King Anathas carries his bleeding wife into a room at the top of the seaside tower and screams for the servants to leave. Queen Eva writhes in his arms, the mass of her pregnant belly overbalancing him. At fifty-three, his knees aren’t what they were. He collapses onto the birthing bed beside her, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Out. Out! No one is to enter! If one of these heathen midwives so much as breathes on that door, I will burn her at the stake.”
Queen Eva arches her back, heaving with a violent contraction. Her wrinkled face contorts with a silent scream beneath the crimson netting of her veil. Her matching gown darkens with blood.
Anathas hauls himself from the bed. In four long strides he crosses the tower room to grab for the door. He slams it shut and goes to the nearest piece of furniture, a carved wardrobe only a little taller than he is. He shoulders it in front of the door.
Five stories down, a battle rages. They both can hear the clash of steel and the shrieks of dying men. The mercenaries hired by the Duke of Sanchia shout for Anathas to come down. Lightning King—Last King! Lightning King—Last King! Come down, come down and die!
Eva pushes herself off the bed. She gets onto her knees beside it, her elbows braced against the straw mattress flecked with blood. She clasps her hands together and begins to pray.
“Eva, stop,” the king commands. “If you love me, you will stop. No more secrets. No more spells.”
“You would not be alive without them!” Eva screams as the next contraction comes.
Anathas comes to stand behind her. He reaches for the back of her gown and tears it open. Silk shreds and pearl buttons skitter across the floor. Where the fabric parts, supple skin emerges. He pulls the lace veil off of her head and the gray tresses turn to golden curls as they tumble free of the netting.
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Stripped of enchantment, Eva’s body does not look aged like his — lined and wrinkled, sagging all over. She has the lithe, muscled form of an acrobat and the full face of a woman just shy of forty. Her naked belly ripples, pulsing with more life than her immortal body can hold onto at once.
“What did you do?” Anathas runs his hand over her bare back. The scars there burn beneath his palm. Nine bone white lines of letters score the tawny skin, written in the Old Language. A curse he has read aloud a thousand times and still does not understand.
“It hurts, it hurts,” Eva moans in that same tongue. A gush of womb water rushes from between her legs. “Cut it out of me! Cut the baby out. Please, please, Nath, please…”
“Stop it. I will never cut you. Never burn you, never betray you.”
Anathas heaves Eva back onto the bed and turns her on her side. He pushes her legs up to see the hairy swell of a babe’s skull between them. The queen’s cursed body goes rigid with the force of bringing the child out. He squeezes her thighs and grabs the tiny blue body by the shoulders to pull it free of her.
The king looks between the infant’s legs and knows he has a son.
“Is she alive? Does she breathe? Give her to me,” Eva pleads.
“It’s a boy,” he says. He passes the baby to her. The queen hugs her child to her face and breathes into the tiny mouth. The baby gives a gurgling cry and spits up blood.
King Anathas stares down at the child in his cursed queen’s arms. A broken prophecy made flesh. He says more to himself than to her, “The Great Dome was wrong. The archmages were wrong. I am not the last King of Ammar!”
The infant’s cries grow louder, stronger. To both parents, it sounds almost defiant. Anathas looks into the face of his cursed queen and sees her eyes burn with sorrow and dread.
“Eva, what have you done?”