Orange light burned her eyelids. Meya knew better than to open them and get her eyeballs singed for her trouble. With a whine, she buried her face into Coris's shoulder and hooked her human pillow closer with an arm and a leg. The light flashed out in seeming surrender, but left a negotiator to continue its work. Heavy footsteps clomped on the overlapping carpets, then a heavy bum slumped down at her feet.

"Rise and shine, newlyweds."

Zier sang over a chorus of clattering china and metal. More clinks and chimes followed as he set about unveiling their breakfast tray. The aroma of boiled wheat and herbs floated into Meya's nostrils, dragging bile up her gullet and spinning her brain in her skull.

Meya bolted up and scrambled for the chamberpot. She heaved and spat, but nothing came save for a few drops of drool. A stab of pain sliced through her head, and she slumped over the pot's cold metal rim, exhausted. She resurfaced and found Zier gawking at her, hands frozen in the act of arranging utensils.

"Why are you retching this time?" He squeaked. An ominous premonition curdled in Meya's stomach. She averted her eyes and combed back her hair.

"Nightmare. About the Famine." She nudged the pot away, wincing at the taste of the lie; she'd been blessed with the rare gift of the blissful, dreamless night last night. None the wiser, Zier turned to the snoring Coris, frowning.

"And my brother?"

Meya glanced at her beau. Coris's closed eyes had swelled to twice their normal size, and his runny nose remained shiny pink. She edged back to his side.

"Cried himself to sleep." She cradled his head onto her lap, sighing as she smoothed his hair, "Poor lad."

Zier blinked in pleasant surprise, then shrugged.

"Good for him." He lifted his behind onto Coris's mattress, then leaned over and shook his brother's elbow. Coris shook him off, nuzzling his face into the fat of Meya's leg with a grunt. Chuckling, Zier fell back on his arms and looked to Meya instead, "Well, guess you'll have to do the morning briefing."

The pause of silence jolted Meya from the cold grips of drowning fear. She tore her gaze away from her belly—it was as flat as it had always been, just flabbier from all the good food she'd been enjoying—and met those honest blue eyes. She couldn't rid herself of the uncertainty, nor could she let it show. Not in front of the potential uncle, at the least. She shoved it aside and focused on the present instead.

"Very well. Uh—" Meya scratched her nape, wading through the chaos in her brain for a proverbial driftwood to latch onto. She held up her hand and counted on her fingers, muttering,

"Philema, Dorsea, Tissa, Frenix, Atmund, Meya—we have six dragons. Three have transformed last night." She paused for thought, then acted out her train of thought with her hands,

"So, we pair up. Me with Dorsea, Philema with Tissa and Frenix with Atmund. You guys set out first and get a head start. We'll teach each other how to transform—shouldn't take that long. Then we catch up with you and practice flying."

Zier rubbed his chin in thought, then nodded.

"Perfect. So, you guys fly alongside us during daylight hours. Then, after dinner, we continue your meditating sessions." Satisfied, he sprang up with a smile, "I'll go talk to Sir Jarl."

Zier left Meya to the grueling task of waking Coris without invoking his tantrum mode and ducked outside. However, instead of seeking out the marshal as he promised he would, he made a beeline for the servant loading cages of messenger pigeons onto a wagon.

"Ah, my lord." The old fellow spun around at the sound of his approaching footsteps. Spotting the scroll Zier had retrieved from his sleeve, he reached for the cage on the left, "To Hyacinth?"

Zier surveyed their vicinity with a cursory glance. Seeing no-one within earshot, he took a step closer to the servant.

"No. Hadrian, please." He passed the sealed letter to the man's veined hand, then leaned in further and murmured into his ear, "Not a word to anyone, especially my brother."

The old man nodded. He must have felt the weight of the golden coin attached to the scroll.

"Of course, my lord." He drew away and fiddled with the padlock on one of the remaining cages, proclaiming heartily as a maid walked past with a basket full of dried laundry, "Tofty is our fastest. He'd reach Lady Hyacinth by evening."

Zier nodded, eyes following the maid, who hadn't bothered to investigate their shady dealings. She disappeared into Coris and Meya's tent.

"Very well. Thank you." He muttered his gratitude, then hurried away, his sweaty, clammy hands shoved deep into his pockets. By the time he realized where he was going, his knowing feet had brought him past their enclave of tents to the wide sand plain dotted with boulders, which had served as last night's training ground.

To the left was the rock under whose shade he had sat commiserating with his brother. The very rock Coris had shoved him against, shielding him from the oncoming dragon-Persephia with his body. She swatted him aside like a rag doll she'd grown out of, as she'd done with Simon and Christopher seconds earlier. It was a futile act, yet one fueled by raw protective instinct—there wasn't time for his brother to scheme or tabulate profit and loss, let alone think.

Zier felt his hands trembling in his pockets, and he twisted the fabric lining to still them. Coris's doodle, along with the stick he'd used to draw it, had long been carried away by the harsh desert gale, while the flower-topped stem of weed remained where Zier had erected it. He uncorked his waterskin and tipped a splash of moisture over it, along with his prayers to the goddess, shuddering as he imagined his parents' reactions to his secret letter.

There was no turning back, and what was bound to come horrified him, but it was high time for the truth.

⏳

The sky was cloudless, occupied instead by circling shadows of dragons, like a mural depicting the Everglen skies of legend. One of the beasts dove with breakneck speed towards the men sitting half-asleep astride their steeds. Having startled them awake with the screaming wind, the little dragon—who was obviously Frenix Pearlwater—pulled up and away, keening with laughter as he banked to avoid the stone Simon had lobbed after him in annoyance.

The day had started slow and didn't pick up pace as the hours wore by. The officials, maids, yeomen and servants were still suffering the after-effects of Persephia's sleeping draught spiked in last night's dinner. Some were merely groggy and could do with nodding off occasionally on their horses, but an unfortunate few were confined within an arm's reach of the chamberpot.

Coris, Simon and Christopher, having slipped pieces of Lattis cut off from Meya's collar under their tongues beforehand, were unaffected, but drained nonetheless from the intense chase and the subsequent cleanup.

No-one felt like chatting or singing, or playing an instrument, making for a dreary, subdued journey. Meya longed to be up in the Heights, frolicking and chasing and hurling balls of leather and fire with her four fellow dragons-in-training, but transforming would mean stretching her lacerated skin and inundating it with sizzling liquid metal.

Meya plopped her head onto her arms, fuming as she glared morosely through the carriage window at her luckier friends. She'd grown back a whole joint of her finger, true, but even that had taken a week. So, for now, she was stuck here listening to a hymn composed of Coris's guttural snores set to a melody of wagon wheels on rubble, while Philema worked on her wounds. Due to a mild fear of heights, the old maid wasn't keen to take to the skies just yet.

A strip of the bandage clung to her scabbing flesh as Philema unraveled it. Meya seethed in pain. Philema made cooing shhs and tongue clicks as she patted her hair. In the noisy silence, the motherly touch was a none-too-subtle nudge, reminding Meya of her own potentially impending motherhood.

She turned and studied the slumbering Lord Hadrian. Fear, shame, and uncertainty, tinged with an inexplicable, bitter warmth, circled into a whirlpool within her. Her eyes slid to the older woman, hesitant, but at long last, curiosity won over.

"Philema?" The widowed dragon nodded in acknowledgment. Meya gulped, lubricating her dry, flaking throat. "You and Flindel—do you have kids?"

A spasm shot through Philema's hand as she drizzled a fresh layer of honey over Meya's wound.

"Three that we know of. None of them were born."

Meya froze. She strained her neck further back, gaping at Philema's seemingly unperturbed facade. She knew it was a facade—Mum and Dad had on that same expression when they lost the babe who came before Mistral. And none of them dared speak of their lost sibling. Overwhelmed by shame, she'd just realized she was staring, and quickly averted her eyes.

"Oh, Freda. I-I'm so sorry—I-I didn't know."

"No, you didn't. So why apologize?" Philema retorted, her voice sharp, and Meya reared back from the force. When she continued, however, her tone lightened to conversational, "What are the symptoms so far?"

Meya gaped in astonishment. How had she divined that from one casual question? Had there been scores of young women before Meya who had approached her gingerly with the same fearful query? Was she rankled by the shallow, exploitative, presuming attention? She was more than just Flindel's widow. More than a woman whom by Latakia's standards should've experienced motherhood.

"Lass, I asked you. The symptoms?"

Philema repeated, now a touch impatient. Meya shook her head out of it and averted her eyes. Making a mental note to properly get to know Philema later, she tried to focus on reminiscing,

"I get nauseous when I smell food. And when I woke up in the morning. My breasts seemed to have swelled, and they hurt when I poke them." Blushing, Meya arched her back up to relieve pressure from her squashed pillows, wincing as the corset chafed against her now oversensitive blobs. "But my monthlies came. It came late, but it came."

"Was it the usual amount? Or just a little?"

Meya shuddered as a rivulet of chill trickled down her spine. Oh, no...

"Just a few drops for a couple of days. I didn't even bother with the rag."

Philema nodded along as she set aside the honey jar.

"Happened to me as well. All three times." She scrubbed blood and honey off her soiled hands in the nearby water basin, then dried them on her apron, "They say that's when his seed takes root in your womb."

In that moment, it seemed as if Coris had stopped snoring, and the wagon wheels had stopped crunching gravel—their noises held back by her own denial and disbelief. Meya's arms buckled against the lambasting wave of truth. No, this wasn't happening. She wasn't Mum. She was never going to be like Mum. She can't be Mum. There must be a way out of this.

"But—it can't be. He's barren. And I used Silfum!"

Philema closed her eyes with a quiet sigh. To Meya, it was as good as a death sentence. Her fingers trembled with pent-up vigor, prepared for the flight, and she gouged at her newly-grown hair—she felt sure she would've clawed her belly inside-out to see for sure if there were a babe in there otherwise.

"Oh, Fyr. How long do I have before the bulge shows? Three months? Four? I can't live like this for that long! Is there a way to know now?"

She scrambled up and grasped Philema's arms, eyes bulging, begging for a shred of light. As she patted her hand to both calm and warn her, Philema shot a wary look at her liege, who impressively snored through it all. Sighing, she turned back to Meya,

"There's a trick I used often, back when Flindel and I were trying." She leaned closer, wagging a finger to emphasize each step of the process, "You take a pot. Plant ten grains each of barley and wheat. Make water over it once in the morning and once in the evening for a week. If the barley sprouts, it's a boy. If the wheat sprouts, it's a girl. If neither grows, you don't have a babe."

The knowledge brought with it a sliver of hope, and hope reassured her frazzled heart, at least for the time being. Meya deflated with a long, labored sigh. Wisps of a plan began to coagulate in her head. Taking deep breaths, she nodded.

"Very well. Guess I'll go piss over some grains and see if I should panic." She shrugged, then eked out a tired half-grin at Philema, "Thank you, auntie."

Philema pursed her lips, her expression impenetrable. Meya could guess what was on her mind, and she turned away, flattening herself on the floorboards once more. Philema remained silent as she weaved clean gauze around Meya's leg.

"If either sprouts, will you tell him?"

Just as Meya was letting down her guard, the attack came. Meya's eyes slid once more to settle on Coris, and the mere sight of his guileless, unperturbed, slumbering profile transported her to an imagined future.

She saw Dad cradling Mum in his arm as he drew soothing circles on her belly, cooing to the unborn babe that would become Mistral, and superimposed Coris and her on them—The first Mama and Dada—The first crawl—The first step—The first fall and scraped knee—The playtime—The meals around the hearth—The endless questions and the patient answers, as they passed on the world they knew to their future.

But then, she also saw the closed door failing to shut out Mum's bloodcurdling screams as she gave birth. She saw Mum and Dad, harried and bedraggled, rocking and singing the squealing newborn to sleep in the dead of night, as her six elder siblings also grumbled and whined.

She remembered coming home one day to the house stinking, its walls smeared with baby shite—Marin had nodded off in her shift, leaving wee Mistral to tackle her bursting diaper with her budding artistic talent. She heard her own voice as she denounced Mum and the life she chose, and saw Mum's heartbreak spread like glass cracks on her pallid face. She imagined that pain hammered down seven times, as each of her children reached their rebellious age.

She watched as over the years, the radiant woman who was her mother dimmed and deteriorated, until she was no longer distinguishable from the scores of mothers in their village. She remembered vowing to Jezia and Deke never to become her. Then, she remembered Coris's firm response, all the times she had raised the issue.

Meya averted her burning eyes and stared at the floor, unseeing.

"He—he's always said he doesn't want children. Neither do I."

Her heart writhed with guilt. After all, she had brought the babe into existence with her reckless, selfish pleasure-seeking. Was it right to cast it away simply because it wasn't needed now—or ever? Like a mere tool without a feeling soul? She had been molded by the pain of being unloved by her creators—and yet she was shamelessly perpetuating that cycle. But would it be better to let it live, knowing it was doomed to suffer at the hands of unworthy, unwilling parents, than to strike it down now?

It was a dilemma with the potential to drive one insane, and Meya decided to leave the thinking until after the results were out. For now, she'd learned her lesson. She must be more careful.

The pressure on her leg as Philema tied the bandage jolted Meya from her reverie. She recalled the woman's tragic circumstances and drew in a sharp breath of horror.

"Oh, Fyr. I'm so, so sorry—I-I mean, you and Flindel were trying so hard—"

"Would you do away with the sorrys already, lass? It's not your fault I can't carry a child to birth!" Philema snapped, no doubt exasperated by decades of unneeded pity for her childlessness. Meya shrank back, spooked. However, her gaze was kind yet sorrowful as she met Meya's eyes.

Meya blinked, puzzled. Philema heaved a brief sigh.

"Freda's blessing doesn't always come in the best of times, nor to those who wish for it. It's not your fault if you don't feel like accepting it."

She shook her head, then reached for more gauze to swathe Meya's remaining leg, dispensing a dose of concrete advice—along with a chilling warning.

"You still have a few months before Freda bestows it a soul, and I've heard Hyacinth is decades ahead in the forbidden ways—being a matriarchy and all. So, take your time to choose wisely. Motherhood is a path once chosen, one cannot tread back upon."

🐉🐉🐉