Iron and Flame

"Mama, watch! Watch me!"

Elena sat on a pony small enough to be mistaken for a large dog. Five years old, back straight, gripping the reins the way she'd seen the guardsmen grip a sword hilt.

"I'm watching," Aria called from the bench in the shade.

"But I didn't do the thing yet!" Elena's voice climbed. "You have to watch the thing."

"Then I'll watch the thing."

"You have to watch it while it happens. Not after."

Darius walked beside the pony, one hand ready to catch Elena if she fell, the other hovering near the reins. He'd been walking like that for the better part of an hour. "All right, little dragon. Show your mother what we've been practicing."

Elena clicked her tongue. The pony walked forward. Three steps. Four. Elena's face went bright.

Then the pony stopped to eat grass.

"No! Bad pony!" Elena hauled at the reins with both hands. "We're s'posed to be riding! Not eating! Eating is for later!"

"Lesson one," Darius said. "Horses have their own priorities."

"That's not a lesson. That's the pony being rude."

"Most of the lessons are something being rude at you. You'll see."

Aria laughed, and it came out easy — not the measured court sound she used across a council table, the other one, the one she hadn't heard from herself in a while. The bench had been sanded smooth by a hundred years of people sitting on it, and there was yard sand ground into the grain that came off gritty on her palm. She wiped it on her skirt. Somewhere past the wall a blacksmith was working, the hammer falling in that steady four-count that meant nothing had gone wrong at the forge. Vendors called from the market square below. The wind came up out of the west and brought wet wool and horse with it, and under that the honeysuckle on the garden wall.

On the far side of the yard two guards ran through sword drills. Parry, thrust, reset. The blades came around into the low afternoon light and each one threw off a thin bright line, over and over, on the same beat. Aria watched a moment longer than she meant to. She had never held a blade the way those two held them and never would. She'd taken her crown back with other people's swords and her own stubbornness, and there were nights she still did arithmetic about the difference.

One hand rested on her belly. Six months, and further along than she had ever been with Elena. No bleeding. No early pains. No ride north through the dark in labor. Coren said the word normal out loud last week, which he had never once done the first time, and then knocked twice on the doorframe like a farmer.

The baby kicked against her palm. Hard, and then again.

"He's fighting the blanket," she said.

"He's a he now?" Darius called.

"You started that."

"I stand by it."

It had started earlier than she'd admit. Some evenings, when the council work was done and Darius had taken Elena down to the yard, she'd found herself talking to him. Nothing that mattered. The garden. What Elena had said at dinner. The way the Ironspines went orange at dusk when the snow caught the last of it. Elena had arrived in a crisis and Aria had never once had the room to simply imagine her. This one she had imagined for months, and it mattered to her — more than she wanted to explain to anybody — that he'd know she'd been paying attention before she ever held him.

Tug lay against the bench leg with his grey muzzle across his paws. Twelve years since the coup. Twelve years since a terrified girl and her dog had gone out through the kitchens and slept four nights in caves while her family bled out on castle stone. His face had gone almost entirely silver now. He slept so hard some afternoons that she checked his ribs for movement, and hated herself a little for checking.