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He could not rub her feet.
He tried not to resent it, the way he knew the whole of Attolia expected him to resent what her orders had done to him. And in the time since the axe had come down and he’d watched his hand tumble to the stone floor - that moment just before his world went abruptly blank - he had grown surprisingly accustomed to the workarounds. The hook had proved itself useful, here and there, and he was nearly as facile with his left hand as he had been with his right. It was almost second nature, these days.
Almost.
But when Irene folded herself, five months pregnant and pushing herself as hard as ever to be the ruler her country expected, into the comfiest chair their rooms held and kicked off her delicate slippers with a long sigh, Gen found himself wishing he could take her feet in hand and press down. He wanted to press his thumbs - both of his thumbs - into the ball of her foot, find pressure points that would make her sink deeper into the chair and smile at him sleepily. He wanted to take her pain away, show her the gratitude that he felt for the burden she’d taken on in a concrete way.
He could not rub her feet, though. He supposed he’d have to try something else.
Irene had begun having cravings before they had even realized that she was with child. It was not difficult for her to feed those cravings - she was queen, after all, and her people were happy enough to inconvenience themselves slightly to indulge her. She didn’t have many whims, in general, and if they found her requests for wine-stewed cherries, out of season, or sage tea with lavender honey from the Gede Valley to be a little strange, they indulged her anyway and spoke of it no more.
It was strange, then, that none of it seemed to satisfy her. As she grew heavier, she grew more elaborate in her requests, more waspish when asked for clarifications.
“Of course I wanted the clementines from Sera,” she snapped one evening when a messenger brought a bushel of fruit, packed carefully into an elaborately carved wooden basket, as a gift from Sophos. “Why would he think I wanted these? I can’t eat these.”
Her cravings tended to the peculiar and the specific, and now she sat back in the chair and watched him as he wished that there was something, anything, that he could give her. “You know,” she said, “I believe I am in the mood for some rice pudding.”
“Rice pudding?” he asked. “That seems easy enough. I’ll inform the kitchens.”
“There was cinnamon,” she said. “A gift of the Magyar ambassador to his counterpart in Eddis. It was used in the spiced wine, the last time we visited. I’d like rice pudding with some of that cinnamon.” She paused, tilted her head as if in remembrance. “It had a particular flavor.”
He felt his eyebrows lift up at the directions. Specific and complicated, that was his Irene. “I’ll send word. If he has not used it all, I am sure we can attain some for your - your pudding.”
Irene’s face was the picture of serenity. “You are resourceful,” she said, and left it at that.
---
The ambassador sent his regrets.
Of course he did.
He read the letter, full of the proper apologies, the elaborate explanation of why there was not enough of the cinnamon remaining to provide a portion for Attolia, that he would be pleased to send a suitable substitute...
“You are resourceful,” Irene had said.
Gen put down the letter and smiled to himself.
---
“You’ve been gone for a while,” Irene said a week later as dropped down from the roof to sit lightly on the balcony beside her. “Costis did not say where you had gone.”
“I didn’t tell Costis where I had gone,” he said. “That might be an explanation.” He grinner, pulled a homely clay pot out of the bag he had slung lightly over his shoulder, and offered it to her with his good hand. “I was going to set this next to your bed for you to find when you came in from meeting with the council of barons, but I find you here.”
“It ended early,” she said, taking the pot. “There was a question as to your unannounced absence.”
“Ah, well,” he said. “If they don’t have one question, they have another. Open it.”
She lifted the lid off the pot, still slightly warm, and took a deep breath. “You got it!”
Gen offered her a spoon, wooden and rough-hewn, incongruous next to her silk raiments and the grandeur of the palace. “You gave very specific instructions,” he said as she put the first spoonful of the pudding in her mouth with an appreciative hum. “I just wanted to be sure I followed them.”
“Oh,” she said, “you did. To the letter.”
She ate the whole pot, scraped the bowl until all that remained was the lingering scent of cinnamon. That night, she did not toss and turn beside him, and he laid a hand across the swell of her belly and slept without dreaming.
---
From then on, she told her cravings to nobody but him, for the simple reason that it seemed not so much the flavor of the food she craved but the method he came by it.
He took the last suckling pig from the villa of a baron who had been particularly reluctant to contribute his full share toward the rations being stockpiled in anticipation of the next conflict with the Mede. After roasting it in a pit outside the city, he snuck it into the palace and shared some of it with her late at night after the kitchens had shut down for the night.
“This,” she declared, waving a rib, “is the best suckling pig I have ever eaten.”
He stole saffron for her from the storehouses of a Sounisian noble, and pomegranates from the orchard of the magus, and watched as she smiled her pleasure. She accepted each dish as her due, and he took delight in each new challenge. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, Gen thought as he watched her nibble on a candied walnut made in tiny batches by a little old man on Chias for his grandchildren. He wasn’t sure how she’d known about them to be able to crave them, but they’d been exceedingly challenging to get a hold of. He would steal them for her if she asked him to. He had become king for her - there was nothing he would not do, if he could.
He could not rub her feet, he thought. But he could do this.
“So,” he asked her as she licked the sugar delicately from her fingers, “what next?”
Irene rested a hand on her stomach and smiled up at him.