BSI Chapter 311: Your Father is right
Chapter 311: Your Father is right
She heard him through the wall that evening, rearranging the entire perimeter watch schedule based on something Voss had mentioned about scent patterns. He’d taken the information, cross-referenced it with terrain data she didn’t know he’d memorised, and redistributed personnel, aka snow team and what was left of leaf team, in under an hour. The beastmen who left the study looked like soldiers who’d been given orders they actually understood.
Felicity pressed her palm flat against the wall and felt something warm and aching bloom behind her sternum.
This is what he was built for, she thought. And he was wasting it on pride and jealousy and a war with Victor that neither of them could afford to win.
The thought made her chest hurt in a different way. She pulled her hand back and pressed it against her belly instead, where four tiny heartbeats pulsed in counterpoint to her own.
She found Luna and Frost in the garden that afternoon, or rather, she found the evidence of them first. A perfect circle of flowers bloomed across the cobblestones near the rose bushes, intricate as lace, and at its centre sat two small figures cross-legged and utterly absorbed. Frost’s new ice magic was covering the area they were playing in.
Luna’s white curls caught the sunlight like spun sugar. Her small hands hovered over a scrap of fabric, one of Felicity’s old scarves.
Frost sat beside her, his brow furrowed with the particular intensity of a child performing brain surgery. A small shield of ice hovered between his palms no bigger than a dinner plate, translucent and trembling, but holding. His pointed ears were pinned flat with concentration. Fine frost crystals had formed along his hairline, dusting his pale lashes white.
Neither of them noticed her approach. Felicity’s heart did something complicated and enormous behind her ribs.
She lowered herself carefully onto the bench beside them, her belly making the descent more of a production than it used to be. The wood was warm beneath her palms. The garden smelled of crushed rosemary and something sweet she couldn’t name, honeysuckle, maybe, climbing the old stone wall.
Luna looked up first. Those pale, bright eyes went wide, and the frost patterns on the scarf stuttered and bloomed brighter.
"Mama Fel!" The scarf was abandoned instantly. Luna launched herself sideways, small arms wrapping around Felicity’s thigh with the simple force of a child who had no concept of gentleness.
"Hello, my little frost and my moon." She gathered Luna against her side, pressing her nose into those sugar-white curls. Luna smelled like winter air and something faintly magical. "What are you two making?"
"Shields," Frost said, without looking up from his trembling ice plate. His voice was solemn, the way only a seven-year-old’s could be when discussing matters of life and death. "For the babies."
Felicity’s breath stopped.
She looked at the shield between his small hands, the way it pulsed faintly, thickening and thinning in a rhythm that matched his breathing. She looked at the frost patterns spreading across her old scarf under Luna’s absent touch, not random, she realised now, but it was deliberate.
They were making protection. For children who didn’t exist outside her body yet.
Her vision blurred. She blinked hard, twice, and pressed her lips together until the trembling stopped.
"Can I see?" she asked, and her voice came out steadier than she expected.
Frost looked up then. Those careful, wide eyes met hers, and something in them was so fiercely, terribly serious that her chest cracked open all over again. He held the shield out toward her with both hands, like an offering. Like a vow.
"It’s not very strong yet," he admitted, and the shame in his voice nearly undid her. "But I’m practicing every day, Daddy Lucan says I have to practice every day."
"Your Father is right." She reached out and touched the edge of the shield. It was cold and solid beneath her fingertips, smoother than she expected, and it hummed with a faint vibration that travelled up her arm and settled somewhere behind her heart. "Frost, this is beautiful."
His ears twitched, and she recognised the expression — it was the same one Voss wore when he was pleased but trying desperately not to show it.
Luna pressed closer against her side, small fingers finding the curve of Felicity’s belly through the thin fabric of her dress. The frost patterns on the scarf behind them pulsed once, brightened, and settled into something that looked almost like a crown.
"For the princess babies," Luna announced, with the absolute certainty of a child who had decided how the world worked and saw no reason to revise. "And the prince babies, I’m making them crowns."
"Of course you are." Felicity pressed a kiss to the top of Luna’s head "Of course you are, sweetheart."
Frost’s shield wobbled. He frowned at it, recalibrated, and the ice steadied. His jaw set with that particular stubbornness she recognised from every single one of her husbands, the one that said I will master this if it kills me.
She sat with them until the light shifted and the garden filled with golden hour warmth that turned the frost patterns to liquid diamond. Luna fell asleep against her hip, small body going heavy and warm, frost patterns still blooming lazily across her skin. Frost maintained his shield for another eleven minutes, she counted, before it dissolved in a shower of glittering particles that caught the light like something from a dream.
He looked at the empty space where it had been, at his empty hands, and something fierce and satisfied crossed his small face.
"Tomorrow it’ll be bigger," he said.
"I know it will." She reached out and brushed the frost from his lashes with her thumb. His eyes fluttered closed at the touch, and for one unguarded moment, he looked exactly like what he was: a small, tired child who had decided the world needed saving and appointed himself to the task.
She gathered them both against her, Luna sleeping, Frost blinking slowly, both of them smelling like winter and safety and held them there while the garden filled with golden light and the distant sound of Dimitri’s voice carried from the study, steady and sure, reshaping the world one decision at a time.