There were few things more humbling than trying to take notes on oogenesis while my unborn child attempted to assassinate me with the smell of someone’s maple protein bar.
I had survived Shroud assassins, court politics, Ascension, my mother’s particular brand of emotional warfare, and one very memorable incident involving a cursed bath soak and Cassie Fairborn’s murder face, but nothing in my increasingly stupid life had prepared me for the biological hate crime happening in the third row of Anatomy and Physiology II. The classroom itself was not helping. It was one of those tiered lecture halls designed by someone who believed education should come with poor lumbar support and fluorescent lighting strong enough to interrogate a corpse. Every plastic seat squeaked. Every laptop fan whined. Every pen scratch seemed to scrape directly across the inside of my skull. The projector hummed with a steady, high-pitched buzz I had been pretending not to hear for forty-two minutes, which meant I was doing extremely well, actually, and deserved a medal, a nap, and maybe a pastry that did not smell like betrayal. Unfortunately, pastries were currently illegal under the constitution of my stomach.
I pressed the back of my wrist beneath my nose and breathed through my mouth, which was always a tactical mistake because college classrooms had their own ecosystem of smells: coffee, detergent, wet backpack fabric, old paper, dust trapped in the vents, nervous sweat, cheap body spray, and the maple protein bar of doom. My glamour sat over my skin like a second sweater, muting the starlight in my eyes to green, softening my hair into autumn ginger instead of the molten mess my magic preferred, rounding the tips of my ears until I looked human enough for people who wanted to believe in human. The glamour was stable. Mostly. Pregnancy made everything more reactive, because apparently growing a person inside my body was not complicated enough without my magic deciding that nausea counted as an emotional event.
Rori sat beside me with her notebook open, posture perfect, pen moving in neat, unforgivable lines. She looked like a normal human college student if normal human college students had the body language of a palace guard, the cheekbones of a romantic tragedy, and the lethal patience of someone who had once been trained to stand between me and murder before she had technically been allowed to wear the correct dresses to dinner. Her glamour softened the parts of her that would have made people stare too long, but it could not hide everything. Not from me. I knew the angle of her shoulders when she was listening to three things at once. I knew the tiny shift of her hand toward the edge of her desk when someone behind us stood too fast. I knew the way she checked the room without moving her head, because I had spent too many years surrounded by people who watched doors like doors had personally offended them.
She was my best friend, publicly. One of the noble girls from Eversea, publicly. A normal student, allegedly. Secretly blood sworn to me, newly mated to Caelan Dawnbreak, and sitting through human reproductive biology with the kind of dignity that suggested she would rather be interrogated by my mother than admit the lecture was making her mate unbearable through whatever newly polished bond they had between them. I knew because mine was worse. Cassie had discovered she could listen if she leaned into the mating bond just enough, and because my wife was a menace wearing a pretty face and government-sanctioned human paperwork, she had been providing commentary since Professor Halloway had put up the first slide.
A diagram of the ovaries filled the screen in clean blue and pink, labeled with careful arrows, follicle stages, and enough Latin-rooted terms to make half the room slump in despair. Professor Halloway stood at the front in a cardigan with embroidered mushrooms on the sleeves, pointing to the projector with the exhausted cheer of someone who had explained meiosis to several hundred undergraduates and still believed, somehow, in hope. “So, remember,” she said, tapping the slide, “primary oocytes are arrested in prophase I before birth. During the reproductive years, hormonal signals such as follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone stimulate the maturation of selected ovarian follicles each cycle, allowing the enclosed primary oocyte to resume development.”
Cassie’s voice slid through my mind, warm and dry and entirely too amused. So you're telling me this entire lecture is about how difficult it was for us to make one baby? Because I distinctly remember us putting in a heroic amount of effort.
My pen jerked across the page, leaving a black slash through the word prophase. I coughed to cover the laugh, which came out half strangled because the maple protein bar had chosen that exact moment to intensify. Rori’s pen paused beside me. She did not look over. “Do not encourage her,” she murmured under her breath.
I bent over my notebook as if deeply invested in follicular development. “I am not encouraging anyone.”
“You made the sound.”
“I have many sounds. Some of them are medical.”
Rori’s mouth twitched. She kept her eyes forward, but I could see the fight happening at the corner of her lips. “Caelan would like me to inform you that Cassie’s joke was biologically imprecise.”
I stared at her. “Caelan is listening too?”
“He says he is not listening. He says he is maintaining perimeter awareness and occasionally receiving educational spillover through proximity to his mate.”
Cassie laughed in my head, bright and wicked. Educational spillover. Please tell Lord Dawn-and-Decorum that if he is going to eavesdrop on a reproductive biology lecture, he has to own it like a man.
I lowered my head until my hair fell forward enough to hide my face. The movement tugged at the braid Cassie had done for me that morning, because apparently my wife had decided braiding my hair was a sacred marital right and not simply an excuse to touch me before breakfast. The pressure of it grounded me, one of those small, familiar things my nervous system recognized before my pride had time to file a complaint.
A month had passed since everything had fallen apart. A month since my mother had slipped into a healing sleep no one could wake her from, a month of councils, healers, reports, reassurances, and carefully controlled panic, a month of my father campaigning across Dominveil while pretending his family was not balancing on the edge of several different disasters, and a month of Starveil growing steadily louder whenever I stepped into it, as though the court had mistaken my refusal to think about certain things for an invitation to keep trying. And through all of it, classes had continued. Assignments still had deadlines. Labs still started at eight in the morning. Professors still expected papers on time. Human biology remained stubbornly unconcerned with royal succession crises, comatose queens, or ancient magical courts. Most days, I was grateful for that.
I rolled the seam of my sleeve between thumb and forefinger, three beats, pause, three beats again. My hand drifted briefly to my abdomen. Three months now. Not enough to show much beneath my glamour and carefully chosen clothes, but enough that the reality of it had settled into my life in a way it hadn't at first. The nausea was less constant than it had been a few weeks ago, though still capable of ambushing me without warning. My clothes fit differently. My energy came and went according to rules known only to whatever cosmic force enjoyed making pregnant women cry over grocery store commercials.
Sometimes it still felt unreal. Then Cassie would rest her hand over my stomach while we were falling asleep, or I'd catch myself planning around doctor's appointments and prenatal vitamins, and reality would quietly reassert itself. The baby was coming whether the rest of the world got its act together or not. Not now, tiny traitor. We are learning about your origin story.
Cassie went very quiet for one soft second, and even though she had been teasing me from outside the lecture hall like an absolute menace, I felt her attention turn tender at the edges. Our origin story was much more dramatic, firefly.
Heat climbed my neck. That nickname still did things to me, which was humiliating because I was an Ascended fae queen, a biology and history double major, future unwilling economics student, current pregnant disaster, and apparently still capable of being melted by my wife thinking one word with enough affection.
Professor Halloway changed slides. “Now, let’s compare that with spermatogenesis, which begins at puberty and continues throughout life, though efficiency and genetic quality can decline with age.”
Cassie made a thoughtful sound through the bond. So eggs are limited edition, sperm are mass-produced with quality control issues. That explains a lot about men.
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard my eyes watered. Rori’s shoulders shook once. Professor Halloway looked up. “Something amusing, Miss Quinveil?”
Every head in the lecture hall turned toward me because, of course, it did. That was the problem with being the publicly known princess of a supposedly tiny island nation that everyone now pretended had not mysteriously emerged from international obscurity right when my life exploded. People noticed me. They noticed my ring, even glamoured down into something that looked like a tasteful silver wedding band instead of a consort bond and a political declaration. They noticed Rori beside me, because she was tall and elegant and noble in a way glamour could file down but never erase. They noticed the two very serious people always outside whatever building I entered, even though Cassie dressed like she was simply waiting for her wife and Caelan looked like he had been carved out of polite violence.
I lifted my chin, forcing my face into the polite student expression that said I respected higher education and definitely had not been laughing because my wife had just insulted sperm. “Sorry, Professor,” I said. “Pregnancy nausea. I was trying not to make it everyone else’s problem.”
The room shifted. It was subtle, but I felt it. A softening. A ripple of sympathy, curiosity, discomfort, and the specific awkwardness people got when they remembered I was twenty, married, pregnant, royal-adjacent, and still sitting in a college classroom trying to color-code endocrine pathways. My life made people’s brains jam. I could not blame them. Mine jammed too.
Professor Halloway’s expression softened. “Do you need to step out?”
“No, thank you. I’m okay.” This was not entirely true, but it was true enough to avoid standing, which was the current goal of my entire political administration.
Cassie’s presence sharpened instantly, all humor gone. Do you need me?
I’m fine.
Firefly.
I am fine, I thought back, letting a little warmth thread through the bond so she could feel it was not a lie. Mostly. Someone has a protein bar that smells like a cursed pancake.
There was a pause. Then Cassie said, with deadly seriousness, Point them out.
No.
I will remove it humanely.
You will commit a felony in A&P.
A misdemeanor at most.
Rori made another small sound that could maybe pass for a cough if everyone around us had never met laughter before. I elbowed her lightly, which was a mistake because the motion shifted my stomach and the baby or nausea or both objected. A cold wash of saliva flooded my mouth, and for one alarming second the entire classroom tilted in a way classrooms should not do unless they were built in Starveil, which this one was absolutely not.
Rori noticed before I could hide it. Her hand moved under the desk, palm up, not touching me until I chose it. That was one of the things I loved about her. Guard, friend, oath-bound noble girl pretending to be human, she understood that sometimes help felt like being trapped unless it came with an exit. I put two fingers against her palm. Three beats. Pause. Three beats. Her hand closed gently around mine.
Cassie felt the shift anyway, because mating bonds were invasive little traitors when your wife had excellent instincts and the emotional subtlety of a thrown dagger. Mira.
Don’t come in here, I warned.
I am not coming in there.
You are standing up.
I heard the smile in her silence, which meant she had absolutely been standing up. Cassandra.
She did not answer immediately. Then, from the bond, prim and innocent as a knife wearing lace: I sat back down.
Liar.
Only emotionally.
I breathed through the wave until it passed. Professor Halloway had turned back to the screen, probably giving me the mercy of not staring. The slide now showed the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, a neat cascade of hormones rendered in arrows and boxes. GnRH, LH, FSH, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, inhibin. My actual body was apparently taking this as a personal challenge, because the word progesterone made me think of fatigue, swollen breasts, food aversions, mood swings, and the way I had cried yesterday because Cassie had peeled an orange for me and left the little white strings on it after I had told her last week I liked the little white strings. I had then cried harder because she remembered I liked them, which had made her very still and very soft, which had made me want to both kiss her and throw the orange into the sea. Pregnancy was stupid. Miraculous, yes. Emotionally huge, obviously. Sacred, if I was being poetic and had not recently thrown up because a toothpaste commercial described mint too aggressively. But also stupid.
Rori slid a small packet of plain crackers onto my desk without looking at me. I looked at the crackers, then at her profile. “How did you know?”
“You made the face.”
“I have many faces.”
“That one means you are deciding whether survival is worth the indignity.”
Cassie hummed through the bond. Accurate.
I opened the crackers under the desk, trying to be stealthy, which was ridiculous because I was a pregnant princess in the third row of reproductive biology and stealth had left the building sometime around the announcement that Elias Quinveil was running for president. My father’s face had been on every screen in the city for a month, smiling that calm, handsome politician smile while the entire human-facing side of Dominveil decided whether it trusted him enough to hand him executive power. He stood at podiums and talked about transparency, infrastructure, social equity, education, and the future of a city that had no idea how many monsters were already embedded in its bones.
My dad was running for president. My mother was a queen in a coma. My wife was outside mentally heckling gamete production. My best friend’s mate was apparently fact-checking the heckling. I was sitting in class trying to remember which hormone triggered ovulation while the court beneath my feet, not literally beneath my feet right now but close enough in the magical sense, kept growing like a second heartbeat I had not authorized. Normal. So normal. Extremely normal college experience.
Professor Halloway clicked to the next slide. “Ovulation occurs after the LH surge. The follicle ruptures, releasing the secondary oocyte. The remaining follicular cells form the corpus luteum, which secretes progesterone to help maintain the uterine lining.”
Cassie sighed in my head. Corpus luteum sounds like the name of a mediocre indie band that plays too many songs about their exes.
This time, the laugh came out before I could stop it. Rori folded forward over her notes, braid slipping over her shoulder as she pretended to examine a diagram. “Caelan says he cannot support that assessment because it is etymologically unfair.”
I whispered, “Tell Caelan I am naming my next political enemy Corpus Luteum.”
Rori’s mouth curved. “He says that would be a waste of a perfectly functional endocrine structure.”
Cassie’s laughter burst through me hard enough that my glamour warmed at the edges. I clamped down on it immediately, pressing my hand over my stomach as if the baby had kicked, which was plausible and socially acceptable and much better than the truth, which was that my wife had made me almost glow in a lecture hall full of humans.
Professor Halloway glanced at us again. “Miss Ashvane?”
Rori straightened with the lethal grace of someone who had never been unprepared in her life, even while receiving mental commentary from a Dawn noble outside the building. “Sorry, Professor. We were clarifying the hormonal function of the corpus luteum.”
Professor Halloway looked at her for a long second, then nodded slowly. “All right. Then perhaps you can tell the class what happens to the corpus luteum if fertilization does not occur.”
Rori did not even blink. “It degenerates into the corpus albicans, causing progesterone and estrogen levels to drop, which leads to menstruation.”
Professor Halloway smiled. “Correct.”
Caelan sounded insufferably proud even through Rori’s wince. Well done, my storm.
Rori’s cheeks colored. It was subtle, but I was right there, and I had eyes. More importantly, because Rori and I were blood sworn and our magic remained partially linked even after her mating bond formed, I caught the emotional echo and surface impression Caelan had sent through their bond. Not his actual voice, not every private thought, but enough to know exactly what he had called her, which meant I was emotionally obligated to be annoying about it. I leaned closer, pretending to copy her notes. “My storm?”
“Do not.”
“Oh, I absolutely will.”
“Mira.”
“My storm,” I whispered, and then had to press my sleeve against my mouth because she looked like she was going to murder me with a mechanical pencil.
Cassie purred, delighted. I like him more now.
You like him because he gives you material.
Obviously.
Professor Halloway continued, unaware that the third row was being haunted by two mentally present spouses with no respect for academic dignity. “If fertilization does occur, the developing embryo produces human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, which maintains the corpus luteum during early pregnancy until the placenta can take over hormone production.”
I looked down at my notes, where I had written hCG in very neat letters and then underlined it three times because it had personally ruined my relationship with breakfast.
Cassie’s voice softened. That one’s the culprit, right?
One of them.
Want me to threaten it?
It is a hormone.
I have threatened worse.
I smiled before I could stop myself, small and stupid and probably very visible. I rested one hand low on my abdomen, over the slight curve that no glamour could hide from me even if it softened what the world saw. There were mornings I still woke up and forgot for half a breath. Then my body reminded me. Nausea. Tenderness. Exhaustion. Hunger that appeared out of nowhere and vanished the second food had the audacity to exist. The strange weight of being inhabited by a future I had not fully learned how to imagine.
Cassie went quiet with me. The bond between us warmed, not with heat exactly, but with presence. With her outside the lecture hall, probably leaning against the wall in sunglasses like the world’s most beautiful security threat, pretending she was not listening to every word and every breath. I love you, she said, simple and private and devastating.
My throat tightened. I looked back at the slide because if I looked down too long, I was going to cry over hCG in public, and that felt like a line even my life should not cross. Love you too.
Rori’s hand brushed my sleeve beneath the desk. Not a question. A reminder. I was here. She was here. We were two normal human girls in a college classroom, if normal human girls had blood oaths, mating bonds, glamour maintenance issues, and geopolitical consequences.
Professor Halloway turned from the screen. “Pregnancy is often treated culturally as a passive condition, but physiologically it is one of the most complex active processes the body can sustain. The maternal body adapts cardiovascularly, hormonally, metabolically, immunologically, and structurally. These changes are normal, but normal does not mean minor.”
I stopped breathing for a second. Normal does not mean minor. Well. That was rude. My body had been trying to tell me that for weeks, but apparently I needed a PowerPoint slide and a woman in a mushroom cardigan to make it sound official. I wrote the sentence in my notebook. Normal does not mean minor. Then I stared at it until the words blurred slightly.
Because that was the thing, wasn’t it? Everyone kept trying to make me normal now in the strangest ways. Normal college student. Normal political daughter. Normal wife. Normal pregnant woman. Normal princess from Eversea, whatever the hell that meant. Normal ruler of Starveil. Normal queen of the Small Folk. Normal future problem for Summer, because my mother was still unconscious and the land that had once answered her no longer felt like hers whenever I stepped into it. Starveil was mine. Not in the way a title was mine. Not in the way Emberhall had assigned me things as punishment dressed up as inheritance. Mine like breath. Mine like pulse. Mine like something beneath the soil had opened one enormous eye and decided I was not leaving.
And Summer? I did not want to think about Summer. Naturally, my brain thought about Summer. My mother lay in a healer’s bed, unmoving, silent, still too beautiful in the cruel way fae queens were beautiful even when magic and grief had hollowed the room around them. Seara Firebrand was not dead. She was not awake either. The court was trying very hard to pretend those were meaningfully different political states. Selene held herself together so perfectly it made my chest ache. Tharion had become even more like stone, which was impressive because I had not known stone could double down. I had a sleeping magical city under my feet when I was home, one that seemed to grow stranger every time I stepped into it, a father running for president in the human world, a baby in my body, a wife outside the lecture hall ready to bite someone over nausea, and an entire kingdom looking at me like I was supposed to know what came next.
Absolutely not. I underlined hCG again like that would solve monarchy.
Rori nudged me with her knee. “You left.”
I blinked. “I am literally sitting right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I was thinking about endocrine function.”
“You were thinking so loudly I could hear it without a bond.”
That was unfair, probably accurate, and extremely offensive. I looked at her notes because hers were better. “I was thinking I might need to take economics.”
Rori’s brows rose. “That was where your mind went during placental hormone production?”
“I am a layered person.”
“You are panicking about governance.”
“I am multitasking.”
Cassie slid back into the bond with immediate interest. Are we panicking about governance again? Should I get snacks?
No one is panicking.
Firefly.
Fine, I am academically concerned about fiscal policy.
Cassie’s amusement returned, gentler this time. Sexy.
I nearly dropped my pen.
Rori sighed beside me. “Caelan says court finance is a valid concern but perhaps not during the hCG slide.”
“Tell Caelan he is no longer invited to my academic breakdown.”
“He says he regrets nothing.”
“Of course he doesn’t. He’s engaged to you. His judgment is clearly compromised.”
Rori’s cheeks colored again, and this time she looked down fast enough that the movement was almost human. Almost. I smiled into my notebook, shamelessly pleased with myself.
Professor Halloway moved on to a diagram of implantation, decidualization, and early placental development. The maple protein bar finally disappeared into whoever’s backpack or stomach had birthed it into my personal hell, and I could breathe through my nose again without wanting to renounce embodiment. The room settled into the familiar rhythm of lecture: slide, explanation, scribbling, someone tapping a pencil, someone else whispering for the Wi-Fi password despite the password being written on the board, Rori’s pen moving with surgical precision, my own notes turning slowly into a mix of biology, panic, and small doodled flames in the margins. By the time Professor Halloway started discussing hormonal feedback loops, I had almost achieved the illusion of being a student and not a walking succession crisis. Almost. Then Cassie said, very thoughtfully, So when the placenta takes over hormone production, does that make it a temporary endocrine coup?
I stared at the screen. Rori made a choked sound. Caelan, apparently, gave up on dignity entirely because Rori pressed her lips together and bent over her notebook like she had been stabbed. I covered my face with one hand. “I hate all of you,” I whispered.
Cassie’s delight wrapped around me like sunlight over a blade. No, you don’t.
No. I didn’t. That was the worst part. I sat there in my uncomfortable lecture hall seat, pregnant, nauseous, glamoured, watched, loved, bonded, politically doomed, and trying very hard to memorize the endocrine timeline of early pregnancy while my wife and Rori’s mate heckled reproduction from outside the room. My mother was still asleep. My father was trying to become president. Starveil waited for me to understand what it had already decided. Summer hovered at the edge of my life like a crown with teeth. The Shroud had gone quiet, which meant it was hiding. The Silent Council existed somewhere beyond the edges of what I understood, ancient and patient and probably laughing.
But for this one hour, my biggest problem was not crying over a lecture slide, not throwing up from maple, not laughing out loud because Cassie had opinions about reproductive anatomy, and not letting my glamour shimmer every time the baby moved. For this one hour, I was a normal college sophomore trying to pass A&P. Mostly.
Professor Halloway clicked to the next slide. “All right, let’s talk about labor.”
Cassie went perfectly, dangerously silent. Rori and I looked at each other at the exact same time. “Oh no,” I whispered. Outside the lecture hall, through the bond, my wife said with absolute conviction, I am listening respectfully. I put my head in my hands.
Rori’s shoulders shook beside me, silent and helpless, and for a moment we were not princesses, guards, wives, mates, heirs, queens, or problems waiting to become wars. We were two girls in a biology class trying not to laugh at the worst possible time. Normal did not mean minor. But gods, sometimes normal was funny.