Chapter 50: Birth

                                    

                                          
THE ROGUE


Daemon ought to be rewarded for his self-restraint.
When he'd overheard your warbling confession to Rhaenyra, his first impulse had been to leap atop Caraxes and make the return journey to that shithole he'd only just left behind, to storm into his brother's Keep and run his whore of a wife through with Dark Sister, to hunt down any and every rotten cunt who had dared involve themselves in this unspeakable transgression against you. Against him.
Moon tea. Moon tea. You had been drinking moon tea all along, dosed without realising by that evil bitch and her cronies.
He knows rage. It is his very best ally—has been since before he grasped the words to describe what lay black and beating like a stone drum in his soul. This rage, the one he has carried about since the awful truth reached his ears, is not the sparking fire that imperils all that surrounds it. He recognises that feeling well. This rage, this throbbing, squalling echo, is a pain in the chest, a stab to the heart, one that pulses and bleeds rather than ignites and incites.
You tried your best to assuage him. He cannot help but admire how unaffected you had been by his roaring madness as he'd stormed into the room, angry enough to daunt even Rhaenyra. But there are no assurances you could make—no promises of the comeuppance that awaits the Queen in the far-off future—that can satiate the stinging need to tear flesh from flesh, take a life for every one that you and he had been robbed of.
He had indeed attempted to mount his dragon, getting so far as the split in the path that takes one around the perimeter of the Dragonmont before being stopped by Ser Lorent Marbrand and whichever unfortunate bastards had been collected for the task. Six or seven sentries had milled about nervously as the knight delivered your command, blasted impudent girl forbidding him from what is his right and keeping him grounded upon the isle. He did not wish to chance the odds of a skirmish against those gathered, nor your wrath, so he'd abandoned the notion and stomped off to walk the beaches until he was calm. Though he had spoken with you later in the afternoon and indulged in a rather enjoyable romp in the bath, the thoughts of what he had learned refuse to leave him be.
Moon tea. How many babes, fruit of the seed he'd fucked into you with utmost dedication and unrelenting regularity, had been swilled away by that damned concoction? Had they existed at all, or did the tea perform its task so efficiently that they never even had a chance? The unknowns spiral relentlessly in his mind.
He'll not plague you with them, though. You have enough to contend with.
"Soon," the healer woman keeps advising him, eyes turned to you as you wince and cup your belly, impossibly great and heavy. "They come soon. Any day."
So large have his heirs become that you now refuse to leave your shared chambers, waddling about in naught but one of those sheer shifts that make him ache with the desire to touch, only to be rebuffed by the very knowledge that you are far too uncomfortable for such things.
Damn it all.
You wear no smallclothes, complaining that they fit poorly and rub against your belly. No, it's nothing but those fucking nightgowns, baring everything and nothing at the same time and driving him mad.
Truthfully, he is somewhat surprised you still deign to wear anything. Even the shifts are too much for your sensitive skin in this final waiting stage, and he often finds you cringing at the brush of fabric over your tits.
On occasion, you sit upon the chaise with the hearth lit and one of his thick woollen coats to lay over your feet while you read or re-read your books, resting the heft of them on the protruding mound of your middle in a manner that is far more comical than it ought to be. On others, you recline on the bed with your swelling feet propped up and a miniature gown or sock or cap in your hands, stitching long-necked crimson dragons or black-and-green snarling wyverns or brilliant golden beasts across the fabric. Most often, you toddle about very carefully through your rooms, fussing with the items in or around the sizeable cradle you had insisted belonged here rather than in the nursery.