Date: June 11, 2440 Time: 11:10 AM
T’monn watched her daughter go with nothing but joy. T’mari was no longer just a young woman—she was carrying Matthew’s offspring and now, by V’ren law, the legally bonded partner of a High Lord of the V’ren.
But T’monn withheld one detail. She needed more information before revealing the presence of twins. Among the V’ren, twins were exceedingly rare and carried deep cultural implications—implications that could reshape the standing and future of their new High Lord.
She felt the unspoken knowledge sit in her chest like a careful stone. In House Th’ron, twin births lived on as cautionary echoes: one pair who fractured their clan with competing claims; another whose marriages stitched a decade of peace. Rare as comets and just as directional, twins had never arrived without setting someone’s course. If the songs remembered anything faithfully, it was that such births were not private news—they were bell-ringers for politics and faith.
What T’monn had been both expecting and dreading for the last few days was the call that would come in next. She gathered another test kit and headed back to the house.
The hallway air held the cool of shaded stone and the faintest trace of cedar from an open wardrobe somewhere down the line. She paused with her hand on the frame, counting a slow breath, letting the physician and the matriarch braid themselves tighter than the mother who wished this could be simpler.
“L’tani,” T’monn called quietly, knocking on the door. This had been Matthew’s room. It didn’t scream his presence, except to her nose, but it refined the subtlety of masculinity and refinement that was unmistakably his. She ran her hand across the top rail of the wainscoting and realized the carving on it was not original. She wondered how many years Matthew spent carving the leaves and vines. She just knew it had been him. She tamped down that feeling before it blew over into girlish garishness.
“I have been expecting your call,” she said, both in triumph and pity for all her youngest daughter had gone through. “Take off your top and let me see your spots.”
The room carried him in fragments: clean linen that spoke of luxury, soap that leaned herbal, the echoes of his happier past. Nothing ostentatious. Nothing performative. The measure of a man who liked order because it kept the world quiet enough to think.
“But how, you tested me and for three days straight the results were negative,” L’tani said, removing the hoodie.
Her fingers fumbled the cuffs. Each negative test had felt like a stay of judgment, a dawn reprieve that never reached noon. She pictured Matthew as he had looked at her last—steady, unflinching, the kindness in it worse than anger because it left her nowhere to put the blame. The fabric slid from her shoulders; her breath stayed high in her chest.
“I suspected you were in Seliv’kai,” she said, getting a horrified look from her daughter.
“I thought seed sleep was just a myth,” L’tani said, referring to the common name for Selective Deferred Conception.
“Myth” clung because elders liked the comfort of certainty. Midwives told two stories at once: one where Seliv’kai saved a marriage from sorrow, another where it unmoored a promise by delaying truth until it arrived like a storm. T’monn had collected such stories not for folklore’s sake but because patterns, even contradictory ones, said something about the body’s patience.
“Oh, the long periods Seliv’kai lasting months and years, probably are just a myth, up to a month is not uncommon. You were conceived almost a month after T’Kain and I last had sex. The tragedy of it was that he would have never left home had I conceived within a few days. I think it was loneliness without him being around that actually triggered implantation. We had been trying to conceive for a few months after meeting. My cycle was off, and he was running shuttles to the outer stations. He so wanted to be a father and my mate that he was willing to go through the entire ritual seven times, between trips. I thought I would blow his entire nervous system.”
Memory warmed her voice. Absence had its own chemistry; longing could become a hormone, a threshold, a key. T’monn had learned that bodies kept their own calendars and lit their own lamps when the room went dark enough.
Her voice softened as the memory washed over her. The loneliness, the ache of absence, and the way hope itself could coax life into being—these things carried into her tone more than the words themselves. Seliv’kai was not myth for her; it was memory.
“Is that what I did to Matthew? Blow out his nervous system?” she said, finally removing the t-shirt too.
“In a way,” she said, looking at the progression of spots which were light except up near her ears, but had already progressed to a point below her armpit,s and interestingly were tracing her shoulder blades.
The pattern pleased the clinician in her—clean edges, predictable descent, the shoulder-blade tracing like rivers finding their beds. It also stabbed at the mother. The markings announced what L’tani had not yet said aloud: a future had arrived and claimed her skin first.
L’tani’s eyes dropped to the markings, her hands twitching as though to cover them. Pride warred with fear; each spot a map of inevitability written on her skin. She wondered if Matthew would see them as beautiful—or as a reminder of her mistake.
She imagined them darkening wholly, the line that would cross her sternum, the bloom around her hips. A map anyone could read. Part of her wanted to stand straighter, to let them shine and dare anyone to look away. Another part reached for the hoodie again, greedy for the smallness of its shadow.
“I have been studying the human fields of psychology, psychiatry, as well as their field of neurology. It is interesting how they parsed them out as separate disciplines. I have reached a small conclusion that the human brain can and often does filter out things that overpower it emotionally. When the two of you came together, it was the first time for him in many years, which I understand is a long time for men his age, especially single, attractive men of means.”
Among the V’ren, those studies would sit under one roof, one practice. To separate thought from feeling from nerve seemed to her like cutting a braid to count the strands. Still, the human habit told her something: they break the world into parts to make it bearable. Matthew’s mind had done the same, setting aside what would otherwise flood him, until the body insisted on being heard.
“I did him wrong.”
T’monn let the admission settle. Judgment from the clan would come easily; truth from a daughter never did. There was no cure for consequence, only care for the person who had to carry it.
“He doesn’t seem to think so, even if many of our people do. You will have to live with that condemnation. Mistakes have consequences, even the ones we make when we are young and inexperienced,” she said, laying a maternal hand on her daughter. “I wish I could make things easier for you, especially now that you, too, are a legally bonded pair.”
Law could hold a door open; it could not walk a heart through. The paper would say one thing, the faces another. T’monn had learned to read both.
“Then I am pregnant. How do I tell him?”
The word pregnant did not frighten her as much as the silence that might follow it. She pictured Matthew hearing it in the wrong room, with the wrong witnesses, the wrong hour hanging over him like a verdict.
“We don’t do anything until I have had time to talk with W’ren. Matthew may be our high lord by our choice, but W’ren is still Keeper of the Flame. I believe we will also wish to consult Angelina. Whether she’ll admit it or not… she’s loved our Matthew all her life.”
Keeper of the Flame was not ceremony; it was stewardship over memory and meaning. W’ren would weigh the twins’ omen, the Seliv’kai timing, the optics of announcements in a house that belonged as much to the Freehold as to any one person. Angelina, practical where others were pious, would count the people—who must be told first, who could be trusted to carry the tale without setting it on fire.
“Then you feel it too,” L’tani said flatly, eyes locked on her mother, hearing the words ‘our Matthew’ hard.
The possessive scraped. Ours. Hers. Theirs. No word felt big enough for the tangle of duty and desire that surrounded him, and yet each one left a bruise where it landed.
“I do. But I think we’ve disrupted his happiness enough for the moment, so we wait to tell him,” she said, leaning her forehead gently into her daughter’s—an ancient V’ren gesture of shared sorrow and silent grace.
Forehead to forehead was older than vows, older than courts. It meant: we will carry this until you can.
L’tani closed her eyes at the touch. The shame and fear did not leave her, but for a fleeting heartbeat, she let herself believe her mother’s strength could carry them both. Somewhere in the house lingered the scent of Matthew’s presence, absent yet overwhelming. He was not in the room, yet every word circled back to him, to the weight of what she carried, and the uncertain joy of what would come next.
The house seemed to listen with them. Floorboards held their breath; the air kept its counsel. When they parted, nothing had changed in the world outside the door, but inside the span between confession and consequence had grown just wide enough for mercy to stand in it. T’monn filed away her data, as physicians do, and made a private vow as mothers must: the timing, the telling, the tempers—she would manage them in an order that protected both daughters and did not break the man they had placed at the center of so much hope.
