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Princess Alys and Simon Illyan will deny until their dying day that their child came by accident.
The truth is that Simon Illyan came home to his wife late at night and sat on her bed, and they exchanged for each other their evening’s debriefs.
And the truth is that Alys had had one husband whom she loved and was dead, and one husband whose death was her escape, and she thought she was through with loving husbands.
But the truth is that Simon sat on Alys’s bed and they were alone together, as they had been often enough before, and Simon was in profile and in shadow, and she felt the weight of him in the slight dip of her bed, and they were not quite touching. And suddenly Alys realized that she wasn’t through with loving husbands, she had loved him a long time already. And suddenly it wasn’t enough to look and not quite touch.
And so she said, shyly, cautiously, unsure, “Simon, would you like to come to bed with me?”
And the truth is that Simon had known he was doomed from the moment that Alys had made her proposal. Because who could marry Princess Alys and not fall madly in love with her? And Simon had known that Alys had married him for convenience, because he was a man she knew and a man she trusted, and he had known that she trusted him to look and not touch. And Simon had known, and he had said yes to his own purgatory, because it helped the security and stability of the Imperium for the Emperor’s mother to marry Vorkosigan’s dog, and because that made Simon’s own job easier, but most of all because Alys asked. And Simon had thought that he had known where they stood, in this show-marriage of theirs, and if he could not quite say that he was happy with it, then at least he was content. So when Lady Alys spoke, Simon went very still and replayed her words on his chip, and then said, “Just to be perfectly clear, and apologies for such directness, but by “come to bed” you do mean “have sex”?”
And Alys laughed, giggled like a schoolgirl, “Yes,” she said, “I’m propositioning you, Simon.” And she felt giddy, and she found that her heart was pounding with nervousness and wanting, and it was ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. She was hardly a naive young maiden still, Simon was hardly the first man she’d taken to bed. But it was different, because with Serg she had had no choice and simply done what she must, and with Padma there had been no complications because they had both known full well what they wanted, and Padma had known about Serg in a limited sort of way, and so he had been gentle with her and asked her at every step, and Alys had said yes and yes and yes, and reveled in the joy of saying it. But in all those past love makings Alys had never initiated, this time Alys was asking, and she knew full well he might say no, and it felt like being at a great height, like being at the controls of a light-flier and swooping down, fully in control and wondering if the air currents would catch her or not. And Simon was staring at her in the dark (and his face held awe but she couldn’t see it) and it was on the tip of her tongue to back down, to apologize, he had had a long day, she knew, perhaps some other night. But he answered her first, and his smile was in his voice.
“In that case, my lady,” Simon said, “There is nothing in the world I would love more.”
And the truth is this: they simply didn’t think, these two people who thought of everything, in this small fairytale moment they simply were, alone and in love, and all the world outside, befores and afters, didn’t matter at all.
So when Alys thought of it not long after, and realized that if they were going to continue to be properly married she ought to get a contraceptive implant, and found out that she was, in fact, pregnant already, she felt very silly. But she went to her husband and told him, and Simon blinked for a moment, entirely blindsided, and then he laughed and kissed her. And she kissed him back and thought she had never made so good a choice in her life as when she married him.
And the truth is that by the time Alys had made an appointment to have her zygote moved to a uterine replicator, Simon had already drawn up several different proposals of reasonings for why having a child was a good political move which they both had obviously arrived at after months of careful and calculated deliberation, providing her with a variety of different angles for her to choose from.
And the truth is that Princess Alys took her favorite explanation and went to Aral Vorkosigan and told him with a straight face that she and Simon had made their calculated decision. And if Aral wondered if her egg had been fertilized through intercourse or through some more sterile means, he didn’t ask, and his chief of security wasn’t about to supply him with the hospital records to say.
And the truth is this: Princess Alys and Simon Illyan lay in bed together and smiled in the dark, and they whispered to each other about children and about the future. Barrayar was a dangerous place, and they now had three young lives to look after and an empire besides, but in those moments, in the quiet dark, they knew that together they were more than up to the challenge.