Against The World

Chapter 68: The News Travels

Mary asked us to repeat ourselves.

This was unusual enough that Melody stopped reaching for the bread.

“Twins,” Evelyn said.

Mary looked at her.

Then at me.

“A boy and a girl.”

“Yes.”

For a moment, the most organized woman in Greykeep seemed unable to decide what to do with her hands.

She finally put them over her mouth.

Melody rose so quickly that her chair scraped the floor.

“I knew it.”

I looked at her.

“No, you didn’t.”

“I knew there was something.”

“We told you she was pregnant.”

“And I believed you. Correctly.”

Evelyn laughed as Melody came around the table to embrace her.

Mary followed a moment later.

I remained seated, watching my wife disappear between them.

When they finally released her, Mary wiped at one eye and looked annoyed with it.

“Does your mother know?”

“We told her last night,” Evelyn said.

Melody glanced toward the door.

“How far away is she?”

“Valewood.”

“That is no longer a useful answer.”

As if summoned by the observation, someone knocked.

A servant entered carrying a large basket.

“From Lady Helena, Your Majesty.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.

I lifted the cloth.

Wool.

Several colors.

Enough, at first glance, to clothe a modest army.

Beneath it lay a note.

Your father says the second cradle will match.

I passed it to Evelyn.

She smiled down at the writing.

Then folded it carefully and kept it.

By midday, the question of an announcement had reached our sitting room.

It arrived with Mary, though she looked apologetic about carrying it.

“The household knows something has changed.”

“The biscuits?” I asked.

“The biscuits. The revised meal trays. Mistress Ilyen’s visits. Lord Garrick carrying a cradle through the gate.”

Evelyn leaned back against the cushions.

“Yes. Father was not especially discreet.”

“He stopped to show the receiving keeper the carving,” Mary said.

I could picture that very clearly.

“Has anyone said anything publicly?”

“Nothing official.”

Evelyn looked toward the open window.

For weeks, we had carried the knowledge from room to room as something small and private.

I understood her reluctance to hand it over.

I felt it too.

Mary waited.

At last, Evelyn said, “I would rather tell them than have everyone wondering whether I’m ill.”

I took her hand.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“But briefly.”

Mary opened her book.

Evelyn considered her words.

“The king and queen are happy to share that we are expecting twins. A son and a daughter.”

Mary wrote.

“We are grateful for everyone’s kindness,” Evelyn added.

Then she stopped.

“That is enough.”

Mary looked up.

“No lineage recitation?”

“No,” I said.

“No comparison to previous royal births?”

“Definitely not.”

She shut the book.

“A mercifully short proclamation.”

After she left, Evelyn remained quiet.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Tomorrow, people will look at me and see the mother of the heirs.”

I squeezed her hand.

“They already see their queen.”

“I know.”

She turned toward me.

“I would like them to keep seeing her.”

I thought about that for a moment.

Then I said, “We can start by making sure I do.”

Her expression softened.

“You have been hovering.”

“A little.”

“You tried to carry my book yesterday.”

“It was a large book.”

“It was a pamphlet.”

I conceded the point.

We made the announcement after the following day’s open petitions.

Evelyn wanted to finish the ordinary business first.

A dispute over a shared wall.

A request for another market water point.

Two apprentices asking whether their master could withhold their wages because one had broken a plane.

The master, who had accompanied them, looked increasingly uncomfortable as Mary asked him to explain the arrangement.

By the time that matter was resolved, the room had warmed considerably.

Evelyn drank a little water.

Then she looked at me.

I stood beside her.

There was no herald’s flourish.

I told the room we had some happy family news.

When Evelyn said the word twins, a woman near the back gasped.

Someone else laughed.

Then applause spread through the hall, uneven at first, growing until I could hardly hear anything else.

Evelyn’s fingers tightened around mine.

A man called a blessing.

Another voice asked whether we had chosen names.

“Not yet,” Evelyn answered.

That produced enough eager expressions that I realized we had made a mistake.

By the time we left the hall, three suggestions had reached Mary.

One had been submitted in writing.

Greykeep knew before lunch.

The bells did not ring for an alarm.

There were no soldiers in the streets.

Instead, people smiled at us in a new way.

A woman carrying washing stopped Evelyn long enough to say that she had raised twins and that two did not always mean twice the trouble.

Her husband, several steps behind her, made a doubtful sound.

She ignored him.

“They keep each other company.”

“They also teach each other things,” he said.

“Yes. Some of them useful.”

Evelyn thanked them.

Farther along, a little boy studied her stomach with open curiosity.

“Both in there?”

His mother looked mortified.

“Yes,” Evelyn said.

He considered this.

“Will they have to share?”

“For a while.”

He looked deeply sympathetic.

I laughed so hard that Evelyn had to tug me onward.

The first foreign congratulations arrived three days later.

Mary laid them out on the council table alongside the ordinary correspondence.

A small chest of fine linen from Stoneford’s merchant council.

A carved music box from an Orselle trading house whose name I recognized from the chocolate negotiations.

A letter from Lady Sabine, with a personal note beneath the formal courtesies.

May your children inherit fewer disputes than we did.

I read that part twice.

Evelyn read it over my shoulder.

“I like her more when she isn’t discussing tariffs.”

“I suspect she feels the same about us.”

One envoy’s letter referred to our son as the future strength of Greykeep and our daughter as a precious bond between kingdoms.

Evelyn’s expression cooled.

Mary noticed.

“I can draft the acknowledgment.”

“Thank them for their good wishes,” Evelyn said. “The children have no appointments available.”

I pressed my lips together.

Mary’s pen paused.

“Shall I use those words?”

“Perhaps something close.”

Later, in private, I found Evelyn looking at the letter again.

“They aren’t even born.”

“I know.”

She laid it down.

“I don’t want their childhood to become a waiting room for someone else’s plans.”

I sat beside her.

“Then we give them other things to do.”

“Such as?”

“Lessons. Friends. Mud.”

She looked at me.

“I was hoping to reduce the mud.”

“We should be realistic.”

She smiled, but the worry had not entirely left her face.

I touched her cheek.

“We won’t be able to stop every expectation.”

“No.”

“But they will hear us too.”

She rested her hand over mine.

For the moment, that was the promise we could make.

The next morning, Evelyn asked me to come to the infirmary.

I assumed it was an examination.

It was a staffing meeting.

Mistress Ilyen stood beside the long table with two other midwives and a slate covered in names.

Evelyn pulled out a chair.

“Sit.”

I did.

Ilyen pointed to the slate.

“These are the outlying households expecting births over the next several months. These are the women who can attend them.”

The second list was considerably shorter.

One of the midwives, a broad-shouldered woman named Nessa, tapped three villages marked along the northern road.

“I cover these. If two women need me the same night, someone waits or sends farther.”

I looked at Evelyn.

She was listening to Nessa.

“This was already a problem,” my wife said. “My needing more visits makes the gap harder to ignore.”

We discussed travel.

Clean linen.

Space in the infirmary for women who chose to come before their expected time.

Pay for training assistants who could remain with a laboring mother while someone fetched the midwife.

Ilyen had two candidates in mind.

“Neither has much magic,” she said.

“Do they need it?” I asked.

“They need judgment, patience, and the willingness to get out of bed. Magic is helpful. It does not supply the other three.”

Evelyn made a small approving sound.

By the end of the meeting, we had agreed to fund two apprenticeships and prepare another room beside the infirmary’s existing maternity space.

Nothing opened that afternoon.

No shortage vanished because we had discussed it.

But Nessa left with a paid training schedule, and Ilyen had authority to order the supplies she had been requesting.

In the corridor, I caught Evelyn’s hand.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m glad I came.”

“So am I.”

I glanced back toward the room.

“Our children are already attending meetings.”

“They will need to earn their biscuits.”

The Voss judgment reached us that evening.

Mary did not bring it to our rooms.

She asked us to meet her in the council chamber with Merrow and the others directly concerned.

That told me enough to walk quickly.

The document was long.

The clerk’s summary was shorter.

The court had found Voss guilty of directing unlawful confinement, fraudulent labor debts, and the forced transfer of families through the company’s yards.

His signatures, his correspondence, and the testimony of his own agents had held.

The claim that every abuse had occurred without his knowledge had failed.

I looked at Merrow.

She sat very still.

Mary continued.

The court had also found that the company arranged transport before the Bellcross fires and profited from the disaster.

It had not found enough evidence to convict Voss personally of ordering the fires.

The arson proceedings against the named perpetrators would continue.

My hands tightened on the table.

After everything, I wanted every part of it answered.

Mary let the silence stand.

Then she read the sentence.

Voss would spend twenty years in secure custody. His company directorship was ended. Assets under the court’s control would be placed in receivership to satisfy wages, wrongful debt collections, and compensation claims.

Other jurisdictions would receive the findings and requests to secure property within their reach.

“Does that release the debts?” Merrow asked.

“The coerced labor debts covered by the judgment are void.”

“All of them?”

“All within the case. The magistrates can use the findings to pursue the remaining yards.”

Merrow closed her eyes.

Jalen sat beside her, one hand resting flat against his knee.

“What do we tell the people still carrying those papers?” he asked.

Mary turned a sheet toward him.

“I’ve prepared a notice explaining where to bring them.”

He read it.

Then nodded.

No one cheered.

Eventually, Merrow asked for a copy of the judgment.

“I want to read it slowly.”

Mary gave her one.

I found Merrow later in the small courtyard outside the archives.

The papers lay beside her on the bench.

“Twenty years,” she said.

“Yes.”

She watched a gardener gather fallen leaves from the path.

“I thought I would feel more.”

“What do you feel?”

“Tired.”

I sat down.

After a while, she picked up the judgment.

“Jalen wants to take the notices home tomorrow.”

“Will you go with him?”

“Yes.”

She smoothed the edge of the paper.

“People need to hear that the debts are gone.”

I nodded.

The gardener moved on.

Somewhere beyond the wall, a child was calling for another child to wait.

Merrow listened until the voices faded.

Then she stood.

“I should pack.”

For the first time, leaving for Bellcross did not sound like a duty she was bracing herself to perform.

It sounded like somewhere she wanted to be.

That night, I found Evelyn in the nursery with a measuring cord.

She had one end held against the wall and the other caught beneath a book on the floor.

I stopped in the doorway.

She looked up immediately.

“You may hold this.”

I took the cord.

“You knew I was about to offer.”

“You were drawing breath.”

We measured the space for the second cradle.

Then the distance to the chair.

Then the door.

At some point, I realized she was enjoying herself.

There was no council schedule on the floor.

No court letter.

Only a piece of cord and a room slowly filling with the things our children would need.

“Mother wants another chair,” she said.

“For herself?”

“She says for anyone sitting up at night.”

“That sounds like herself.”

“Yes.”

I marked the measurement on a scrap of paper.

Evelyn lowered herself into the existing chair and rested a hand against her stomach.

I knelt beside her.

“Tired?”

“A little.”

“Shall we stop?”

“In a moment.”

She looked toward the cradle.

“Did Merrow seem all right?”

“As much as I could tell. She’s going to Bellcross tomorrow.”

“I’m glad.”

For a while, we sat quietly.

Then Evelyn said, “Today was a great deal.”

“It was.”

“Midwives. The judgment. Three more letters about the babies.”

“Four. Mary intercepted one.”

“Was it a name suggestion?”

“Several generations of them.”

She laughed.

I rested my head against her knee.

Her fingers moved through my hair.

“We haven’t even begun choosing.”

“We have time.”

“Yes.”

I looked up at her.

“What do you want their names to sound like?”

She thought about it.

“Something I can call across a garden.”

I smiled.

“Something that survives being shouted?”

“That too.”

We tried a few aloud.

None settled.

There was no hurry.

Outside the nursery, the evening lamps were being lit. Somewhere downstairs, Mary was preparing copies for Bellcross, and the kitchen staff were arguing cheerfully over tomorrow’s bread.

Evelyn took the scrap of paper from me.

Beneath the measurements, she wrote two small headings.

Our son.

Our daughter.

Then she set the page on the table, leaving room beneath each.

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