hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She had remained slender for a long while, with skin pulled too tight over too many ridges and too many ribs pushed up beneath those soft brown dapples. Her flightiness had always kept her thin, those fearful urges unfurling like butterfly wings in the pit of her stomach until she chased the shadow across meadows and forests, reluctant to stay in any one place for too long. Offspring had done much to settle these worries, these reflexes imbedded so deeply in her mind, like parasites eating away at her sensibility. But five years of solitude had shaped her whether she liked it or not, despite his promises and his kisses, despite the heat she felt in her belly every time she spotted his familiar silhouette so dark against the white and blue of the frozen tundra, it was still in her nature to drift. Those feelings of never being enough, they had not faded yet.
So when at last she did begin to gain back some weight, to see some of those hard points soften beneath the dark brown of her skin, she thought nothing of it. But as the months stretched on and on, and still she gained, anxiety attached itself like a burr in her chest. It made it easier when Offspring left to solidify kingdom alliances, none the wiser, and Isle had turned to the cold and the snow of the mountains and buried herself in the solitude she knew. The solitude some broken piece of her still needed. It had been easier still to conceal the weight from him, he was so tired with so much rebuilding of a Kingdom that had sunken into a snowy slumber of complacency. When he came to her on different nights and they had stood with bodies entangled and on the edge of sleep, he would’ve felt the fullness of her belly but he would not have noticed the disproportionate weight of it in the heavy dark of the night.
And she never said anything.
Her quiet felt treacherous even to her, but the uncertainty that bled from that broken piece of her soul had poisoned everything else. For a long while she had not known the words to say to him, had not even known the truth in her own heart where it lay buried and drowning in the shadow of doubt. But she felt it now, so bright it outshined even those cold silver stars like pinpricks of light against the deep night. She wanted this, as much as she had ever wanted anything, she wanted this child, this family, this life it sometimes felt like she had accidentally stumbled into. She wanted all of it. Anxiety still twisted in her stomach, but it was different now, lesser, more the product of facing an entirely new unknown and not knowing whether or not she would face it alone. Offspring was the King of a rapidly growing kingdom, his time was already spread so thin.
But when morning flushed the sky and snow beneath it with a soft peach light and she turned to spy a familiar silhouette heading in her direction just a little lower down the mountain, she did not hide. Worry tightened in her belly but she turned to join him, moving slowly, slowly down the narrow, worn path. The slowness was due in part to the uncertainty she felt blossoming like a smothering heat across her skin, but also to the now enormous swell of her belly as it swayed from side to side. There was a moment when at last they were only a short distance apart and she paused to look at him with dark, uncertain eyes. But the uncertainty paled against the intense wave of affection that tore through her after having been apart from him for so long, and in the next instant she had closed the distance between them to push her face against the hard slant of his dark shoulder.
For a long moment she said nothing because she still was not sure what she should say, and instead basked in the familiar scent of snow and sweat and sun on his skin. Her lips found the point of his shoulder, the thick line of muscle that climbed up along his neck. They traced the curve of his heavy jaw and the line of it to his chin until at last her lips found the soft curve of velvet skin above the corner of his mouth in which she placed a kiss, a promise, before pulling back a little to look up at the burning coals of his crimson gaze. Her words are gentle when they spill over her lips, soft when she reaches over again to brush her mouth against his cheek, “How do you feel about being a father, Offspring?”
Isle
