Iona
The room no longer smelled of dust.
I had asked Borin to air it months ago, and he had thrown the windows wide without a single word of protest, without once glancing toward the door the way he used to, flinching at his own shadow crossing the threshold.
Now sunlight touched things that had not felt it in three centuries.
The tattered curtains were gone. The crates had been cleared, sorted, some kept and some burned.
Only the painting remained above the mantel, and the cradle beneath the window, exactly where he had left them both the night everything changed.
I glanced up at the portrait. Morana, of the house of Borja.
My father's name. My blood, however distant, however buried beneath hundreds of years and a province she had died trying to reach.
She had not lived to see it, but her kin had carried on what she could not, and I was the last quiet proof of it, standing in the very room she had never returned to. Perhaps this was how she meant to return, not in flesh but in blood, in the daughter I was certain I carried.
Tears trailed down my cheeks, my heart too full to hold steady.
I crossed the room slowly, my hand trailing along the wood of the cradle as I went.
Dust no longer gathered in the grain, but the carving beneath my fingers was the same as it had always been, deep and careful, cut by a craftsman who could not have known his work would sit empty for three hundred years.
It would not sit empty much longer.
My other hand found my belly, low and instinctive, the way I had seen him do once in the painting before I understood what the gesture meant. Varga did not know it yet, but I was certain, in the quiet way a mother simply knows, that I carried a daughter.
Footsteps sounded behind me, quiet enough now that I no longer startled at the sound of them.
He did not speak. He rarely did, in this room.
He came to stand behind me instead, close enough that I felt the warmth of him before I felt his arms, and when they came around me his hands settled over mine, one at the cradle and one at my belly, as though he had been waiting three hundred years to stand exactly here, in exactly this shape.
I turned my head against his chest, knowing my monster would tear the world apart for us if it ever came to that.
His claws had shortened, month over month, barely more than blunt crescents now where they had once been long enough to open a man's throat with a single stroke.
The coarse hair along his jaw had thinned to something closer to an ordinary beard, dark and soft where I rested my cheek.
When he finally spoke, low against the crown of my head, there was no growl beneath the words at all.
"Is he ready to greet me yet?”
"Soon,” I said, and felt him go still beside me, the way he always did when something old and careful moved through him.
His hand pressed a little firmer over mine, over the cradle, over the child we did not yet know the shape of.
For the first time since I had come into this castle, chained and certain of my own death, the silence between us held nothing but this.