Chapter 196 - 195: The Princess Who has Rebelled against her own Brother

The war had turned uglier than anyone anticipated. What began as a border dispute along Zhipher’s eastern edge had metastasized into something far more dangerous once word spread that Princess Penelope, the king’s own sister, had herself been behind the invading force, and that she had taken the support of Seraphine for snatching the throne for herself..

It was, by every account reaching the capital, a civil war wearing the mask of a foreign conflict, and it demanded far more than the modest force originally dispatched. Alastor rode out within days of Caelestis and Hael’s departure, shedding the last of his ceremonial hesitation the moment his mother’s words had taken root, no longer content to wait quietly for a throne that might not survive intact if he didn’t fight for it directly.

The capital settled into the strange, suspended rhythm that always followed men to war, markets a little quieter, prayers said a little more often, the war office’s public postings drawing small, anxious crowds each morning as families searched for any scrap of news about the units their sons and husbands had been assigned to.

Eleanore found herself among them more than once, though Caelestis’s rank meant his movements were rarely posted publicly, leaving her to rely instead on the far slower, far more precious channel of letters.

Letters came slowly, weeks apart, censored and vague about actual troop movements for security reasons, but enough to confirm that all three men were alive, exhausted, and increasingly hardened by whatever they were facing on the front lines.

Eleanore read Caelestis’s letters until the ink blurred from handling, memorizing every line as if the paper itself might somehow carry him closer to home. She kept them bundled together with a faded ribbon in the drawer of her writing desk, rereading the earliest ones on nights when the newer ones were slow to arrive, simply to feel closer to him in the interim.

"My dearest Eleanore," one read, "the eastern camp is cold and considerably less comfortable than I remember, though I suspect memory is kind of things that were never actually pleasant to begin with. Hael snores loudly enough to be heard three tents over, which the men have taken to blaming on enemy drums whenever it wakes them.

I think of you constantly. I think of the house, and the quiet mornings we’ve only just begun to have, and I hold onto both like something worth fighting my way back to. Write to me when you can. Even news of nothing at all would be a comfort right now."

She wrote back faithfully, filling her own letters with small, deliberately mundane details, Marina’s latest complaint about the kitchen staff, Stella’s growing insistence on redecorating the nursery twice over, the particular stubbornness of a rosebush in the garden that refused to bloom no matter how carefully it was tended, anything to give him something ordinary to hold onto amid whatever he was actually facing.

It was nearing a month since he’d left when Eleanore first noticed something was wrong.

It started subtly, a persistent tiredness that no amount of sleep seemed to fix, a faint nausea some mornings that she initially blamed on stress and poor eating habits during his absence. She dismissed it at first as simple worry manifesting physically, the way grief or fear sometimes did, and pushed through her days with the same determined composure she’d maintained since the day the carriage had disappeared down the drive.

But when the fatigue deepened and her stomach turned at smells that had never bothered her before, the particular sharpness of the kitchen’s morning coffee, the floral perfume one of the maids favored, she finally allowed herself to consider the possibility that had been quietly nagging at the back of her mind for days.

She went to Stella first, finding her in the small sitting room she’d taken to resting in more often now that her own pregnancy had begun to visibly.

"You look worse than how I felt about six weeks ago," Stella said the moment Eleanore sat down, studying her with a knowing, assessing eye.

"I don’t know what’s wrong with me," Eleanore admitted. "I’m exhausted constantly. Certain smells make me want to be sick. My cycle’s been off for weeks, but I assumed it was stress, given everything with Caelestis being gone."

Stella’s expression softened into something between delight and gentle amusement. "Eleanore. When was the last time you actually bled?"

Eleanore paused, mentally counting back, and felt something in her chest go very still as the timeline settled into place. "Before he left," she said slowly. "It should have come twice since then."

"I think," Stella said carefully, reaching over to take her hand, "that you might have a little something in you responsible for this fatigue."

"You think I’m—" Eleanore couldn’t quite finish the sentence, the possibility too large and sudden to fully hold.

"I think you should see the physician properly, but yes. Given everything you just described, I’d wager quite a lot on it." Stella’s smile widened, genuine warmth breaking through. "Which would mean our children will be born only a few months apart."

The physician confirmed it two days later, her manner brisk and professionally unsurprised in a way that somehow made the news feel both more real and more absurd all at once. Eleanore sitting stiffly on the edge of her own bed while the woman listed dates and instructions with the same even tone she likely used for every patient, entirely unaware of the small earthquake her words had just set off.

Eleanore sat with that for a long moment, a strange, overwhelming mixture of emotions rising all at once joy, disbelief, and beneath it all, a sharp, aching grief that the one person she most wanted to share this with was somewhere on a battlefield she couldn’t reach, with no way of knowing if he’d even make it home to meet the child they’d only just begun discussing weeks earlier.

"He doesn’t know," Eleanore said quietly. "I can’t even tell him. Letters take weeks to reach the front, if they reach him at all with the lines as unstable as they are."