Mirium eyed the drink uneasily. “You say this is tradition among the nobles?”
“Well, yes,” said Keelath, sitting across from her. They had retired to their wedding bower after the festivities of the day, after much winking and grinning from their relatives. Mirium had thought it all a little “put on”, but now that she was here, facing the last choice of their marriage, it suddenly felt very real.
“We nobles usually don’t wed except to have children–” Keelath began awkwardly.
“–so why wait and risk a conceiving to chance when you could simply make it happen the first night, hmm?” Mirium finished for him.
Keelath swallowed, his smile wavering, then he touched her hand. “You don’t have to do this. It’s only a silly tradition, and we’ve got plenty of time together ahead of us. It’s not like it was for our parents, staring extinction of our race in the face, with the Troll Wars. We could take our time.”
Mirium shivered. “Oh, how romantic you are! I should have expected Keelath, knight of the realm, to somehow sneak mention of war and battles into our wedding night!”
Keelath grinned ruefully.
“It’s not the having of a child really, that scares me,” she went on, coming back to the subject. “In the past, I was most nervous thinking about supporting one. Once you have a child, you’re responsible forever after for that life, in a way. Suddenly there’s two of you, twice the mouth to feed, twice the person to make room for in your daily life…”
“I’d hope it’d suddenly be the three of us, actually,” said Keelath with a grin. “You, me, and our little son or daughter.” His smile was warm, eyes shining with an excitement Mirium had never seen before.
Mirium took a breath to quell her quickening heartbeat, too, smiling back. “So, you feel ready to be a father?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be. I want children, and I want them with you, Mirium. I honestly don’t know how to handle children, but I thought that’d be something we’d learn together, as it were.” He nodded slightly as he spoke, and it seemed like his grin would grow to overtake his face.
Mirium closed her hand over the cup between them and lifted it up. “And I know you’d make a good father. So, Keelath Sunwalker, my husband, I’m ready too.”
She toasted him and then swallowed the glass in one long draw as Keelath watched intently. She wasn’t sure what to expect; the elixir wasn’t horrible to the taste, but it wasn’t pleasant either: rather like a spicy sweetness with a faint cloying effect, like rotten berries. Keelath drank his man’s version of the concoction, with a similar grimace of disbelief. Then he reached over and clasped her hand.
“This is it,” he said.
“No turning back now,” agreed Mirium, and they waited for the drug to take effect.
She might have lost consciousness; it was hard to tell, with the rush of euphoria and the joy and the eternal sense of a new life flaring into existence inside her. She swam up from the landscape of that feeling some time later, Keelath still heavy atop her.
The dreams of a successful mating were said to be prophetic, telling of her future child’s life and fortunes. She remembered vaguely visions of the triumph of the Light and long, happy years growing old together as a family, but the details of these escaped her.
Keelath was still awake, only barely. They were still connected, his body relaxing as his mana coursed through her; building a cushion within her of magical energy for the baby to feed on as it grew.
As he grew. She knew it as a sudden awakening, as the tiny presence stirred and made itself known. Across from her, on top of her, she saw Keelath know it too. They held each other close, Keelath cradling her, both of them cradling the new life of their son inside her.
“Evelos,” said Keelath.
Mirium nodded at the name. “Evelos,” she breathed. The child’s soul was faint, only a few flashes of intent as it found a place to nestle into her, begin to draw on Keelath’s well of energy and make it his own. “…and now I’m going to grow fat with your heir whether I wanted it or not,” Mirium said.
They both laughed. “Not fat,” said Keelath. “Only, ah, large with life, swelling like a seedpod, or a fruit–“
“Not exactly a romantic image either,” returned Mirium, and they laughed again.
Keelath’s magic slowed to a trickle and then abated, and he shifted to more comfortably arrange himself around her. She cuddled into his scent, not as overpowering now as the elixirs’ effect waned in their systems, but with a new subtle tang to him that she would always mark as being her influence on him. Their tie, her connection to him, as a mated elven pair. A married pair, she corrected in her head.
And the life inside her pulsed more brightly, even now starting to swell and push at the boundaries of her womb, though no one would be able to mark it from the outside for some months more. Their life had changed, literally overnight. She was a Sunwalker, and they had a son.
She had never been happier.