Book 5: Chapter 48: Holy Fucking Shit |
“Dove.”
Grant looks up from his guitar. “Yeah?”
“Can you fetch me another ice pop?”
He sets the instrument aside and shakes the pins and needles from his leg. “You got it, hon.”
“Angel. Thank you.” Sykora lounges on her side. “I’m going to try lying on my right, Luniya. Yes?”
Technician Luniya looks up from between the Princess’s legs. “Whenever you like, Majesty.”
“Y’know, I was ready for a mad rush to the birthing center,” Grant says, as Sykora readjusts and he rummages in the cooler by the bed. “And, like, holding your sweat-soaked hand for thirty crazy seconds.”
“My hand is quite sweaty.” Sykora wipes her palm on the sheet and takes Grant’s offered ice pop. “If that helps.”
It’s hour two of labor. Grant wasn’t expecting how many different things they’ve tried. All fours, lying on her side, standing up, in the tub, halfway out of it. And always their delicately featured technician’s calming presence, her professional, patient calls to push ticking the time away.
“Broadcast to doorway,” Sykora says. At its affirmative beep, she calls: “You may come in if you wish, Majordomo, but I’m rather dilated.”
“I won’t look, Majesty.” The door slides open and Vora steps through, artfully averting her eyes from Sykora’s spread legs. “I don’t mean to scold you, Majesty, but I’m not Majordomo anymore.”
“Hellfire.” Sykora grimaces. “Forgive my idiotic lapses.”
“It’s more than forgivable under the circumstances. Hello, Grantyde.”
“Heya, Vora.” Grant scoots over on the couch next to Sykora’s bed. “How are things?”
“Just fine, thank you. I was overdue for a break, I think. Oryn certainly was.” Her smile looks painstakingly practiced. “And we are fine.”
She’s said it so convincingly that Grant is certain it’s not true. “How’s the boy?”
“He’s getting into 3D printing,” Vora says. “He’s a creative technologist now.”
“There’s worse vices,” Grant says. “Calligraphy, for example.”
Vora chuckles—and that, finally, is genuine. “For example.”
“How are you feeling?” Luniya prompts. “Any pain?”
Sykora shakes her head. “No pain, just pressure. Just a lot of pressure.”
"Remember to hit the button if you need more anesthetic, yes?” Luniya hands Sykora a glass of water. “As early and often as you require. We've already calibrated your dosages.”
“It’s such a relief when it finally happens,” Vora says. “And it was just the one for me. Can't imagine how you're feeling.”
Sykora scoots her butt higher and rests her hands on her swollen stomach. “As magical as it was at times to grow these little hellions inside me, I am quite ready to get them out.”
“We’re all so excited to meet them, Majesty,” Vora says. “Well, Dantia went home. But the rest of us.”
“Narika’s out there?”
Vora nods. “It’s rather awkward. But yes. She’s haunting the waiting room.”
“Perhaps while I’m getting my princelings out, she can find a technician for that stick in her ass.” Sykora reaches toward Grant. “Is there any tulaberry left in there, dove?”
He rummages in the cooler. “Last one.”
Sykora takes the final tulaberry ice pop and unwraps it. “Well, now it’s urgent.”
“Have you decided your heiress yet?” Vora asks. “I suppose it’d be hard, with just the names to go off.”
“I believe I have, actually.” Sykora winces. “Oh, hell. That was a big one.”
“You should be feeling the urge to push again any moment, Majesty,” Luniya says. “On your own time.”
Sykora takes a deep inhale. Her breath comes out in a hitch and then a huff. “Fucking hellfire.” Her face is suddenly intense. Her fists ball into the sheets. “Come on. God dammit.”
“Do you, uh—you wanna hand me that?” Grant reaches for the ice pop.
Sykora laughs breathlessly as he gingerly returns it, half-licked, to the cooler. “Always—always the problem-solver, this one.”
Grant chews a knuckle. “The bath again, maybe? That seemed good.”
Luniya nods encouragingly. “Would you like to try it, Majesty?”
“No. No.” Sykora gasps and sits back up. “Wait, wait. Don’t. Just come back, I’m—ohmygod.”
“Perhaps I ought to, uh…” Vora puts the bouquet on an end table. “I’ll be outside.”
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“Uh huh.” Sykora’s only halfway listening. Her face is strained. Her ears lay flat against her head.
The former majordomo undertakes a discreet departure. Her tail brushes Grant’s knee as she goes. Good luck, she mouths, and gives him an encouraging thumbs up. Then she’s out the door.
Sykora scrabbles for Grant’s arm and yanks him closer. “Dove. Let me lean on you.”
Grant’s stomach flutters. His pulse boosts. He sits behind his wife like they’re on a waterslide and holds her tightening hand in his. Sykora’s heaving again, taking great gulping breaths.
“Oh God. Oh, Grant, it feels…” Her head rolls back against his stomach as she strains. “I think this is the thirty seconds you talked about."
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
“I love you.” She screws her eyes shut. “I love you so fucking much, Grant.”
“I love you, too.” He kisses her head and holds on tight. “Let’s do this.”
Sykora grits her teeth around another sharp gasp. “Luniya.”
“Yes, Majesty,” Luniya’s breeziness hardens to an unyielding focus. “You’re doing wonderfully. You’re ready. Isn’t she, Majesty?”
Grant wants to encourage her too but his throat has gone too dry to speak beyond a hoarse “Yeah.”
“If I shit, don’t tell me,” Sykora stammers, as her tail thrashes against Grant’s chest. “Nobody tell me, just—oh God—”
Suddenly it’s happening. Suddenly it’s here. Cycles and cycles and he still never quite understood, still never really believed it would come, and it has.
Sykora lets out one final, full-throated cry. Another voice, high and distraught, joins it.
Sykora of the Black Pike and Grant Hyde’s first child is born into the world.
They lie together in the Princess’s recovery bed. The five of them. The House of the Black Pike. Grant, and Sykora, and Ziavra and Aurora and Kiar, all lying in their parent’s arms, sound asleep in their swaddling clothes. Red for the two sisters, saffron for their brother. That’s the tradition, apparently. The two of them have spent the past hour enthralled, staring rapt at their new children, speaking in hushed voices as they try to comprehend the new reality they share.
Grant knew a guy briefly in college whose family had a breeding golden retriever. He visited over the summer and remembers being struck by how small the little newborn puppies were. He’d seen bigger potatoes.
That’s how big Kiar is. He could fit in one hand, if Grant could ever be so cavalier with such a precious thing. If he wasn’t holding his son as close and tight as he dared.
Grant loved his father, but never liked him. He used to wonder, when he was young and they fought, why Richard Hyde even claimed him. Why this unprepared, uneducated, unkind man was so insistent on raising him, instead of simply refusing the weepy waitress who bore him, and letting him slip away to foster care.
He holds Kiar and for the first time he understands. He would tear the firmament out of the sky for this boy. He’d run through hellfire. He would change himself into whatever he had to be. That’s probably what Richard Hyde tried to do. Tried and failed.
The world goes blurry with tears; Grant blinks them away. He doesn’t want to miss a second of looking at this tiny miracle.
“I thought I would live a life without love. For so long, I thought it.” Sykora holds her daughters against her chest, where the sweat is finally drying. “Looking back, I see how stupid I was. I had love already, in excess. Hyax and Vora and Waian. I love them and they love me. But I didn’t understand it, didn’t know what to call it, didn’t understand how precious they were to me, or I to them.”
“I didn’t realize how much I loved my people either, until they were gone,” Grant says. “Every time. I'd wash my hands of them and then they'd die and I'd only see it then. I wondered sometimes if it was love or just some nostalgia I was calling love.”
“Our children will know.” Sykora’s eyes glisten. “Every second of every day they’ll know. We will leave no room for doubt. Every bit of love that was withheld from you and me, every day we spent alone. We’ll be repaid. They’re beautiful, dove.” She kisses the top of Ziavra’s wispy head. “So, so beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” Grant agrees. “But their tails look so funky right now.”
Sykora lets out a scandalized gasp on her babies’ behalf. “Grant Hyde. No they don’t. They’re perfect.”
“They are. And also funky.”
There are holes cut for the funky tails. They’ll wag constantly on their own for the first few cycles, the medtechs say, whenever their owners are awake, until the son and daughters of the Black Pike develop enough to control them.
“I’m not surprised they start bald,” Grant says. “I guess I ought’ve assumed. But they look like little rodents. Big ol’ ears.” He takes Kiar’s gently between thumb and forefinger. It’s so silky-soft.
“That’s your offspring you’re talking about,” Sykora says. “Insufferable.”
“They’ll forgive me.” He tucks Kiar into his blanket. “They really conked out.”
Sykora titters and cuddles her family closer. “Like they did the work.”
A soothing two-tone chime at the door. “Enter,” Sykora calls.
Waian is in first, her arm and eyes shining in the soft warm hues of their room. She gets a couple of steps through the sliding door and then halts beside the big stuffed throok by the entrance. Vora and Hyax nearly collide with her.
“Holy fucking shit,” she breathes.
Sykora holds a daughter up with an exhausted grin. “Here. Take her.”
The chief engineer sleepwalks to a seat next to the bed and mutely accepts the crimson bundle. Hyax stands next to her and stares into the sleeping face within. Grant has never seen this sullen, scarred woman look so tenderly at anything. “Who’s this one?”
“That would be Aurora,” Sykora says. “My spear fighter. You’ll be needing to train her, I think.”
Hyax chuckles. “This early?”
“You only say that because you didn’t feel her pummeling you these past few cycles.” Sykora beckons Vora as she dawdles by the door. “Would you like to hold one, Vora?”
“I… am content just to watch them, Majesty,” Vora says. Her fists flex. “I don’t know if I trust myself. Not on a lot of sleep right now.”
“Nonsense. I’m not either. Here’s Kiar.” Sykora parcels out another kid.
Vora hesitates and then takes him.
“Sire,” she says, carefully. “You can’t hear me, I know. But someday you’ll understand how many people would gladly lay down their lives for yours.” Her thumb rubs his tiny fist. “Don’t let it get to your head.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Waian whispers again, cradling Ziavra, tears running down her face.
“Majesty.” Technician Suniya slips into the room behind the doting command group. “If it please you, the Clerk has arrived for some paperwork.”
“Can’t it wait?” Vora asks.
“No, no.” Sykora sits further up in bed and gathers her blankets around herself. “Let him in.”
A squeaky-wheeled trolley with a terminal laden atop it bumbles into the room, with a brown-robed clerk, his anticomps large and owlish, following.
“Majesties,” he says, genially. “It is my honor to be Clerk Tarsik, of the Chassak College. I am here to record the heir and heiresses of the House of the Black Pike into the Imperial peerage.”
They’re three Imperial subjects. Grant almost forgot. Sykora feels some of his tension. Her tail finds his thigh. “Proceed, Clerk.”
Tarsik bows and cracks his knuckles. He takes up typing position on his boxy beige terminal’s oblong keyboard. “What would their names be?”
“Aurora, Ziavra, and Kiar.”
“Aurora, Ziavra, Kiar… good.” Tarsik notes each in turn. “Splendid names, Majesty, for three splendid new servants of the Empress. How would you spell Aurora?”
“You’re in luck, Tarsik,” Grant says, without warmth. “You’re the first.”
Tarsik smiles and gamely types in his interpretation. “And which will begin as your Princess-in-Waiting?”
Sykora looks between their pruny little faces, then to Grant. He gives her an encouraging nod. They’ve talked for a long time about this, first with one another, and then with Waian, and then, from there…
Sykora points.
Every eye in the room follows her finger to its source.
Vora blinks and tightens her hold on their son. “Kiar? He can’t—”
“Not Kiar,” Sykora says. “Vorakaia of the Black Pike, I adopt you into the royal family and name you Princess-in-Waiting.”
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