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“I need to tell you something,” she says one night as they sit at the chessboard.
When her silence stretches on, he steeples his fingers and rests his chin on their tips, looking up from the game to meet her eyes, “Go on.”
She is looking at him with a strange kind of studiousness that he seldom sees these days. It is not quite distrust but the gaze in her eyes hovers awfully close to that territory. He’d thought they’d left that behind.
He thought they’d moved past that.
“Are you trying to decide how long I should wait?” he asks, glancing away to prevent the frustration from showing.
“I’m trying to decide if you truly don’t already know what I’m about to say,” she says quietly. And like her expression, her tone is strange. Her voice is quiet but not a whisper, and he realizes now that it is not distrust he sees but something else. Something he cannot place.
“I suppose I’ve committed some unintentional slight,” he offers, feeling his shoulders tense against his efforts to remain calm. Despite himself, he begins reviewing the past several days, wondering if he had said something that would irk her or cause alarm. It is a reflection that requires conscious choice on his part. As he replays their most recent activities an unwelcome feeling begins to stir inside him. He does not enjoy how closely it resembles doubt.
He does not enjoy how it makes him wonder if he needs to doubt her.
He is shocked to realize that he hasn’t doubted in her quite some time.
He is angered to think that she may now be doubting him.
And yet there is a voice in the recesses of his mind that whispers of a time when her doubt was a challenge in a different way. An obstacle to be overcome. Now he finds himself wishing it was an obstacle that didn’t exist in the first place.
Humor. He goes with humor.
“Did I tangle your knitting?” he asks with a fake smile. “Steal the blankets during our sleep?”
She turns her head to the side, the strange expression intensifying and mingling with something else, another emotion he cannot quite place, although he is sure he has seen it writ on her face before. “Truce.” It is a request and a command.
“Truce,” he acquiesces, but resolves himself to offer no more compromises until her intentions are clear.
The silence stretches on, the chess pieces forgotten until she reaches across to claim his king, placing it in the center of the board, against all rules. He watches as she picks up her own queen, which had been prowling near his solitary bishop. But she does not place it, choosing instead to run her thumb over the crown and stare at the figurine, carved in the likeness of a Sankta.
He wills himself not to but he finds, like a child, he can no longer stand the suspense. He feels that something is terribly wrong, more so the fact that he feels blindsided and cannot recall the last time he was caught so completely unaware.
Yes, yes he can. The last time that life truly surprised him was the first time he reached out a hand and touched her arm, centuries ago in a tent on the shore of The Fold.
“What is it you need to tell me, Alina?” his voice is not a shout but the anger is rising. “Clearly you are about to divulge something unsuspected.”
There is the smallest hint of a smile in her mouth and he is all the more perplexed because it is seems to be sincere and not the beginnings of a smirk. What is it? He wants to reach across the board and grip her shoulders.
She merely looks down at the queen piece in her hands. “I think I’m about to do something I swore I would never do. Something I refused to let myself ever contemplate.” She looks up at him, her eyes searching his features with great care before continuing. “And I find it’s something I want to do.” At this she smiles truly, and seems almost embarrassed by it. He doesn’t think she has ever made him feel so confounded. “Something I want very much.”
“But I need to know, Aleksander,” she says his name in a way she has never done before. That is when his consternation begins to shape shift into fear. “I need to know that this is real. That I can never again be simply a pawn to you. That you want this more than you want anything else.” She finishes by placing the queen beside his king, in the center of the board.
He looks down at the paired pieces, one white, one black. Whoever carved this set made the royals the same height. Each piece is equally detailed, crafted with deep attention to tiny patterns and prints. He is about to respond when she continues.
“I don’t think I could ever truly be sure of that,” he looks up and her eyes lock on his. “I’m not sure if there is anything you could say or do that would make me completely and unequivocally certain.” He knows there isn’t. And he doesn’t think there should be.
“But I think that is a risk that only the strongest people take,” the words sound nonsensical and he wants to ask her why she is suddenly sermonizing like an Apparat. “I think that is called faith. And I want to have faith in you, Aleksander.”
Her eyes beseech him and the force of her gaze pushes him back against his chair. He finally realizes what the strange look on her face is: fear. She is afraid. Of him? Though she has been afraid of him before, he finds the knowledge suddenly agonizing. A burning, awful shadow of a power that he wants to physically cringe away from.
Never before – not once in his life – has he shied away from power.
Was there no end to her ability to completely unnerve him? She is the only person who has ever done so.
And she does so again.
“I’m pregnant.”
The air leaves his lungs in an audible gasp. He is frozen still and does not draw another breath. She sits before him, across this checkered tabletop, hands folded neatly in her lap and claims to be offering him something that he believed was forever forbidden to him. Something that seemed to go against the already unnatural, inconceivable life that was his.
Conception.
A different eternity than the one he was already living.
A change of course.
The ability to create life not with Merzost but with the most natural, simple, human power.
He breathes but does not feel it. Stands suddenly but his gaze never waivers from hers.
“You’re sure?” his voice is a barely a whisper, paired with the most fragile, fledgling, delicate note of hope.
She raises an eyebrow, a fleck of laughter in the arch, “Quite.”
Again he is breathless, a million futures flashing through is mind. Decades – centuries – begin to change shape, morphing into possibilities that he had never fathomed before. After nearly a millennia of life, she was offering him something new. Something he had yet to experience. One of the very few forms of immortality he has never entertained. Because he had known there was no one else.
Until there was her.
Air comes back into his lungs, the room comes back into focus, and for perhaps the first time, he allows his feelings for her to pour out from his being, unbridled and unrestrained. He sees her inhale deeply, as though she is taking a new breath for the first time. Everything as changed.
Then he walks around the table, slowly coming to her side. She stands to meet him but he slides his hands over her shoulders, down her arms, cupping her elbows, squeezing her hands before coming to rest at her hips as he lowers himself to his knees before her and reverently bows his head against her womb.
A benediction. A prayer. A worship.
A promise.