Chapter 189

Chapter 189
Freya‘s pov. continuation

Silence. The yard, the keep, the entire sky seemed to pause and lean in.
Dorian’s mouth opened and closed. Once. Twice. Then he scooped me up so fast the world blurred and began barking orders I didn’t remember him giving. By the time my feet touched stone again we were already in the healer’s wing, and a flurry of competent hands had placed me on a cool bed.
Herbs steamed in clay bowls. Someone tied my hair back. A healer with steady eyes and ink-stained fingers took my pulse, asked me questions I answered on automatic, pressed gently against my abdomen with a touch that felt both clinical and reverent. Time stretched and folded and snapped like thread.
At last, the healer smiled. “Your Majesty,” she said to Dorian out of habit, then corrected herself with a small bow to me, “My lady—you’re with child. Five weeks, perhaps six. Strong pulse. Stronger than most.”
Dorian made a sound that was half laugh, half prayer. He kissed my knuckles, my forehead, then stood and paced and sat and stood again because his body apparently didn’t know what to do with joy.
I, meanwhile, forgot how to breathe.
A baby. A life soft as new grass. A heartbeat tucked under mine.
The healer said more—remedies for nausea, foods to favor, herbs to avoid. Dorian asked a dozen practical questions, bless him, about rest and travel and the safest sparring stances for fools who insist on training. I heard maybe half of it. When she finally bowed and withdrew, leaving us with the hush of the room, the quiet pressed.
He sat at the edge of the bed, took my hands, and spoke first. “Tell me what you’re feeling. All of it.”
I stared at our joined fingers. “Terrified,” I said honestly. “Happy. More terrified. Guilty for being terrified. Excited. Worried I’ll be a terrible mother. Worried I’ll be a good one and it will change me so much I won’t recognize myself. Worried I’ll break.” I swallowed. “Worried I’ll break them.”
He exhaled, long and shaking, and some of the wild gleam left his eyes. “Thank you,” he said simply. “For saying it instead of swallowing it.”
“What are you feeling?” I asked, because he’d been pretending at composure for both of us.
He laughed, raw. “Everything and its opposite. I’m—gods—Freya, I’m happy. Stupidly, scarily happy. And then I remember war, and politics, and our lives, and I think, Can we protect this?And then I think, We have to.” He cupped my face. “I want this. With every part of me. With every part of us.”
Tears burned again, but they felt cleaner. “Me too,” I whispered, a little surprised to hear how true it sounded.
He kissed me, soft and careful in a way that made my bones ache, and then he straightened, king-mask slipping back into place—but this time it was gentler. “Can you walk?”
“I can try.”
“I’ll carry you,” he said at once, and when I snorted he added, “I am capable of not overreacting. Occasionally. Today is not that day.”
He did not, in fact, carry me—he tucked an arm under mine and let me lean, which felt better. The hallway air was cooler, and I breathed it like I’d been underwater.
We reached my door. It swung open before we touched it.
Tiberius stood inside, road-dusted and sun-browned, a coil of something fierce and relieved in his eyes. He opened his arms, and when I all but fell into them, he laughed quietly into my hair.
“Surprise,” he murmured. “I came home.”
“We have a surprise too,” Dorian said, and I could hear the grin in his voice even if I couldn’t see it.
Tiberius set me back enough to look at me, and that hunter’s focus sharpened. “What happened?”
“I—” My throat went tight. “I’m pregnant.”
For one terrible heartbeat he went utterly still. Then he exhaled a sound that was almost a sob disguised as a laugh, pulled me in hard, and pressed a kiss to my temple. “Good,” he said into my skin. “Good. That’s… that’s the best news I’ve had in a long time.”
He leaned back, studying me like I might vanish. “How long?”
“Five or six weeks,” I said.
His mouth crooked as the mathematics clicked behind his eyes. He looked at Dorian, one brow arched in a question, not a challenge.
I opened my palms, helpless and honest. “I don’t know who the father is.”
Dorian didn’t hesitate. “We are,” he said simply, beating both of us to it. “Both of us. This child belongs to the three of us, whatever blood says.”
Tiberius blinked, then huffed a breathless laugh that sounded suspiciously like profanity dressed as relief. “Fine by me,” he said. “Easier than arguing with fate.”
“Exactly,” Dorian said, as if they hadn’t nearly strangled each other with tension for weeks. “We’ll sort the formalities later. Right now we celebrate.”
I should have collapsed with gratitude. Instead, absurdly, I found myself fretting. “The heir,” I blurted. “Succession. If—if the firstborn isn’t yours, Dorian, the packs will—”
“Stop,” he said gently, thumb brushing my cheek. “We will handle statutes and signatures when we must. For the moment? Breathe. Be happy.”
“I’m trying,” I admitted, and then remembered to do the thing I’d worried over for days before the world upended. “Tiberius—how did it go?”
A light climbed his face I hadn’t seen in too long. “Shockingly well,” he said, and the grin turned boyish. “I’m back in the ranks. And… I’m on the new tribunal.”
“The new tribunal?” I repeated, startled. “Since when is there a new—”
Tiberius cut a look at Dorian, suspicion and fondness tangled up. “Since someone with a crown and a talent for backroom deals decided that the old one was fossilized and needed replacing.”
Dorian attempted innocence. It didn’t fit him at all. “Reform,” he said loftily. “Not replacing. Fresh blood. Clearer charters. Less sanctimony.”
“Uh-huh,” Tiberius said dryly. “And absolutely no strings attached, I’m sure.”
“Only the ones that keep you from doing something heroic and idiotic on any given Tuesday.”
“I don’t wail,” Tiberius said to me when I snorted. “He says I wail.”
“You do brood, though,” I said, and for the first time in weeks the three of us laughed at the same moment, and the sound was shockingly easy.
The laugh broke the last thin shell around my fear. Warmth flooded in behind it.
“Damn it,” I said, wiping my eyes and smiling like a fool. “This wasn’t the plan.”
“Nothing with us ever is,” Dorian said, sweeping me into his arms again and planting a kiss in my hair. “That’s why it’s fun.”
“Fun,” I echoed, dazed. “Right.”
Tiberius leaned his shoulder on the doorframe, watching us with that soft, secret expression he gets when he thinks no one’s looking. “We’ll make the plan as we go. You talk to the packs. I’ll whip the hunters back into a shape that won’t embarrass me. He’ll keep the nobles from eating one another alive.”
“And the baby?” I asked, hand drifting, as if my body could already answer better than words.
“We’ll love them,” Dorian said without hesitation. “Fiercely. Stupidly. Together.”
I believed him.
We moved, then, into ordinary things that felt brand-new. Cassian barged in with an armful of blankets when he heard—“because apparently mothers like soft shit,” he declared—and stole a piece of bread off Dorian’s plate while swearing he’d make sure the entire keep didn’t smother me by lunchtime. Calipsa sent up tea with a note that simply read,
No more heroics, underlined twice. Dante’s raven arrived with About time and a crude drawing that made me snort.
We ate. We argued over which room had the best light for crib-building, though none of us knew how to build a crib. Tiberius admitted, under duress, that he could whittle. Dorian insisted, with dubious confidence, that he could hammer. I confessed, with utter certainty, that I would be banned from both activities for safety.
At some point, amid the bustle, a hush found us again. The three of us stood at the window, the courtyard below washed in late-gold. Training bells rang in the distance. A pair of young wolves sprinted the perimeter path, laughing, one tripping the other into grass. The air smelled like woodsmoke and rosemary.
Tiberius’s fingers brushed mine. Dorian’s knuckles grazed my shoulder. No grand vows, no speeches. Just the three of us sharing a breath.
I thought of everything ahead: the visits to the packs I’d promised myself, the bridges to hunters cracking and ready to be rebuilt, the stubborn elders I’d have to charm or outlast, the crown I’d eventually wear without letting it own me. I thought of the tiny pulse under my palm and the two men beside me who were willing to rewrite rules to make space for it. For us.
A quiet certainty lit in my chest like a lantern.
“We can do this,” I said aloud, surprising myself.
Dorian didn’t tease. “We will.”
Tiberius nodded once, soldier-sure. “One step. One day. Together.”
I let my head tip to his shoulder, reached for Dorian’s hand, and, for the first time in a long while, the future did not feel like a cliff’s edge. It felt like a path—crooked, yes, muddy in places, with brambles that would snag and stones that would bruise—but a path we could walk.
And if the gods were watching with their usual mix of mischief and malice—well. Let them. They’d learn, as everyone else did, that Freya does not bow to fate.
She negotiates with it