LTSV Patreon Exclusive Short Story - The Kids (Patreon)

(This story is set in post-canon Book One, an unspecified number of years after the final chaper and before the epilogue.)

Much to Mira’s surprise, she had no problems with getting pregnant whatsoever. 

They waited until she’d finished university and then a bit more as Dr. Desmona adjusted her inscription to protect her against the fatal combination of preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and cardiomyopathy that had complicated her mother’s pregnancy. It sounded like Lady Altmadine had gotten every complication she possibly could have and her mother, Mira’s grandmother, had suffered from something similar so they were reasonably certain that Mira would suffer the same. 

Obviously, Lady Altmandine and the Lady Priestly before her hadn’t had a fretful Saintess living in her house and checking on her every thirty minutes. Mira would never say so, but she now understood the impulse that had led her mother into throwing Bertram out of the house for a long weekend.

Between their precautions and Cecily’s hovering, Mira was delivered of a healthy baby girl and did not die from it. 

Surrogacy was always difficult and Mira had gone into this arrangement fully aware of how difficult it would be. It helped that Millica turned out to be an excellent and caring mother. Mira might not have managed to hold up her end of the bargain if she weren’t, but she’d had a glimpse of the kind of caretaker that Millica could be in her interactions with Andrei. She’d been fair with him, up until the very last second when it was clear he didn’t want to learn or change and so he wasn’t going to.

Adra was less sanguine, mostly because he’d never been involved in the entire baby-creation process and had never seen it happen up close. Things like morning sickness, swollen ankles, and stretch marks were entirely foreign. The changes in Mira’s body and energy alarmed him, mostly because the majority of her symptoms looked like illness to him.

“Have you done this many times?” he asked, at some point during her third trimester when she was enormous and crabby all the time. 

“I would say about half of my lives have involved children,” Mira admitted. She was on bedrest by that point and within days of starting labor. “It happened more often when I was younger and less stubborn about getting my way. Other times, children are unavoidable. Sometimes my host body already had them before I woke up. Childbirth isn’t an uncommon way for women to die in certain settings. I don’t mind being a mother, but the physical insults of pregnancy make me avoid it whenever I can—and it's never easy, leaving the children behind when my time comes.”

Having said that, Mira felt like a hypocrite when she caught a glimpse of Adra staring down at the wrinkly red infant in his hands like it was an unexploded bomb (right before the nurses whisked Mira away to the arms of three healing priestesses and an anxious Saintess) and thought that was a sight she might never get tired of. 

The baby, Princess Mirabel, ended up being the eldest of her generation. The Ladies Morrowood and Lancaster were predicted to have easy pregnancies, but their family challenges were traditionally in getting pregnant. They’d managed it by the time Mira was ready to start her second contribution to the Royal Nursery. They got another girl on their second try, Princess Mirana, who blew all the windows out of her bedroom when she was two and her mana started coming in. Their third and fourth ended up being twin boys, the Princes Mirage and Miracle. Her last baby, before she retired from the entire business of childmaking, was another little girl named Princess Miram. 

To be clear, Mira had not been consulted when naming the children. It was Millica’s decision to honor the biological mothers of her children through their names, although Mira wasn’t fully convinced that Adra wasn’t behind that idea. He and Millica snipped and scuffled constantly, but they also had an oddly fraternal relationship and she was more likely to take his advice than anyone’s. 

That said, there were other reasons why Mira rarely chose motherhood and about twenty years later, she was standing on the mezzanine looking down at a crowded ballroom at one of them.

The ball was to celebrate Princess Mirabel’s promotion to Crown Princess and the retirement of Queen Millica’s Ladies. As one of the celebrated Ladies, Mira was already in the process of moving back into Priestly House. Rosepark had served her well, but she was looking forward to being able to change her own wallpaper without running the decision through two Palace committees and a historical preservationist. 

A young lady was caught between two young men on the dance floor. One of them was Mira’s very own son, Prince Mirage. You could tell him apart from his twin brother, Miracle, because he never had his shirt buttoned up past his sternum. He wore his pale blonde hair loose and draped over one shoulder. His look was as fearsome as it was sensual. As Mira watched, he jerked the girl away from her dance partner by the wrist and she collapsed against his bare chest with wide eyes. The dance partner didn’t look happy, but Mira recognized him as a larval Andrei-type who’d been censured in the papers a few times now for his behavior around new debutantes so Mirage wasn’t the bad guy here—although Mira wondered if she was looking at her future daughter-in-law down there. She had the look of the type that Mira’s sons always went for; dewy, middlingly pretty, and into pastels. 

“Why do all my boys come out like this?” she asked herself. Was it something wrong with her, specifically?

Miracle was no better, for all that he kept his appearance more buttoned up. He’d started smoking cigars recently, but only in the dead of night where he could be drenched in the moonlight while leaning back in a chair and staring at the ceiling. Mira had stumbled across him doing it once and stubbed the cigar out. He had been seen backing a delicately-boned male clerk up against a wall recently, which was coincidentally the other type that Mira’s boys always went after.

“Forgive me, Darling,” Adra said as they watched Mirage spin the girl away from her previous dance partner to cup her jaw and lean over her with sensual menace. “He may have gotten that from me.”

Mira sighed and covered his hand on her shoulder with her own. “No, I’m afraid I have to take this blame. All my sons wind up like that; with the looming and the refusal to wear their clothes properly. It’s been every single one of them, so far. I take solace in the fact that the girls are different.”

Mirana chose that moment to stop a man from approaching her by gently chucking him under the chin with the tip of her folded black lace fan. She raised the fan so he had to bare his throat to her and Mira could see him swallow heavily, even at this distance.

“Most of them,” she amended. 

- Fin