used to do the Lady Morgana's hair every morning," she said contemplatively. "I miss it sometimes."

"I don't think I'm going to miss much about my life before being married," Freya said, staring off into the distance. Her family had been gone for years, not even here to rejoice with her.

"Neither did I by the time I was married," Gwen said frankly. "The days when I had enjoyed being Morgana's maid were long behind me by then."

Freya would have glanced up at Gwen if the queen hadn't been behind her. "What were you thinking about on your wedding day?" she asked.

"Honestly?" Gwen answered. "A mixture of, 'I can't believe I get to marry Arthur!' and 'Please don't let me trip on my way down the aisle in front of everyone.'"

Freya laughed out loud in spite of herself, and Gwen was laughing with her.

"You don't have to worry about that, at least," Gwen said. "No one here will judge you if you trip."

"Were you scared, at all, to become queen of Camelot?" Freya asked shyly.

"Of course I was," Gwen told her. "I was terrified of that. But I was marrying Arthur, after we'd dreamed about it as a near impossibility for years, and that would have made up for a world of terrifying things."

"Right," Freya said, and exchanged a private smile with the pasque flower she still held in her hands.

"You afraid of becoming the wife of the Court Sorcerer?" Gwen asked, turning the question around. Her fingers deftly moved in and out of the hair above Freya's ear, and she felt a daffodil be slipped into the braid there.

"A little, maybe," Freya admitted. "Maybe afraid of what the responsibility will ask of both of us. But it's Merlin. I never thought I'd get to be married to him."

"And that," Gwen said, a smile clear in her voice, "makes up for everything. Don't be afraid, Freya. I guess, if there's anything to share from my wedding day, it's that this day is no day to be worrying about the future. Just let the dream come true."

Freya smiled and didn't say anything, letting her fingers play with the pasque flower. Just let the dream come true.

What does the Lady of the Lake, once a druid girl, once a bastet, dream of on her wedding day?

She comes in a simple white frock and flowers bound in her hair to meet the man she once dreamed, years ago, that she would get to marry. She sees the world she yearned for in the lake just in front of her, close enough to touch, becoming real around her. She takes the hands of the man she loves and swears her vows, that she will be true in sickness and in health, as long as they both shall live, and hears him swear them to her with the special smile reserved just for her spreading across his face.

She lets him hold her close as they dance and knows that she no longer has to dream, because the dreams have become reality.


There was a day, shortly after their first anniversary, when Freya caught Merlin when he came out of a meeting with some of the councilmembers; Freya was restless, and she knew Merlin was too. They didn't often use the mind-speak the druids could use between each other, but they almost always had a sense of the other's mind – an awareness of their location and mood.

So when Merlin came out of the meeting, Freya slipped up beside him and caught his arm. They met each other's eyes, and neither needed to speak to know where they wanted to go.

They slipped off to the little courtyards behind the castle where Aithusa was drowsing in the afternoon sun; the need to sneak around quietly was long past, but neither of them had forgotten how to do it, and no one, not even the guards, saw them go. The dragon sat up sleepily when they came and spread her wings to be mounted, and in another moment they were airborne.

Freya would never shriek and whoop as the young Prince did riding the dragon, but she wasn't in the least afraid of flying either. Perhaps her ability to sense the all-pervasive magic around the dragon, magic that felt deeply safe, kept her from feeling any twinge of fear. And Aithusa knew the route that she and Merlin always wanted to take now perfectly well. It was a route that ended on the far side of Avalon lake, where the mountains were nearer and the view was different, and instead of reminding them of the years of loss and grief it was the closest they could come to the old dream of mountains and fields and wild flowers, a couple of cows and a lake. It was a place that was all their own.

It was as they were sliding off that Aithusa bent her head toward Merlin. He froze abruptly, staring at the dragon.

"What?" he asked sharply. "Aithusa, are you serious?"

"What is it?" Freya asked quickly, nervous. "What did she say?" All she could feel from his mind was a sense of elated terror.

Merlin stared blankly at the dragon, who was looking insufferably smug, for a couple of minutes, until she spread her wings and left. Merlin ran his hands into his hair and turned to face Freya, wide-eyed and rather pale.

"She said," he began, paused to swallow, and pressed on, "she said, 'Congratulations on your hatchling.'"

Freya felt it was her turn to be utterly stunned. Her legs gave out and she sank down to sit.

Yes, there were things that had seemed irregular lately, but for her, so much more used to being a spirit than a woman, physicality was still strange altogether and she had written those things off as simply her body adjusting to being a woman's body again.

Merlin grabbed her arm as her legs gave out and helped her gently down to the ground. "Freya?" he asked anxiously. "Are you okay?"

"Was – was she serious?" Freya gasped.

"Of course," Merlin answered quickly. "She said, 'Any child of yours is certain to have a great destiny,' and took off. Bother dragons and their vague predictions!" he added with real bitterness.

Freya flattened both hands over her stomach, more afraid, somehow, than she had been since she'd been a Bastet.

"We haven't talked about children much," she whispered.

"No," Merlin admitted freely, "but we knew we wanted them."

He wasn't wrong. When they were listing their impossible dreams of the future to each other, that one had been on the list. But they hadn't talked about it anytime recently, nor had they been planning on it just now.

"I never thought I'd be a mother," she whispered. "Never – since my family died."

Merlin bit his lip in sympathy. "I never thought I'd be a father either," he said freely. "Not without you – and there were all the other complications of magic being illegal."

Freya clung to his words that he didn't want a child without her and shifted to sit against him. He immediately put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him.

There was a sense where having a child would be the ultimate proof that they were free. Before, it would have been utterly stupid for a druid girl who had a little magic of her own and Merlin Emrys to have a child and expect that they wouldn't see it killed someday. Unsure how to say that, she nudged the thought toward Merlin and felt his thoughtful agreement.

"But it's not just that," she said aloud, working through the thoughts as she said them. "It's that – we're secure in our marriage now, and in the roles we've taken on in Camelot. A child isn't – isn't just the proof of our freedom, but the culmination of this dream we're somehow living."

"Our hatchling is just coming a bit sooner than we thought," Merlin replied, smiling, but the tender hand he reached to lay over her stomach spoke to the awakening yearning in them both.

By the time they left their little clearing, both of them had adjusted to the idea that they were going to have a child soon, enough for a tentative joy to start springing up. It was always going to be the way with them that any unexpected new good they instinctively distrusted for a while until it proved true, but they were better prepared now to face the future with hope instead of fear.


Merlin and Freya broke the news to their friends after one of the regular meals that they had with the King, Queen, and Knights of the Round Table plus all their families. These were always loud, cheerful affairs, with much gossip interchanged and friendly plans made. Discussion of ruling or the duties of knight or sorcerer were strictly forbidden at these meals, except to furnish stories, and the presence of children always made them loud and cheerful.

Freya and Merlin wanted the others to know, because they knew this news wouldn't stay with just them for very long, but they also didn't want to be questioned throughout the whole meal about it, still too shy of this news themselves. So they planned it so that, just as people were beginning to talk about rounding up their kids and preparing to go home for the night, the two of them stood up. The others hushed, expecting an early goodnight out of them.

Instead, Merlin put his arm around Freya and rested it lightly on her stomach. She had left the duty of saying the news to him, knowing she would never get the words out, but even Merlin had a rather hard time. "We're –" he began, and then choked and had to clear his throat twice. "We're pregnant," he said at last.

Not very loudly, but the whole hall was hushed to hear, and Merlin and Freya made their escape to the sound of cheering behind them.

Of course the women of the group were all eager and excited and communicated that eagerly to Freya when they ran into her afterwards, but it was the reactions of the knights she had been in the lake with, the ones who had first opened her closed heart to friendship beyond Merlin, that stuck firmly in Freya's mind.

She ran into Elyan the first after the announcement, and he beamed all over his face at her. "I'm so happy for you, Freya," he said earnestly. "And Merlin too, of course, but especially for you."

Gwaine, when he saw her later, literally broke into a run towards her, caught her around the waist, and spun her around in the air as if she was his little sister, making her laugh helplessly. "A baby!" he was shouting. "A little Merlinette or Freylin to pamper around the place!"

"Gwaine, the whole castle will know if you shout it like that!" Freya exclaimed, laughing. "And please put me down."

Gwaine spun her around once more before he set her back on her feet. He immediately swept his most elaborate bow. "My eternal services pledged to the child," he announced solemnly.

"I'm sure my child appreciates it," Freya told him, still laughing, but there was a deeper warmth kerneled underneath the laughter. She knew, under the flamboyance, that he was sincere, and it touched her.

Lancelot, the first to be her friend, was the last she ran into. He took her hand and smiled down at her with all the warmth of his brown eyes. "Congratulations, Freya," was all he said, but from Lancelot it was all that needed to be said.


Slowly, as the weeks passed, the idea that they were about to become parents in a few months became more real to Merlin and Freya. As it sank in, Merlin began panicking about his ability to be a good father.

Freya hunted down Arthur and sent him to talk to Merlin when she figured he needed to hear the same assurances from someone other than her.

Freya herself, the girl who had been spirit more than woman, who had never expected to be pregnant, who was now embarking on the most physical thing a woman could, perhaps, do in her life – Freya went to talk to Gwen.

Gwen had just had her own daughter, Cerelia, a few months ago. Freya had been given all but free admittance to the queen's chambers, but when she ducked her head shyly around the door, she found the queen breastfeeding her tiny daughter, murmuring to her too softly for Freya to hear.

Freya was about to back out as quietly as she had sneaked in when the queen looked up and smiled at her. "Stay and just give me a moment," she said. "We're almost done here – aren't we, my darling?"

Freya ducked into the room and shut the door, but she turned her back to Gwen to give her some privacy and diligently studied a tapestry on the wall. Something within her was thawing and swelling wide at the thought of someday feeding her own children at her breast. It was a deeply buried instinct that she had scarcely thought about in years, and it filled her now with a longing that terrified her.

"Alright," Gwen said at last. "Come sit down and tell me what's going on, Freya."

Freya turned to find the queen cradling her sleeping daughter in her arms; somewhat hesitant, she slipped across the room and sat down beside her. "So I'm pregnant," she said.

Gwen's eyes were very knowing. "And you're trying to figure out how to deal with it," she said gently. "It's an amazing thing, being pregnant for the first time, but it's not always easy."

Freya nodded quickly. "I don't – I don't really know how to deal with it," she admitted. "I've been a lake for more years than I've been a woman! And I gave up on any dreams of motherhood before I was properly old enough to carry a child in my womb."

Gwen wordlessly passed her baby to Freya. Freya automatically opened her arms to receive her and curled over around her. Cerelia didn't even wake.

"You know how to hold a baby," Gwen observed quietly.

"I had a little sister," Freya whispered. It had been years since she had thought much of Aldyth, but her baby sister's sweet face swam into her mind now. She remembered the first time her mother gave her the baby to hold, the sweet, stumbling footsteps following so often in hers for those few years of her sister's life.

"You learned how to hold a baby once, then, when you were young," Gwen told her. "You'll learn the rest you'll need to know. The most of it your body will do for you, right now, and the best thing is to rest and take care of yourself and let it work."

"That can't be all of it," Freya protested, even though Gwen's words reassured her.

Gwen laughed. "Of course it's not all," she said. "Pregnancy is wonderful and scary all at once. I'm so glad you have Merlin by your side to go through it with you, though. I wouldn't give up Amhar or when I had him for the world, but I was so glad to have Arthur for Cerelia's pregnancy."

Freya nodded and couldn't speak. It was her old childhood dreams coming true somehow, to be pregnant with her beloved children and have her husband by her side, and she still couldn't fully believe it was real.

Gwen leaned back on her hands and tipped her head back toward the ceiling. "There's some level where pregnancy is the biggest gift of yourself you will ever give to this child," she said. "It'll live and grow in you for nine months, and you'll be pouring your life and yourself and all your love into the unborn baby. There's a way where the baby is the safest now it'll ever be, and there's a piece of you that wants it to stay there, always safe and protected and warm. But of course there's another part of you that can't wait to see your child's face for the first time and name it and hold it close in your arms so you can tell your baby how much you cherish it and see it when you're saying it."

Freya nodded again, because Gwen's words made sense of the tangled ball of feelings within her. But there was something else preying on her mind. She swallowed and swallowed again before she could find the words to say it.

"What if I lose the baby?" she whispered.

"I think we're all afraid of that at some point or another," Gwen said frankly. "But you're young and strong – I don't think you should have a problem with it."

"I was a lake or a magical creature for more years than I was a woman," Freya protested. "And if you count those years, I'm older than I look. What if – what if I can't carry the baby through?"

"I don't think you'd have gotten pregnant if your body didn't have the ability to carry the baby," Gwen said matter-of-factly. "You'll never get away from that fear, I guess, until you've given birth to a living baby, but don't let it consume you."

"Alright," Freya whispered, and let herself take strength from Gwen's words. She curled her arms tighter around Cerelia.

"Any other deep fears?" Gwen asked her, sounding ready to sit and talk with Freya all day.

"I don't know if I know how to be a mother," Freya said frankly. "I haven't had my own mother for at least twenty years, and I've barely spent any time around children since I lost my baby sister. I don't know how to navigate this, not really."

"Well, you've got me," Gwen said cheerfully. "I'll be here for you whenever you need me. And you have Hunith. I'm sure she wouldn't mind helping you out, and she took care of the original Merlin – she ought to be helpful with his prodigy. And – did you have a good mother of your own?"

"I did," Freya said, old, half-remembered shadows dancing before her eyes. "The best."

"So did I," Gwen said frankly. "So lean on those old memories of her. This is the best legacy you could give her, after all, to be a mother to her grandchildren."

Freya nodded, and felt more ready than she had yet to take on this new challenge. "Thank you very much, Gwen," she said earnestly.

"Of course," Gwen told her. She took Cerelia back and laid her down gently in her own crib. Then she pulled Freya up and gave her a warm, tight hug. Freya, still not completely used to touch by anyone who wasn't Merlin, stiffened for a moment before she got used to it and hugged Gwen back. "Anytime," Gwen said in her ear. "It's so good to have another mother here with me."


Even after having her fears somewhat allayed by Gwen, Freya's was not a particularly easy pregnancy. She was sick and vomiting more often than she wasn't in the first three months, prompting Merlin to find every anti-nausea spell he could dig up from any ancient tome and perfect them all on her. She woke up too often in those months from nightmares convinced she had lost the pregnancy and rolled over to weep in Merlin's arms; he would half-wake up and hold her and whisper comforting things to her. In later months, as her ankles swelled and her stomach ballooned, navigating the many staircases of the castle became more and more difficult. If Merlin had had his way, he would have confined her to her room and brought everything she needed to her on a platter. He pretty much had his way for the last month or so as it was.

But in one thing her pregnancy definitely worked. Never again afterwards did she have dreams of being a lake or feel utterly dissociated from her body.


Freya kept thinking of her mother more and more during her pregnancy, remembering the days when she had seen her mother pregnant and her father doting on her like Merlin now doted on Freya. She had almost blocked out the memories of her baby sister Aldyth before, the thought of the little life cut short almost too painful to stand, but they kept swimming up before her now.

She was thinking of them one night, leaning against Merlin's side and brainstorming names, and suddenly knew something with certainty.

"Merlin," she whispered, "if it's a girl, I know what I want to name her – if it's alright with you."

"Of course it is, my love," Merlin told her, bending over to kiss her forehead. "What are you thinking?"

"Aldyth," Freya told him. "It was the name of my baby sister. I – I want to carry the name forward."

"Aldyth is a beautiful name," Merlin told her, and the way his arms tightened around her told her that he understood the other half of the name just as well.

"Is there anyone you'd want to name our baby after for that reason?" Freya whispered. "To carry the name forward?"

"Not nearly as many now, thanks to you," Merlin said, with a low laugh that carried little humor in it. "But maybe – Balinor."

"Wasn't that your father's name?" Freya asked him, pressing a little tighter to his side.

"Yes," Merlin answered softly. "I'd want to ask Mother first, to be sure she was okay with it. But someday I'd like to carry that name onward."

"Aldyth or Balinor it is, then," Freya said.

"We need to have twins," Merlin told her, laughing with more real humor this time and kissing her forehead again.

"Or we need to have a second child," Freya said cheerfully, and smiled because the idea made her excited rather than nervous now.

She settled more securely into Merlin's side. There was nothing that was more solid proof of their love – of the fact that she was a securely married woman about to have a family instead of a loverless girl or a lonely Lady – than the little bump swelling steadily under their hands.


When the time came for Freya to give birth, it was a less arduous process than it could have been. Merlin had hunted up every spell, potion, or incantation that he could possibly find to lessen birth pains when Gwen gave birth to Amhar, and he had dusted them all off for her second delivery less than a year before. But he was near obsessive about researching for Freya's delivery.

"Love, I'm sure I'll be fine," she told him one night when she was heavily pregnant, upon finding him buried in dusty scrolls in his study. "Many women have given birth in far less comfort than I will over the years, and Gwen says what you know already made even Amhar's birth bearable."

"I know!" Merlin exclaimed distractedly. He ran his hands through his hair, leaving streaks of gray through the black. "But you're my wife, and it's my child you're giving birth to – I want to give you the easiest time I possibly can."

Freya wondered, for the thousandth time since her marriage, how she had ever thought she could live without this man.

"I know," she said gently, "and I love you for it, darling. But I know you know plenty already, and just now I'd rather have you come sleep by my side for tonight than stay up researching."

Merlin laughed at her and rolled up the scroll he was looking at. "This isn't fair," he said. "You know I can never deny you anything."

Freya smiled at him and laced her fingers through his. "Let's try to get some sleep," she said.


Two days later, the baby came.

Merlin was by Freya's side throughout it all, of course, casting all the spells he had researched and holding her hand when he wasn't busy with that. Gaius pottered in the background and kept an eye on things. Alice, his wife, was midwife for the whole affair. And Gwen came in a simple frock, sat by Freya's side, and took her hand.

"Squeeze as hard as you need to," she said.

Even thoroughly bepotioned and bespelled, giving birth was long and somewhat painful and difficult. But it was all worth it for the moment when it was all done, and everyone was gone besides her and Merlin. He sat on the bed beside her, placed a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. A tiny, wizened red face with very blue eyes looked up from the bundle at them.

"It's a girl," Merlin whispered.

"Aldyth," Freya whispered back.

"Aldyth," Merlin echoed.

Freya leaned back against his strength, clutched her precious bundle closer, rested her head on his shoulder, and felt perfectly content.


Gwen came and found Freya in her chambers the following day, bringing Cerelia with her. Freya was holding her own baby daughter close when the queen came in.

"Congratulations on surviving birth," Gwen told her, with a half-playful, half-serious smile.

"I guess the hard part's over then," Freya said, beaming down into the red, wrinkly little face beneath hers.

She looked up to find Gwen giving her a strange look, bouncing the much larger Cerelia in her arms. "Hardest part of the pregnancy, yes," she said. "Welcome to parenting. Aldyth's small and innocent now, but wait until she starts talking and walking. There's a lot of challenges that come then."

Freya laughed and inclined her head in agreement, remembering watching Gwen and Merlin raise Amhar from the lake. "I'm sure I'll need plenty of your advice," she said.

"I'm always available to you, you know," Gwen told her. Then she raised her baby in her arms and laughed. "But this is both of our first time with daughters! We'll have to figure that one out together."


Aithusia the white dragon was gone from Camelot when the baby was born, but the first day that Merlin and Freya took Aldyth out into the courtyard, the dragon appeared in a burst of white wings out of the sky and landed directly in front of them, heedless of the knights that had to scatter to let her land.

This is the child? she rumbled, and for the first time Freya could her the dragon's voice in her own mind. She realized, with a start of surprise, that Aithusa was deliberately broadcasting to her as well as to Merlin.

"Yes, Aithusia," Merlin answered. "This is our child."

I give her a dragon's blessing, Aithusia said, and although she had the swelling, rough voice one would expect of a dragon, it sounded oddly gentle over this phrase. I bless her with the freedom of the skies, the fearlessness of flight, the majesty of the dragonlords, and all the peril and wonder of the old magic. May she find a destiny to suit a child of such illustrious forebears, and may she be beloved and watched over by those she loves all her days!

There were tears in Merlin's eyes by the time the dragon finished, and Freya felt a lump in her own throat, too. The dragon clearly meant every word, and there was something inexplicably beautiful about a magical dragon blessing a child of magic in the courtyard where magic had been a thousand times condemned, and none of those involved feeling the slightest frisson of fear.

"Thank you, Aithusia," Merlin said thickly.

Of course, the white dragon said earnestly. And though as your daughter she will never be a dragonlord, she is yet free to fly on my back any time she pleases, and I will bend to her will. And so will my children and my children's children, if ever I am lucky enough to have eggs.

Before Merlin could find voice to thank her again, Aithusia half-reared and shook her wings. Now where is the king's son? she asked, her voice fading away to the edges of Freya's mind now that the blessing was complete. I feel like a flight with him today.


There was a night when Freya half-lay in her bed, breastfeeding Aldyth. Merlin was lying stretched across the other side of the bed, watching them, and the expression on his face was very open and soft. His mind was open to Freya's, not communicating anything, just touching, and she could feel how his perfect contentedness in the moment echoed hers.

"You're so beautiful," he told her softly.

Freya didn't say anything, but she reached across the bed and threaded one hand through his.

Neither of them was afraid, she realized after a long moment. Neither of them was afraid that this was a dream or that they didn't deserve this, or that the perfect happiness of this moment with the two of them and their child would be snatched away.

Before, even after the wedding, even during the pregnancy, there was always a little undercurrent of fear cutting through their every moment together. They had determined to face it together, to be brave and take hold of the future they had, but the scars of their pasts had left that little shadow even in the happiest of moments.

It was gone now. It was nowhere in her mind, or in Merlin's, and even her realization didn't bring it back.

It was a perfect moment, the circle of a little family, the happy couple and their firstborn baby. And Freya wrapped her baby to her breast and squeezed her fingers in Merlin's, and knew for an indisputable fact that she was loved.


Freya was sitting crosslegged on the floor of her room, playing with Aldyth. Her girl staggered toward her on pudgy legs and held up the little doll Freya had hand-sewn for her.

"Hey, Aldyth," Freya said, smiling and kissing the doll. "You're taking such good care of your baby, aren't you?" She tucked the doll back in her daughter's arms and imitated rocking, and Aldyth made jerky movements, copying her.

Light footsteps that she knew by heart came up behind her, and Merlin sat down and kissed her on the top of her head. "Evening, love," he whispered.

"Evening," she whispered back to him.

She expected him to go pick up Aldyth next, as he always did when he came back to their chambers, but he hesitated for a moment.

"You're so good with her," he murmured to her. "I think sometime we need a second baby."

"Merlin," Freya said, laughing, "we always knew we were going to have a second baby. Are you saying you think we need a second baby now?"

"Maybe?" Merlin whispered.

Freya laughed again and tipped her face up to kiss him. "Let's have a second baby now," she said. "After all, we still need a Balinor."

When Freya got pregnant with her and Merlin's second child, they made the announcement at the beginning of a Round Table meal and cheerfully put up with all the teasing and eager conversation that came out of it.


"Mama?"

Aldyth was sitting on her little stool by her mother's chair, swinging her legs and rocking her doll enthusiastically in her arms. Freya was rocking a little in her chair, carefully stitching what looked like an elaborate piece of embroidery. In actuality, it was a secret code written in the Old Language containing carefully selected secrets to be sent to the Spymaster of Caerleon. Freya's stomach was swelling with the promise of a little sibling for Aldyth, but it would be some months yet before the baby came. Aldyth must have told Freya half a million times that she couldn't wait.

Freya paused at her daughter's voice, sticking her needle into the embroidery and pushing the hair that had fallen from her messy bun out of her face. "Yes, darling?"

"I want to be just like you when I grow up," Aldyth said definitively.

Freya smiled broadly at the determined, lisped statement. "You do, do you?" she asked.

"Of course I do," Aldyth chirped. "I'll live in Camelot somewhere here and have a horse and a dragon to ride, and have several children about, and sometimes we'll go to the lake in the mountains to pick wildflowers in the spring and eat strawberries together. And I'll do something important for Amhar when he's King of Camelot. Oh, and I'll be married to the most wonderful man on earth," she added, as if that was something absolutely taken for granted.

Freya was still grinning at the absolute, secure certainty in her daughter's voice as she turned back to stitching the fabric.

"I hope you have that life, Aldyth," she said. "And I really think you will."


A/N: And Freya doesn't even think about it, because she's past that point now, but she has a life now that her daughter wants instead of the life of the cursed druid girl that made everyone cringe away from her long ago.

The bit where Freya sends Arthur to go talk to Merlin about his fears sets up the second half of the third chapter in "Of Royalty and Dragonlords." And this last conversation in this chapter mirrors the one Freya has with her mother at the beginning of chapter 6 of this story. See if you can spot the important difference in the last lines of these conversations. :) Also, I didn't really expect Gwen and Freya becoming closer friends to be a theme in this chapter, but it crept in and I like it.

Also. Um. Obviously this chapter is about a year later than I ever meant it to come out. My only excuse is that life after college is busier than I ever expected it to be. But I never mean to abandon this story, and I'm really sorry! Thank you to anyone still interested in reading this. And the final section of this should (fingers crossed!) be out sometime in the next few weeks.