She sat down to a breakfast tray delivered by Lady Merissa. Some berries Andrin didn’t yet recognize filled half the tray. Somehow she knew they’d quickly become her favorite food, during her pregnancy-she’d want them day and night for their mix of tartness and sweet lusciousness-for all that they were seasonal and increasingly difficult to procure.
Fast work with the spoon emptied the entire bowl. She only barely noticed the off flavor at the end. Then the cramps came sharp and hard. Blood splatter coated the hands she tried to use to hold the bleeding back and stop the too early, far too early birth. She vomited bile mixed with breakfast, but too late. Vomit and blood clogged her senses as she lay weeping on the matted child’s rug.
The dream reset a dozen more times. Until finally she gave it all up for utter secrecy. No suite prepared, no special food requests. She vomited, normal healthy vomit, multiple times a day and hid it. Lady Merissa increased her makeup to hide the sallow tinge to her face. Her middle sister, Razial, pretended a renewed love of sweet jams and included the favorite berries in the mix. But the jar was tested carefully and measured out a bit at a time in no more than the consumption rate a boisterous young princess could reasonably manage. Andrin bore the pregnancy in deepest stealth. She had to keep this child alive.
And still she failed. Again and again, she failed.
She rose from the depths of sleep, weeping, and her tears stirred Howan Fai awake beside her. She hadn’t wanted to do that, but she clung to the strong, loving comfort of his embrace as she poured out the horrible dreams. And not simply because she needed his comfort. These weren’t Glimpses; she knew what they looked like entirely too well, and only Death Glimpses revealed the fate of the person to whom they came. She did die in some of the nightmares, but in most, she survived to grieve bitterly over the yawning ache of her murdered babe. Yet they were more than simple nightmares induced by anxiety: she was equally sure of that. She dared not trust the details of the fast changing dreams to paper, yet she needed to be sure they were remembered properly in the morning, and so she poured out her nightmares to him in a bare whisper while he held her sobbing body.
“It will not happen, my love,” he told her sternly, kissing her earlobe while he stroked sweat and tear-soaked hair from her forehead. “Upon my life, it will not happen! We will keep our child safe and your pregnancy secret. Chava and his accursed agents will learn of it only when our babe is born!”
Andrin nodded against his shoulder, limp with emotion, wrapping his love and his promise about her like another blanket. The Caliraths had already given up one heir to the throne, willingly and at great cost, she thought. But she and Howan Fai would see that this child reached Janaki’s years.
“We can keep the secret for a while without too much trouble, I think,” she said after a moment. “If we’re careful, it’ll be at least two months, maybe three, before anyone’s going to notice anything just looking at me. But you know Chava’s watching like a hawk for any sign of something like this, and I’ll still have to attend state dinners. Won’t he start to wonder if I suddenly stop drinking the wines at them?”
“No doubt you’re right about that viper,” Howan Fai agreed grimly. “But I think the solution to this problem is near at hand, Sister of White Fire. We will get you a Taster. Your father has Kallen, and as rare as Precogs are, Tasters are among the more common. They only need to Know food and drink with a Precog range of a few minutes, and you are the heir. We should already have assigned one specifically to you, too, and no one will be surprised if we correct that oversight. The Taster can switch any wine for juice of the right color, and with enough care we’ll be able to keep the news from leaking that way.”
“Yes. That should work.” Andrin hugged him. “Thank you. I’m so worried, but you’re right. We can make this work. But what about after that? I’d hoped that because I was tall the baby would just sort of stretch out lengthwise, but that doesn’t seem to be this child’s intention. In all my dreams, I get huge.”
Frustration and dismay mingled with the worry in her tone, and Howan Fai chuckled and kissed her fingertips.
“Large you may get, My Lady, but you can never be anything save beautiful to me. And how could you be anything but lovely in my eyes when you carry the child of both our hearts beneath your own? But even if you are to become ‘huge,’ it need not present an insurmountable difficulty. We could take a honeymoon cruise. Go visit Eniath maybe? My mother’s family’s island is closer to Uromathia, but it’s isolated and a virtual citadel. We can defend it, and keep the wrong people out much more easily than we can here at the Grand Palace. I think we could keep you safe. Were any of the nightmares in an island fortress?”
Andrin pondered that.
“No. I recognized all the rooms. Every time we tried another place it was within Tajvana. We could do that. We should do that. Take me home, Howan. I just need a safe place to have this baby. I don’t know why this can’t be made to work at Tajvana, but there doesn’t seem to be a single way to have the child here safely. And in some of the dreams a lot of the Imperial Guard die, too.
“They serve to save us, but they shouldn’t die for nothing.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
March 16
It was even colder than he’d expected it to be, and the ice-edged wind didn’t help a bit.
The snow-covered plains stretched away in every direction, as far as the eye could see. It was no longer actively snowing-there was that much to be grateful for, he supposed-and a brilliant sun burned down out of a cloudless blue sky. It offered at least the specious illusion that there was warmth somewhere in the world, and Arlos chan Geraith stood on the running board of his Steel Mule headquarters vehicle, his head haloed in sun-struck breath steam, and slapped his gloved palms together for warmth.
He stopped pounding his hands together, pushed back his parka’s fur-lined hood, and raised the field glasses hanging around his neck to sweep the impossibly distant horizon, although that was purely a reflex action on his part. His scouts were ten miles out from the main column, with Plotters and Distance Viewers scattered among them; nothing was going to get past them unnoticed.
He lowered the glasses and glanced around their overnight laager. Tiny vortexes of white danced above the previous day’s powdery snow, which had covered without concealing the deep tracks scores of vehicles had cut into the virgin prairie, and he grimaced. That pounded down swath gave new meaning to the term “bison wallow,” and he doubted even a blind Arcanan dragon pilot could miss that broad spoor if he happened to pass overhead. That hadn’t happened yet-that they knew of, at any rate-and hopefully, it wouldn’t happen, either.
He snorted at the thought, expelling another spurt of steamy breath, and looked at the vehicles parked around him. The Bisons and Mules were firing up for the day’s travel, sending up the wind-shredded scent of burning kerosene, and heat shimmer danced over their exhausts. The Bisons were all the Mark Two, kerosene-fired variant; their flash boilers could produce enough pressure to be up and moving from a cold start in less than five minutes even in these weather conditions, although it took a bit longer to reach full pressure, and he imagined more than one crew had the heavily insulated hatch into the boiler compartment latched back this morning to take advantage of the welcome heat.
The Bisons’ tracks were heavy with snow, and he heard sledge hammers pounding as the crews broke up the ice that had a tendency to form around drive sprockets and track bogies before firing them up. That ice had broken-or thrown-more than a few tracks, but the Bison’s tracks seemed more tolerant of that particular form of abuse than the Steel Mules could say. The halftracks’ crews had to spend even more time and effort on keeping them moving, and the long route back to the railhead as dotted with at over a hundred and fifty abandoned Mules. No doubt most of them would be recovered and put back into service eventually; in the meantime, they-like at least fifty or so Bisons-had been stripped for spares to keep their more fortunate brethren running.