The words didn’t land all at once. They slid into her slowly, disjointed, like cold water seeping through her wool. With child. Pregnant. The meaning arrived moments later, full and staggering.

  “I –” Lain’s voice caught. “That’s not – wouldn’t I have known?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Not always. The Kelthi don’t have… well, regular menstruation, is that so? You wouldn’t have bled to show you weren’t with child.”

  Lain shook her head.

  “You’re young,” the nurse said. “And you’ve been through… quite a lot.”

  Young. The word prickled.

  She thought wildly of her bandolier, and brought a hand to her chest, and imagined for a moment removing her bell and summoning a wyrm to swallow the whole building, herself and Morgan and everyone inside, and end it all in an instant with one last horrible song.

  The nurse hesitated, then asked gently. “Is the man who brought you here your husband?”

  Lain stared at her, breath shallow. Images flashed unbidden of Morgan’s wings dissolving into smoke, his hands bloodied in the night, the way he hovered over her as if afraid she might vanish if he blinked.

  She thought of the Veinwright ceremony. Their bedding afterward. A strange marriage, indeed.

  “No,” she said. “He’s not.”

  The nurse’s concern deepened. “Then who is he to you?”

  Lain swallowed. “That man is Lord Morgan Balthir.” And he had held her captive, and hurt her, and bound her to his will, and made her create a monster in an attempt to save the world, and none of those things could ever come free of her throat in a room like this.

  The nurse's eyes widened a fraction at the title, then softened again, doubt and worry threading together. She glanced toward the door, clearly weighing something unspoken.

  “You’re safe here,” she said finally. If she only knew. “But I need you to understand why I asked. You look scarcely grown yourself.”

  Lain’s hand drifted to her belly, resting there without conscious decision. Hard. Morgan had felt that earlier. She hadn’t wanted to understand then.

  Understanding came now, slow and merciless.

  Her breath hitched with a sudden, aching confusion. The bond hummed faintly in the distance, Morgan’s presence still there, still reaching – but it wasn’t him she felt when she searched inward. Not cleanly, not surely.

  Another face rose instead, unbidden and unwanted in its tenderness: Mallow, standing in the green hollow of Vaelun, his hands steady on her hips, his voice low as she chose him freely, openly, and with no doubt. She felt the warmth of earth beneath her hooves. The certainty. The way her body had known yes before her mind caught up, and agreed.

  Her throat tightened painfully.

  “I don’t know,” she said, the words slipping out before she’d meant to speak them.

  The nurse paused, attentive. “Don’t know what, dear?”

  “Who the father is,” Lain said quietly, shocked to be telling this stranger such a thing, but now she’d spoken she couldn’t stop. The nurse watched Lain’s face as if gauging how much truth it could bear.

  Lain gripped the sheet. “There are two men,” she went on, voice thin but steady. “There’s Morgan – Lord Balthir. And –” she swallowed. “One I chose before. My –” her what? Her lover? Her sellsword? Her heart entire? “My partner. But he… passed.”

  The nurse's expression softened into something sorrowful, but Lain was deeply relieved to see no judgement there. Perhaps she had heard similar stories in her time.

  “I see,” the nurse said. “Do you hope for one more than the other?”

  Lain closed her eyes.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  The word cracked the vessel of her voice. Her chest tightened, grief arriving like a long-driven messenger, because hope carried loss inside it already. If the child was Mallow’s, what did that mean now – after his death, after everything that had already been taken? And if it was Morgan’s –

  She couldn’t finish the thought, couldn’t yet look directly at what that would bind her to.

  The nurse rested a warm and steady hand over Lain’s own. In the Tuning Lain felt her understanding and resolve and a horrible sadness and pity that made her cringe.

  “Whatever the truth is,” the nurse said gently, “you won’t know today. Which means you don’t have to make any decisions until you’re ready.”

  Lain nodded, though tears slipped free despite her effort to hold them back. Her palm stayed pressed to her belly, as if she might already be asking the small, unseen life there a question it could not yet answer.

  Outside the door, Morgan’s worry flared again through the bond.

  The nurse explained that Kelthi gestation was difficult; that she would need more food, more water, more rest than the average human. She must double her meals. “Pregnancy in humans lasts all of nine months; yours is closer to five. So long as you feed yourself, and rest, the worst of your symptoms will ease. But you will need a midwife who is familiar with the Kelthi, if you choose to keep it. And if you don’t… well, a midwife will help with that, too.”

  Lain recalled her time in Vaelun with Atheri, who was her aunt, and wished with all her heart that she was there, in that place, with her people. Her family.

  “Is there someone like that here?” Lain asked.

  “I will ask. The doctor and I will return shortly.”

  Lain turned her face toward the window, breathing through the ache, and thought of green valleys and steady hands, a choice she had made so many times – hoping, fiercely and selfishly, that the child remembered it too.

  Morgan returned to the room alone. The door closed softly behind him. The latch clicked into place with care. Lain lay propped against the pillows, the coverlet pulled up to her waist, her hands folded together as if she had arranged them there on purpose. She had been listening to his footsteps in the hall, the pause when the doctor spoke quietly to the nurse, the way Morgan’s voice had sharpened with worry despite his attempt at calm. Now the bond tightened between them, a red-hot iron bar burning with unspoken things.

  He crossed the room and knelt at the side of the bed.

  It startled her, that instinctive gesture, the way his weight vanished as he brought himself level with her. His hands came to rest on the mattress, careful not to touch her yet, his face turned up toward hers with an intensity that made her breath hitch.

  “They didn’t tell me,” he said quietly. “Which means they told you.”

  She swallowed. There was no space here to hide. The bond would not allow it; it stripped away any shape a lie might have taken before she could even try to form it.

  “Yes,” she said.

  His breath left him in a slow rush. “Lain.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “I’m with child.”

  Joy surged through Morgan so fast it was nearly painful, an overwhelming force that made Lain gasp. It carried astonishment, fierce relief, wonder so piercing it bordered on reverence. His hands trembled where they rested on the bed, and when he finally reached for her, it was with an awe she had never felt from him before.

  He pressed his forehead to her knee, breathing hard.

  “A child,” he whispered, the word rough with emotion. “With you.”

  Her throat tightened. “Morgan –”

  He looked up at her, his silver eyes bright and unguarded, the hunger that so often shadowed him swept clean away by something deeper and steadier. “Do you have any idea,” he said softly, “how long it has been since I thought I would hear words like that spoken to me?”

  She shook her head, overwhelmed by the force of his feeling. “I don’t even know if –” She stopped herself, breath catching. “I don’t know whose.”

  The joy did not vanish. It shifted, absorbed the uncertainty without breaking.

  “That will come,” he said, and his certainty wrapped around her like a cloak. “What matters is that you are not alone. That this life exists.”

  His hand rose, hesitating only a moment before settling gently against her belly. The contact sent a ripple through the bond, a quiet and profound recognition that left him very still.

  “I will take care of you,” he said. It was a vow. “Both of you.”

  Tears slipped down her cheeks before she could stop them. She reached for him then, fingers curling into his hair, anchoring herself in the solid reality of him kneeling there, alive and whole and present, and she hated herself for doing it, for the weakness in it, for needing such comfort from such a man. But it was here, and so was he, and she had no one else.

  After a while, he leaned back, speaking with renewed purpose. “You’re not traveling hungry,” he said. “Or cold. Or uncertain of where your next bed will be.”

  She managed a weak smile. “You sound very sure.”

  “I am,” he replied. “This village knows me. They trust me. And they will help.”

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  A quiet knock sounded at the door. The latch lifted before either of them answered, and the doctor stepped back into the room with his bag in hand. The nurse was not with him.

  His eyes went first to Lain, then to Morgan. His expression arranged itself into a familiar, practiced look of concern and efficiency, sympathy measured out in doses he could afford.

  “My Lord,” he said in a careful tone. “I did not wish to leave this unaddressed.”

  Morgan’s hand was still on Lain’s belly. He did not move it. Lain felt the shift through the bond anyway, the way his care drew in around something darker, the way his startling, brilliant happiness made room for a colder kind of possession.

  The doctor opened his bag on the small table as if he’d done it a hundred times in a hundred rooms like this. He drew out a bundle of dried greens tied with twine, a small tin, and a cloth-wrapped vial with brisk confidence.

  “We all have our indiscretions,” he said, almost conversational, as if they were men in a corridor exchanging knowing looks. “There is no need for alarm. This early on, these things can be straightened out with minimal discomfort. A tea, a tincture – tansy will do, or –”

  Morgan rose. The air in the room changed as he stood, his shadow lengthening on the wall. The bond pulled tight as a sudden pressure in Lain’s chest, as if a sleeping wolf had lifted its head inside him and begun to listen.

  The doctor’s hands paused over his tools.

  “My Lord,” he began, still smiling, still trying to keep this in the realm of polite understanding.

  Morgan crossed the space between them in three quiet steps. His presence filled the room like bloodwyrm smoke.

  “What are you doing?” Morgan asked. It would’ve sounded casual but for the deep simmer in his tone. The nurse made a small sound and drew back toward the door.

  The doctor blinked, misunderstanding for a brief second. “It is – this sort of thing is hardly unheard of, my Lord. I assure you, we will be discreet and you will not be inconvenienced. Her stamina will recover quickly, and –”

  Morgan leaned closer, enough that the doctor had to tilt his head back to keep eye contact. The silver of Morgan’s eyes looked strange in the dimness, like coin in a dark well.

  “You enter my room,” Morgan said, each word placed with care, “and presume what I wanted.”

  The doctor swallowed. “My Lord, I only meant –”

  “You presume,” Morgan continued, “that I would wish to erase what has happened here. That a Kelthi woman’s child with a lord is an indiscretion which cannot remain unaddressed.” His mouth curved in a brutal imitation of a smile. “You presume I am so free with my issue, have so many kin at hand that I might discard one at my convenience?”

  Fire – Lain’s, his, all tangled – spiked through the bond, then fell away into something colder. She could feel the edge of Morgan’s temper the way she could feel a blade near skin.

  The doctor’s face drained of color. He tried to gather himself, to hold his authority with both hands even as it slipped away from him.

  “My Lord,” he said again, more carefully now, “it is common for men of station to –”

  Morgan’s fingers caught the front of the doctor’s coat and pulled him forward just enough that the man’s breath hitched. When that involuntary sound met Lain’s ears she knew with sick clarity that the doctor had just realized he was alone in a room with someone he did not understand.

  Morgan held him there, close, as if they were sharing a confidence.

  “You did not ask her,” Morgan said softly.

  Lain blinked, surprised.

  The doctor’s eyes finally flicked toward her on the bed. It was the first time since he’d entered that his attention rested on her as a person rather than a body.

  “You did not ask her what she wants,” Morgan went on. “You spoke around her, as if she were an embarrassing technicality in the matter at hand. Is that what you believe? That she is merely a vessel for someone else, to be emptied without consideration? Do you think me a Lordwith such little care for the quality of the Lady he chooses?”

  The doctor opened his mouth, but no sound came.

  Morgan’s face was close enough now that the doctor must have been able to see the controlled violence behind his eyes. Morgan’s voice dropped a fraction further, intimate as a dagger.

  “If you bring that herb in sight of us again,” he said, “I will make you regret having hands.”

  The doctor let out a whimper. Morgan released him. The man staggered back as if he’d been shoved before his suddenly clumsy hands scrambled his things into his bag. He didn’t look at Lain.

  “My Lord,” he managed, and the title sounded stripped of its earlier ease. “I meant no offense.”

  Morgan watched him with the stillness of a very focused predator. “Your meaning was clear,” he said.

  The doctor’s throat bobbed. He nodded once, then backed out of the room as if Morgan would pounce if he turned his back..

  Morgan stood where he was, a few paces from the bed, his posture perfectly controlled, as if he’d pressed all that violence into the floorboards and dared it to rise again. There was blood in him still, fire still, the old hunger prowling, and Lain could feel it through the bond like a storm lingering over the sea. She was relieved, and furious, and neither feeling could find a clean place to land.

  She gazed at the now empty table where the doctor had set his bag. Straighten this out. He had spoken as if her body was a ledger error, as if the child inside her was already a stain to be scrubbed away, and the worst of it was how familiar that was, the ease with which humans had treated her life like something to be corrected. She had been corrected her whole life. Heat suppressed, voice managed, obedience coaxed until it looked virtuous and pure.

  Her hand drifted to her belly again. Something in her chest rearranged itself around that touch, a protective firmness. The child was still too small to feel, too early to claim any shape she could picture, and yet her body had already made room, already begun the work of holding. She understood, in a sudden clear line, that no matter whose blood had started this life, the world would treat it the way it treated her: as unwanted and dangerous, something to be bound or buried.

  Morgan turned his head. His eyes came to her hand, then her face. The bond pulled taut again, the echo of his fury curling itself around her like armor.

  “You scared him,” she said.

  “He should be afraid” he replied. There was no apology in it. Instead came a calm certainty, as if the world had always been made of threats and the only question was whose hand held them.

  She was drawn to that certainty, her body leaning before her mind could assemble all its objects. She’d been alone in rooms like this before, alone with people who saw her as an object to manage. No one had ever turned their wrath outward on her behalf like this.

  Morgan moved closer. He paused at the side of the bed, waiting for permission.

  “I don’t want them deciding,” she said. “I don’t want –” She pressed her palm more firmly to her belly, as if to shield herself. “I don’t want anyone talking to me like that again. Like I’m –”

  Like I’m already decided.

  Morgan’s breath shuddered out of him. For the first time since the doctor had arrived, the fire in him bent into something cooler.

  “No,” he said. “They won’t.”

  Threaded in his words came a fierce protectiveness. It aimed past her, past the room, toward the whole world that had treated her this way. She didn’t forget; she still felt the shadow of his hands in places she hadn’t wanted hands. She still remembered the Veinwork, the knife, the way he had tried to carve ownership into a creature that had chosen her.

  And still.

  Lain reached out, and caught the front of his shirt.

  Morgan dropped to his knees before her. He searched her gaze for the edge of a trap. The bond thrummed with disbelief, with relief so intense it hurt.

  “I’m afraid of you,” she said, and forced herself to say it plainly. “And I’m glad you were here.”

  Morgan shuddered as if the words had struck him somewhere tender and unprotected.

  “You should be afraid of me,” he said quietly. “And you shouldn’t have to be.”

  Lain closed her eyes. She wanted protection so badly, she had wanted a future where her body was hers. Now she wanted something more than all of that – for her child to live in a world where being Kelthi wasn’t a wound people felt entitled to press.

  When she opened her eyes again, she didn’t let go of his shirt. She pulled him closer, just enough to surprise.

  “Then don’t hurt me,” she whispered. “And don’t let them, either.”

  Morgan’s hand lifted, halted, then settled gently over her wrist.

  “I won’t,” he said. “Never again.”

  And because she was tired, because she was frightened, because the child inside her had made her brave in a new way, Lain leaned forward and pressed her forehead briefly against his chest.

  For a heartbeat she let herself borrow his strength.

  Then she inhaled, steadying, and released his shirt.

  Lain lay awake longer than she meant to. The room was still, the small inn quiet in the way places became when the last lamp was put out and even the mice had learned the hour. Morgan slept on his side beside her, one arm thrown across the space between them, his breath slow and measured. He always slept like this now, near enough that the bond stayed warm, not so close that he crowded her. It was restraint learned the hard way.

  Her hand rested on her belly.

  The nurse’s voice returned unbidden, gentle and firm. With child. Rest, warmth, food.

  She turned her head toward Morgan and studied his face in the low light. He looked older when he slept, the lines at the corners of his eyes drawn deeper, the sharpness of him softened into something vulnerable. She exhaled and shifted carefully, the mattress creaking.

  Morgan stirred at once, eyes opening, already alert. “Lain?” his voice was low, careful. “Are you ill?”

  “No,” she said.

  He propped himself on one elbow, gazing down at her face. Concern slid along the bond, followed by the familiar undercurrent of hunger he kept leashed by habit. He watched her for a long moment without speaking, as if weighing something he did not trust himself to say aloud. Then he lay back down again, careful with the bed, and drew his arm closer, near enough that the warmth of him was unmistakable.

  “Come here,” he said quietly.

  She shifted toward him, slow and cautious, until her shoulder rested against his chest. He did not pull her closer. He adjusted, making space for her weight, for the shape of her breathing. His hand came to rest lightly over her arm.

  “I don’t have much,” he said, and there was no drama in it. “But there were old things I remember. From before.”

  She felt the shift in him through the bond, the way the hunger eased back, making room for something older and steadier. His chest rose behind her. Then, very softly, he began to sing.

  The words were a language she didn’t know, worn smooth by use, the kind of song meant for rooms lit by hearth-glow and the quiet vigilance of night.

  Suan, a ghrá, suan go séimh,

  Tá an oíche ag fanacht leat.

  Codail faoin réalta bhán,

  Go dtiocfaidh an solas ar ais.

  Tá an fhuil ciúin, tá an domhan mall,

  Ná bíodh eagla ort, a chroí.

  Coinneoidh an talamh thú slán,

  Go dtí an maidin, go dtí an lá.

  His voice was low and unadorned, imperfect in a way that made it very human. It rumbled at her back. He sang as if the song had no audience beyond the space between them, as if it had always been meant for this moment and no other. The bond warmed, settled, a quiet tide drawing back from its edges.

  “What does it mean?” Lain whispered.

  He sang it once more, this time in translation.

  Sleep, my love, sleep peacefully,

  The night awaits you.

  Sleep under the white star,

  Until the light returns.

  The blood is still, the world is slow,

  Do not fear, my heart.

  The earth will keep you safe,

  Until the morning, until the day.

  Lain’s eyes closed. The ache in her chest loosened. Her breathing slowed, matched by his. When the song ended, his hand remained where it was, steady and protective, as if he were afraid that any motion might break what had finally come to rest.

  “Sing it in your language again,” she said softly.

  She felt the warmth of his smile through the bond, and he obliged her, softly, barely more than a whisper.

  This time, she slept.