The pregnancyat seven months is a full physical occupation.
I have a person inside me. I am aware of this at every hour. She shifts and kicks and settles and wakes before I do and pushes her opinions through the bond at intervals, a faint secondary warmth distinct from Vaelis's signal, hers alone. I have been tracking both for weeks, learning to distinguish them—his from the direction of the court, hers from the interior, both of them permanent, both of them mine in the specific way that things that live in your body become yours.
My ribs ache where she has been using them as leverage. My lower back requires negotiation every morning. I have learned to sleep on my left side with a pillow Aldric arranged without being asked. I have learned to stand up from the desk slowly and to eat small amounts frequently and to give up the particular sleeping position I preferred before this, which apparently conflicts with her preferences.
She has strong preferences.
I think about Rosalind in Thorn Court at eight months, sitting in that rose-climbing sitting room with her hands resting on the curve of her stomach, the unmistakable weight of it, looking entirely like herself. Not performing anything. Just real. I understand that now in a way I didn't when I was sitting across from her.
The weight of being real is specific. You can't put it down.
At midnight the mirror shifts.
I have been half expecting it. I'm sitting in the chair by the window when the surface ripples—he is at the desk, he looks up—and Oberon steadies in the glass. Silver eyes. That ancient patience. The voice from no particular direction.
He looks at me. Then at my daughter, visible in the changed landscape of me, the pregnancy at its full weight.
"The fifth bond's daughter," Oberon says. "She will be able to tell the difference between a truth and a thing made to feel like one. This is what she is. It is not a skill to be taught."
"Good," I say. "She'll need it."
"The sixth bond is moving." His eyes shift to Vaelis. "Ember Court. The alpha is already selecting. The fifth bond's daughter will know when the sixth is ready. Before anyone else knows." He looks back at me. "Before the sixth herself knows."
I look at Vaelis.
He looks back at me.
"She's going to have a very strange childhood," I say.
"The extraordinary ones usually do," Oberon says.
He fades. The mirror is just glass.
I sit with this for a moment—the sixth bond, Ember Court, the relay traffic I have been tracking for weeks that now has a shape I can name. My daughter, arriving in weeks, who will know things before anyone tells her. Rosalind's son in Thorn Court, six months old, who already watches everything with complete attention.
All of us in this together. The five courts bound or binding. The sixth still in motion.
Vaelis comes to me. His hands on my shoulders from behind—cold, steady—and his mouth finds the claiming mark at my collarbone. The bond opens wider with it, the particular opening that is not quite pleasure and not quite anything else, just the bond alive and certain and entirely ours.
"Come to bed," he says.
"Our daughter is going to spend her life knowing when people are lying to her."
"I know." His hands moving. Unhurried.
"She's going to be impossible."
"Yes," he says. "Come to bed."
He is slow tonight.
Seven months in and he has learned the specific patience that is mine—not holding still, but paying full attention and adjusting in real time. Both hands on my face first. My throat. The changed landscape of me, the full weight of the pregnancy between us, and he reads all of it with his hands in the way he reads everything.
I am not managing what he reads.
Face to face. He has to adjust for the weight of her, for the new angles, for the ways my body is not what it was in November—and he does adjust, without comment, careful with the places that ache and deliberate with the places that don't. The claiming marks warm under his palms, responding before he touches, permanent now, fully settled. I pull him in.
The upper cock, the curve of it at the depth that is mine—the vibration at the frequency I chose during a long afternoon in his rooms seven months ago when I set the pace and saidthereand felt him hold back everything else until I was ready. That frequency. Still mine.