Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Death
Something is wrong with my wife.
The sensation hits mid-stride between realms—a sharp, jagged pull against my heartstrings that has nothing to do with a soul departing and everything to do with the one soul I can’t bear to lose.
It yanks me sideways, dissolving the shadows I’m traveling through and stitching me back together in the palace hallway outside the royal chamber with enough force to crack the flagstone beneath my bony heel.
Miss Hampshire startles backward, her hand flying to her chest. “Saints alive!”
Of course, this woman recovers faster than most mortals would at the sight of a half-skeletal god materializing from thin air. Still, her complexion goes rather gray, probably because she’s seen me one too many times throughout our past.
“What’s happening?” I stride toward the double doors. “Is the baby coming?”
“Yes.” Miss Hampshire steps into my path with the speed and precision of a woman who has spent decades blocking doorways from people far more intimidating than Death. Her nubs plant themselves flat against the oak. “But you are not going in there.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is woman’s work.” Her chin lifts, her jaw set in that immovable line I’ve watched her deploy against ministers, priests, and at least one king. “You have no business being in that room.”
A sound tears from my throat that rattles the sconces. “My wife is suffering through the birth of our first child. I will be at her side when she—”
“Looking like this? In your…evening attire?” Miss Hampshire gestures at me—at the exposed ribs, the skull, the cloak of living shadow pooling at my feet.
“You’ll send the maids into hysterics, and the midwife will drop the babe out of fright.
” She straightens her apron. “But that is beside the point. No king has ever been present for a birth. It is tradition.”
“It was also tradition to slit queens’ throats,” I grind out, “and we seem to have moved past that.”
Miss Hampshire opens her mouth. Closes it. Her eyes narrow into slits so thin I’m genuinely impressed she can still see me through them.
I don’t wait for her rebuttal.
The shadows swallow me whole for the briefest of seconds. Just long enough to weave bone into flesh, hollow sockets into green eyes, and ancient terror into the borrowed calm of Vale. Then I step through the door as though it isn’t there at all…
…and straight into a battlefield.
Two maids scramble between the bed and a table laden with linens, hot water, and instruments I refuse to examine too closely. A stout midwife with rolled sleeves and an expression of seasoned authority kneels at the foot of the bed, her hands steady even as the woman in the bed is decidedly not.
Elara lies propped against a mountain of pillows, her shift soaked through, her hair plastered to her temples in dark, wet ropes. Violent red flushes her face, her teeth bared, her hands fisting the sheets with a grip that has turned her knuckles into white ridges.
I’m at her side in three strides, my hand finding hers. “I’m here.”
“Oh, wonderful.” The words come out in a snarl punctuated by a gasp that bows her spine off the pillows. “The man responsible for this finally shows up!”
I flinch at her shout. “I came as fast as I—”
“You came fast the night you put this child inside me, too, and look where that got us!”
One of the maids chokes on something that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. The midwife doesn’t even blink. Presume this is the way of mortals and childbirth. One of many things I have yet to learn, to experience, so I borrow the stout woman’s calm.
“You’re doing beautifully,” I murmur.
Elara crushes my fingers with a strength that would concern me if I weren’t fairly certain I deserve it. “Nothing about this is beautiful! It feels like I’m being split apart by a…a battering ram wrapped in—oh god—”
Her words dissolve into a groan so guttural it vibrates through the bed frame. The midwife leans forward, murmuring instructions I can barely hear over the roaring in my skull.
Saints…maybe this is woman’s work.
“Push now, Your Majesty,” she says. “Bear down.”
Elara bears down with a scream that could strip paint from walls. Her hand in mine becomes a vise, her nails biting crescents into my palm. “You’re the worst husband alive.”
A surreal chuckle tumbles from my lips. “You’ve called me worse.”
“Breathe, Your Majesty,” the midwife says, calm as a pond. “We’re nearly there. One more.”
“You said one more three one-mores ago!”
I brush the hair from her face with my free hand, wincing when another contraction hits and her grip threatens to rearrange the bones in my fingers. “Shh…you can do it.”
“Push!” the midwife commands.
Elara, to my surprise, complies.
And the sound that leaves her is not a scream.
It’s something older, deeper. A sound that belongs to the beginning of things.
Her body curves around the effort, every muscle drawn taut as a bowstring, her breath suspended in a moment that stretches so thin I’m convinced time itself halts for a moment.
Then…a cry.
Not Elara’s.
Smaller. Sharper. A thin, furious wail that pierces the heavy air of the chamber and drives straight through my sternum like a lance of light.
“A girl!” The midwife lifts a slick, writhing, impossibly small creature into the light. “Healthy and whole, Your Majesty. A girl.”
Elara collapses against the pillows, her chest heaving, tears streaming freely down her flushed cheeks. She’s laughing. No, crying. No, laughing and crying all at once, her hand finally releasing mine to cover her mouth. All while the maids burst into motion.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
Because the midwife rises with a bundle in her arms, so small it barely fills the crook of her elbow. She’s holding it out to me as though this is ordinary, as though handing Death a new soul is something that happens every day.
“Your daughter, My Lord.”
My arms lift on instinct, not thought. Pure instinct, ancient and bypassed by every rational function I possess. The midwife settles the bundle against my chest, and the weight of it—the devastating, negligible, impossible weight of it—stops my heart.
All three strings go still.
She’s so small. A red, scrunched face no bigger than my palm, eyes squeezed shut against a world she’s only just arrived in. Her mouth works in tiny, furious movements, lips pursing and unpursing as if she has inherited her mother’s opinions but can’t speak them yet.
But it’s her aura that undoes me.
I’ve seen thousands of auras. Millions. The dim, flickering embers of the dying. The steady glow of the healthy. The slow fade of the old. I know their vibrancy the way Elara knows the weight of soil.
This child blazes.
A light so bright and dense and ferociously alive that looking at it is like staring into a sun that hasn’t learned how to set. Her entire body radiates with it, waves of luminance that pulse in time with a heartbeat so rapid it sounds like the wings of a hummingbird.
Fear arrives. Right on schedule, settling its familiar claws around my ribs with a grip I know too well. Because that blazing aura is finite. An hourglass. A number of grains I could count if I wanted to, each one a tick toward a silence I will one day have to witness.
My jaw locks. My arms tighten around the bundle.
Then she opens her eyes.
Dark. Unfocused. Blinking against the light with the confused, squinting displeasure of someone who was perfectly comfortable where they were, thank you very much.
She looks at me.
Not through me. Not past me. At me, with a directness that has no business belonging to a creature who is less than a minute old. Her tiny hand escapes the swaddling, fingers splaying wide before they curl around the edge of my collar and grip.
The fear cracks.
It crumbles because I cannot fathom an existence where this moment doesn’t happen.
A million years of solitude, of collecting souls in silence, of walking between worlds with nothing but shadows for company, and none of it, not a single second, was worth as much as the weight of this child in my arms.
I carry her to Elara.
My wife reaches for her with trembling, exhausted arms, and I lower our daughter into them with a care that borders on absurd for someone who has handled the dead for eternity.
Elara cradles her against her chest, and the baby quiets instantly, her scrunched face smoothing into something closer to calm as she finds the warmth she was looking for.
“Oh…” Elara breathes, fresh tears tracking down her cheeks. “Oh, you’re so angry.”
“She has your temperament,” I manage, though my voice comes out wrecked.
Elara looks up at me, her face blotchy and radiant and beautiful in a way that makes my chest feel like it’s caving in. “Are you crying?”
I lift my hand to my face. My fingers come away wet. Not the liquid silver that has traced bone once before, but something simpler, warmer—human tears, from human eyes. Because whatever this feeling is, it’s too mortal for a god to comprehend.
“For once,” I whisper, sinking onto the edge of the bed, my hand finding the dark, downy crown of my daughter’s head, “I didn’t take a soul.”
Elara’s hand covers mine. “No.”
“I helped create one.” The words come out fractured, each one carrying more weight than the last, and I have to press my lips together to keep the rest of them from flooding out in a mess of incoherent awe. “I made…this.”
“We made this,” Elara corrects softly.
“Yes.” I lower my head against her sweaty temple, leaving a kiss there before I whisper, “We should make more.”
She chuckles. “Never again.”
I look at my daughter. At the scrunched nose and the angry brow and the tiny fist still clutching at nothing, demanding the world pay attention. At the blazing, impossible, finite aura that will one day dim and fade and go out.
And instead of grief, instead of the cold, preemptive mourning I braced myself for in graveyards and arguments and the long, dark hours before I chose this path, I feel something else entirely.
Gratitude.
Thankfulness for this single, unrepeatable, devastatingly brief moment. For the small weight of a life I helped make, resting against the chest of a woman I love, in a room filled with morning light and the distant sound of a realm that is learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to live again.
Now is all we’re ever given.
I press my lips to my daughter’s forehead. A kiss so soft it wouldn’t disturb a petal.
Yes, I understand it now.