Chapter 618: A Posthumous Child
It was not a complicated story. Roland listened to it and felt something he couldn’t quite name—not sympathy exactly, more the particular heaviness of watching history fold itself into a person’s life and crush them.
When Gerald Wimbledon had commanded the frontier guards, he had made his annual visits to Coldwind Ridge during each Months of Demons to support the church’s defense. In one of those stays, he had met a bar girl named Olivia in a tavern. He had fallen in love with her in the way that sometimes happened to people who had never been permitted to choose anything freely before—fast, and completely.
Given Olivia’s status, a formal marriage was never possible. Gerald could not acknowledge the relationship publicly without consequences neither of them could afford. Instead he had purchased a house in town, quietly, and made it theirs. Whether it was genuine love or something shaped by the particular loneliness of a prince who had spent his life in service to a court that regarded him as a piece in other people’s games—Roland could not be certain from the outside. But Prince Roland’s memories confirmed that Gerald had refused every offered marriage alliance, had maintained no other relationships, had generated a rumor in King’s City, persistent and apparently credible, that he preferred men. That rumor now seemed like a shield he had constructed deliberately, to protect something he couldn’t name openly.
The letter Olivia produced—encrypted, still legible—was more remarkable than anything Roland had expected. Gerald had named her his queen in writing. He had committed it to paper in a form that, had it been found, would have made King Wimbledon III’s displeasure a considerable understatement.
Then Timothy had sentenced Gerald to death.
The news reached the Northern Region, and Olivia’s life ended one shape and began another. The guards Gerald had left dissolved without warning. Her house was burgled while she was away—the thief went directly to where she kept her money, which meant the thief had been told. With no income and nowhere else to turn, she had returned to the tavern.
The owner had not forgiven her disappearance. He found his revenges in small and grinding ways.
Roland would not hold her submission against her. There was no contempt available to him for what she had endured. She was an ordinary woman without allies, without resources, facing down a man with leverage over her livelihood and her safety, doing what survival required. The burglary, the specific and convenient timing of it, the fact that whoever had been watching Gerald’s arrangements had moved the moment Gerald died—none of that was coincidence. It had been a systematic stripping of everything that might have protected her.
“What is it you need?” he asked.
He had already decided to help. Not for Gerald—a half-stranger whose political aims had made him, by Prince Roland’s reckoning, something close to an enemy. But for this woman, who had endured something large and unjust and had waited, patiently, for the right moment and the right audience, rather than surrendering the last of what she had. That kind of patient, practical courage deserved more than dismissal.
Helping her was also, in the present scale of his problems, a simple task.
“I want to leave the tavern,” Olivia said, her voice barely above conversational. “Could you find a different position for me? Any work would do.”
“The Western Region would offer you work, food, a house of your own,” Roland said. “If the tavern owner knows who you were to Gerald, he’ll find ways to keep punishing you as long as you remain within his reach.”
Olivia hesitated. “I… want to stay here, Your Majesty.”
“She’s afraid of you,” Nightingale said against his ear, nearly inaudible. “She’s at least half as striking as Edith, for all her plainness. The tavern owner sees that. She has reason to be cautious.”
Roland silently made a face. “Let’s not,” he told her, with lip language only.
To Olivia, he said: “All right. I’ll ask Duke Calvin to make arrangements at City of Evernight.” He nodded toward Sean, who had remained at the door. “It’s late. Sean will find you a room tonight.”
She dropped to her knees again. “Your Majesty’s kindness—”
“It’s late,” Roland said, with enough warmth to soften it. “Go rest.”
She rose. At the door, she paused to wrap herself in whatever composure she had left, and Roland asked, almost as an afterthought: “Did you and Gerald have any children?”
A silence so brief it almost wasn’t there. Then: “No, Your Majesty. I had no child to carry on his family name. I’m sorry.”
She left with Sean.
Nightingale stepped out of the Mist. “Her last answer was a lie.”
“I know.” Roland had felt Nightingale’s signal the moment Olivia’s voice had changed—that almost imperceptible hesitation, the odd phrasing, the apology attached to a denial. “She’s not a practiced liar. Whatever she’s protecting, she’s protecting it by instinct, not by skill.”
“The child?”
“The tavern owner knows she was Gerald’s. He would know what it would mean if Timothy—or, now, a new king—learned that Gerald had a child. The safest thing she could do for the child was deny its existence to everyone in power, including me.” He paused. “And the only reason to stay close to the Northern Region rather than accept a fresh start in the West is that she’s keeping the child near whatever few people and resources remain to her here.”
“Want me to look into it?”
Roland looked at Nightingale for a moment—the shape of the question settling in the air between them.
“You’re wondering whether I mean to bury it,” he said. “Like Timothy would have.”
She held his gaze without expression.
“I won’t harm an innocent person. Gerald’s bastard son by a commoner is not a threat to anything.” He held up a hand. “Even Duke Ryan’s family are under house arrest in Neverwinter, not in a grave. That’s already a significant departure from local tradition.”
“I’ll follow whatever orders you give,” Nightingale said carefully.
“Then the order is this.” He took her hand and set it on his shoulder. “Give me a massage. I’m tense.”
Olivia’s footsteps were quiet on the wooden floor of the immigrant cabin, but the baby heard her anyway.
The crying started before she had her boots off.
From the next room, the tavern owner’s wife’s voice came through the thin wall without delay: “Shut it up or I’ll drown it in the river myself!”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said, already moving. “I’ll quiet him right away.”
She lifted the baby, and he found what he was looking for immediately—rooting against her chest with a competence that still struck her, sometimes, as miraculous in something so small. She held him close. The crying stopped.
She let out the breath she’d been holding since the city gate.
The owner hadn’t come back yet. He spent most evenings in the local taverns now, more volatile and less predictable than he had been in Coldwind Ridge. She had used that window—had slipped out after dark, had told herself she would only go as far as the gate, had found herself standing in the castle courtyard on her knees before she’d fully decided to do it.
He believed me. She thought that was true. Or at least—he had not pressed her, not put her in the cage of a prolonged inquiry. Perhaps he hadn’t believed the denial, but he had chosen to accept it, which amounted to the same thing.
She had not told him about the baby. She could not afford to. Gerald’s younger brother was the new king of Graycastle—a man with every reason to regard the existence of a prince’s illegitimate heir as a complication, if not an outright threat to be quietly resolved. She did not know him. She only knew that kings sometimes made choices that ordinary people could not appeal.
She would not stake her child’s life on the character of a man she had met once.
In the dim light from the window, she could see the gray at the crown of the baby’s head—dark gray, silver-edged, unmistakably Wimbledon. He had it from birth, a marking as clear as a name.
Gerald had never seen him.
She pressed her lips to the baby’s head and stayed there for a moment, feeling the warmth of him, the small living weight of a person who had been made in better times and born into worse ones.
She would raise him alone. Whatever it cost her. That was already decided—had been decided since before he was born, since she had understood what was happening in King’s City and what it would mean.
He would grow up knowing who his father was.
She would make sure of it.