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Liam is easy to hold. He curls naturally into Primsy, long arms wrapping easily around her and his face tucked into the crook of her shoulder. They spend long hours of their courtship curled together on couches and daringly, when no one is around, together on a single chair, talking quietly. His hands are broad and warm on her side and back, even through the layers of her dresses. Liam smells of mint and the summer rain and his curls are soft beneath her careful fingers.
They marry and holding him is harder. The bed they share will never be a marriage-bed in the common sense, but they still both occupy the same downy mattress. Liam’s nightmares rage through his body, flailing and crying out at things unseen to her but branded in his memory. He hits her, once, by accident, a stray elbow catching her cheek. This was before she learned how to wake him and drag him out of the terrors in his mind, before she learned to dodge limbs caught in the replay of the war. She had cried out in shock and pain and her guards had come running in, expecting assassins and finding only the Duchess half to tears and the Duke unconscious and writhing on the bed. Annabelle had been summoned and she nearly gutted Liam before the whole story had the chance to come out.
Liam cries, too, when he’s awakened to armored fists dragging him from their bed, when he sees the dull red patch on her cheek and the tears spilling down her face. There’s an awful moment when he reaches for her and she shies away from him, still wary, and the light in his eyes drops out cold. Then she takes his reaching hand in her own and kisses his knuckles before dismissing the guards and sending Annabelle to fetch her some ice for her face.
(“I was in the attic again,” he tells her, days later, in the quiet of his garden. “I thought - I almost saved her.”)
She knows now how to pull him back to her from the depths of his memories. She knows how to hold him tight to her, to let him bury his face in her neck or chest and shake out the last tension of the dream. Sometimes he cries, sometimes he’s quiet, sometimes he leans up to kiss her slowly and surely. She knows to run her hands in smooth sweeps up and down his back, to measure her breathing to give him something to match.
Liam paid a terrible price by going to war. A price that kept her people free, that saved her life on the open ocean, that brought magic rushing back into the world. Primsy will jolt awake as many nights as she must to soothe his battle-scarred mind. He always quiets under her care, always curls into her side like one of her kittens and often drops peacefully back into the billowing void of sleep.
They sleep in late, on these interrupted nights, and people talk, of course. Lifted eyebrows and sly smiles and careful jokes about the spring in Liam’s step or the glow about her character. How they looked for Primsy at breakfast but she wasn’t there! Most are looking to slip into her graces as a confidant for some new gossip and social standing. A few are outright nasty rumor-mongers.
She tells no one of Liam’s night terrors or of their chaste wedding bed. Let people talk. It will at least ease the tension of succession. Primsy is healthy, a popular leader, and twenty years old. The old lords and ladies on her council needs must calm down about who will take the throne next. If they believe an heir could be, well, in the works , then all the more power Primsy will hold over them.
(“I’ll need an heir eventually,” she says, lying beside him in their bed. Their fingers are tangled together and she admires the fold of his knuckles over hers. “We're a bit young to be parents, but perhaps we could take to ward some of the orphans from that nunnery your cousin burned down.”)
Primsy is twenty-one and Liam is twenty-three and they have four wards, two girls and two boys.
The elder of their boys is barely eleven and when he arrives at Lacrimor he's standoffish and cold and refuses his lessons, a bedtime, or any sort of kind handling. They spend more nights awake than usual talking about what might be done to better welcome him into the family. He's not unkind to the other children, the absolute contrary, he takes care of their bumps and bruises from play without a word of complaint. He spits and snarls at any adult until Annabelle arrives for the High Frosting's Eve tourney and unseats every knight in the castle. Annabelle finds herself with a shadow, and he comes to Primsy and Liam - the first time he's willingly spoken to them - begging to be allowed to sail away with her. They negotiate that he will stay at Lacrimor until his sixteenth saint's day, attend all his lessons, and squire with a member of the castle guard, and then if he still wishes to go, he may.
His younger counter is just four and Primsy's shadow, still wary of Liam even after months at the castle. He's a quiet thing, and sits in her council meetings politely with a book in hand and his thumb in his mouth. Primsy teaches him to embroider and to knit and when they pass the long winter evenings as a family by the fireplace, they work at both ends of the same scarf. He doesn't say much, but they don't expect him to. He was hiding in the chapel when Cinnamon came down on the roof, and still has the scars and the deafness in his left ear to show for it. Traveling bards are given a stern talking-to by Liam before they're allowed to tell stories to the children. There aren't many children at Lacrimor, but the ones who are there have been counseled by their parents to not demand stories of dragons while the Duchess' youngest ward is present. They can get them from his older brother, contraband first-hand tales of a sky lit by fire and the terrible crunching of walls falling and the people who were hurt to win all their freedom from the nuns.
The girls are twins and Liam had cried after he had met them, despite never knowing Jet when she was wee. They are nothing like the Rocks twins, not yet, still shy and scared from their time with the Bulbians, but slowly growing into themselves as they run free around a castle ripe for the mischief of children. Six years old and so much growing still to do for them. Primsy learns to plait their hair and convinces them they may eat as much as they are hungry for at dinner. Little personality differences start to divide them into individuals: one won't wear blue, is afraid of the curd horses, and has beautiful handwriting already, the other climbs up as high as she can in every room and always loses her place in her books. Liam takes them to the beach to play while Primsy goes to mass on Sundays; she still keeps the faith because the habit is still politically convenient within the Isles. They come back with their hair wild and covered in sand and she scoops them into her lap despite the mess.
("Perhaps my father was on to something with having extra parents around for all the children," Liam says dryly to her one night as they're dressing for bed, exhausted after a long day of running a country and managing their wards.
"I envy their governess," Primsy says, falling face-first onto the mattress. "The most difficult post to get anywhere in Calorum and we do all her work for her?")