Work Text:
I.
The ceremony is complete, and she has been claimed as his before the Grimleal. It is not a wedding in the way of foreigners: there is no music and there are no cheers. She has seen the way foreign women smile at their husbands, and she does not understand it. In this moment she is officially a wife, married to a powerful man, and yet she sees no reason to smile. The court would think her a fool if she were to, and so she mirrors her husband’s dark, calculating expression as well as she can. There is no love here, and there is no light.
Her ceremonial dress is made of velvet, but feels like chainmail. The weight of it is impossible to define.
II.
She struggles to understand the war that starts up within her when it is announced, nearly a full year after the ceremony, that she is with child. For the first time in recent memory her husband deigned to smile at her when he visited after hearing the news: it was not a kind smile, nor a warm one, and brought to mind a victorious smirk more than it did a cheerful grin, yet still it filled her with pride. She was to give him an heir, to ensure the future of the Grimleal as a whole. Born and raised within the cult as she had been, she felt as though she’d accomplished what she’d been set on this path to do. There was no greater gift that could be given to her people than this, a child she felt would be blessed by Grima himself.
And yet…when she is alone, she filled instead with fear, and guilt, and sorrow. She will nurse this child, she knows, and nurture it, but it will not be hers. Even as it slumbers within her, she knows that she has no claim over it. The child is Grima’s and Grima’s alone: not even its father, her husband, could call it his own if fate makes it so that it is the vessel it needs to be. She thinks of her own childhood, strict and cold as it was, and imagines how much worse it will be for such a blessed child.
When she is left alone in her quarters at night, she presses a hand to her stomach and whispers praise and apologies both to the life within.
III.
The pain of childbirth is unbearable, and it lasts for nearly a full day. She is blind with hope and fear, and feels cocooned and smothered all at once by the figures that crowd around her. She has been readying herself for this day for months now, and still feels unprepared, nearly bowled over by the chaos of it all. Her people are eager to see their future leader take its first breath, and the child itself fights to greet the world and be greeted in kind.
Her husband lingers in the background, distant as always. She has no love for him as anything but her leader, yet her feverish mind wishes he would draw nearer, that he would at least acknowledge her existence, her sacrifice and her pain.
For this wish, she does not hold her breath.
IV.
The child is, as she’d predicted, perfect in every way. Marked and claimed as Grima’s vessel, she knows that the infant will grow to be someone powerful and great.
She is allowed only short amounts of time with the child as they both recover, and it is during one of these rare moments of companionship between mother and infant that she realizes that she has a choice. The child, soft and warm and innocent, does not have to follow the path that she had. The walls of her husband’s palace are not the edges of the world, and the space that lies within is not all that exists. This predetermined fate is not the only possibility.
She smiles down at her child. There is a light here in her arms, and she will have it shine away from this cold place.