Morgan was as good as his word. By midmorning, the common room below had become a place of quiet industry. There was no hesitation when Morgan spoke, no bargaining born of doubt. People listened, nodded, and moved. An extra cloak appeared for Lain, heavier than the one she wore, lined against wind and damp. Food was packed with care – real meals, not scraps meant to stretch too far. A cart was offered for the first day’s travel, so she would not need to walk until her legs quavered.

  When Morgan offered promissory notes, they waved him off with a mixture of fondness and practicality.

  “You’ll pay us back,” said the cobbler, who returned his boots to him with a mirror-polish. “You always do.”

  He smiled at that, something warm and genuine. “Then consider this an investment.”

  When they finally stepped back out into the daylight, supplies secured and plans made, Morgan paused beside her, hand resting at the small of her back.

  “We’ll go slowly,” he said. “We’ll stop when you’re tired. And if the road needs to wait for us, it will.”

  Lain leaned into him, the bond between them steady, but beneath that came all her doubt, long and lingering.

  They had gone only a few miles beyond the village when the ground lurched. It was a deep, rolling convulsion that passed through the earth like a muscle seizing under skin. The cart jolted hard enough that Lain cried out, her hands flying to the rail as the wheels skidded sideways down the narrow path.

  Morgan turned at once. “Lain –”

  The second tremor cut him off.

  The path buckled. Stone sloughed downhill in a sudden sliding rush. The horse screamed, rearing as the cart pitched, its load shifting violently. The driver shouted. Lain felt herself lifted, weightless for a sickening instant, then thrown.

  She hit the ground hard and rolled, the breath knocked from her chest in a white-hot burst. Her shoulder struck stone and her hip followed. She tasted dirt and heard the splintering crack as the cart’s axle gave way and the whole thing slid off the path in a grinding avalanche of wood and shouting and terrified animal.

  “Morgan!” she tried to call, but the earth heaved again and swallowed the sound.

  She lay there, stunned, the world pitching around her, the sky swinging wildly in and out of view as the ground rippled beneath her like water under wind. The immediate heat of panic flared in her, sharpened by the fragile life she now carried, the sudden absence of Morgan at her side.

  And pressed to the earth as she was, she felt a vast, blinding terror coming up from the soles of her hooves. It moved beneath the land, something ancient and powerful waking in chaos, thrashing in alarm.

  Lain rolled onto her side and pushed herself upright, tail lashing. She ignored the ache screaming through her shoulder. Her bell was already in her hand. She rang it once.

  The sound was thin at first, barely carrying over the roar of stone and the shriek of the horse below the path. She rang it again, harder this time, pouring herself into the motion, into the note, into a space beneath sound, and sang.

  Settle slow, you wild friend

  Soothe the earth and let fear end.

  Hide your snout inside the ground

  Close your eyes, and make no sound.

  The answer came. It was a vast presence coiled too tight, pressed on all sides by shifting stone, confused and terrified by the sudden absence where something immense had once held the world steady. The Underveins had moved, their balance undone, and the wyrm did not know why. It only know that the ground was wrong, that its place in the Underveins had abandoned it.

  “I know,” she whispered aloud, the bell trembling in her grip. “I know. You’re not alone.”

  She tried again, ringing the bell, offering rhythm where there had been none. She grounded herself, pressed her palm to the earth, let the wyrm feel her weight and presence and the simple fact of her living body above it.

  The ground continued to shudder, stones skittering down the slope, dust rising in choking clouds. But the violence lessened, the wild thrashing easing into an uncertain tremor, like a creature settling after a nightmare.

  You’re safe, she told it, though her own heart hammered wildly. You’re safe. Be still.

  The bell rang a final time, then fell silent

  The earth stilled, though not entirely. There was a low, uneasy hum underneath it, a sense of strain that had not been there before. But the shaking ceased, and with it the immediate terror.

  Lain sagged where she knelt, her hand still pressed to the dirt, gasping. She became aware of the pain in her shoulder again. She tried to stand and nearly went down.

  “Lain.”

  Morgan’s voice cut through the haze, fretful. He ran toward her from up the path, his coat torn, one sleeve dark with dust and blood. He dropped to his knees beside her, hands hovering, not daring to touch until he knew where.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She sheathed her bell once more.

  He caught her, one arm firm around her back, the other braced against her hip, grounding her against him as though afraid the earth might try to steal her again. The bond flared with his terror, his relief, his anger at the ground.

  “What did you do?” he demanded hoarsely, then stopped, closing his eyes as understanding rushed through him. “You rang the bell. It was a wyrm.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was frightened.”

  He pulled back to search her face, his hands sliding lower, careful and urgent as they came to rest over her belly.

  “Are you –”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated. “I think we both are.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing hard, and for a moment neither of them spoke, the silence filled with the eerie settling of where things had moved.

  Behind them, the earth had opened.

  Lain gasped, stood, went toward it –

  “No,” Morgan said, turning her with one swift arm over her shoulder. “You don’t want to see.”

  “But the driver – the horse –”

  “Buried,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  Lain gasped, then saw the contents of the cart half-visible down the slope, scattered like offerings before the freshly drawn seam in the earth.

  Morgan went to collect what might be usable, insisting that Lain remained where she was.

  Ahead of them, the road waited, no longer steady, but still the only way forward. Morgan worked with brutal efficiency, hauling packs up the slope, cutting loose what had been trapped beneath splintered wood, checking twice that nothing living remained pinned where the earth had folded over it. Lain sat where he left her, back against a boulder, her arms wrapped around herself.

  She watched every pebble that shifted under Morgan’s boots. The bond carried his focus and his anger, but beneath that she could feel his fear now too, tight and watchful, mirroring her own.

  When he finally came back to her, he crouched instead of standing ,bringing himself low again and searching her face.

  “The Underveins moved,” she said.

  He stilled. “And that frightened a wyrm.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was steady, but only because she forced it to be. “It wasn’t just the quake. It was like everything shifted to fill the space.”

  “The wyrm you soothed –”

  “Was afraid,” she finished. “Afraid of losing its place. I don’t know if it can stay where it is. If the Underveins keep moving like this, it might migrate. They follow pressure, don’t they? Balance.”

  Morgan’s gaze drifted briefly to the broken land behind them, the raw seam in the earth still smoking faintly with dust. “Many of them cannot survive real travel,” he said. “Once they find a place in the earth, they remain there. The Underveins grow to meet them, not the other way around. Perhaps this wyrm will attempt to move, and follow the veins; but more often, the wyrm will simply die of starvation.”

  Lain blinked at this. She imagined being trapped beneath the earth, normally drinking her fill of some great power source that flowed beneath her, finding that power source gone. How long would it take for a creature like that to die?

  He helped Lain to her feet, and they walked the rest of the day. Morgan let her stop when she needed to, let her listen with her palm to the ground, let her stand motionless for long moments when the world felt too loud beneath her hooves. By the time the next village came into view, she was running on something thinner than resolve.

  The village sat along a river bend, modest and worn, its stone houses crouched low against the bank. Smoke rose from chimneys in the damp chill of early spring. People moved about their business. From a distance it looked untouched, almost peaceful, and the sight of it made her knees buckle.

  Morgan caught her before she fell.

  “That’s enough,” he said, and this time there was no mistaking the finality in his voice.

  She leaned into him, too tired to protest, her head resting briefly against his chest. The bond signaled his concern, his calculation already turning toward beds and food and safety. She could barely keep her eyes open.

  He got them into the village with quiet words and a familiarity that soothed her. A room was found. Water was brought. Someone passed bread into her hands that she could not bring herself to eat.

  When she finally lay down, the bed felt unreal beneath her, too soft, too still after the tremor of the road. Morgan sat beside her, his hand warm and solid over hers, anchoring her to something she could trust.

  “The Underveins won’t break tonight,” he said, as much for himself as for her. “We still have time.”

  She nodded, though sleep was already dragging her under. As her eyes closed, one last unwelcome thought surfaced: the wyrm she had soothed would remember her now. It would know her voice. And if it moved, if it followed the sifting veins of the world, she suspected it would not move blindly. It would listen.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Lain woke late with the sun already high and the feeling that the day had happened without her. Light leaked through the inn’s narrow window in a thin band, pale and sea-washed, cutting across the floorboards and the hem of the coverlet. The room smelled faintly of salt and boiled oats. Somewhere below, a door opened and shut, and a man’s laughter rose and fell.

  Morgan was sitting in the chair by the window with his coat on, one boot braced against the rung, elbows on his knees. He wasn’t moving much, but the bond was alive with him: a coiled impatience, contained and watchful, like a hound held by the scruff. He was waiting for her to wake, and yet his hands were loose, his shoulders not squared for command.

  Lain swallowed, her mouth dry. Her stomach rolled, slow and ugly, and she pressed her palm to her belly as if she could steady herself. Under her hand there was that new, unfamiliar density, her body changed in a way she couldn’t un-know.

  Morgan’s head lifted at the small sound.

  “You’re awake,” he said softly, as if it mattered enough to keep his voice from startling her.

  Lain propped herself up on one elbow. The motion made pain bloom in her shoulder where she’d landed after being thrown from the cart, and she hissed through her teeth before she could help it.

  He was on his feet before the sound finished leaving her throat, crossing the space in three steps. Then he stopped himself a pace away, hands hovering, the restraint in him almost visible.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “My shoulder,” she said. “And my hip. And everything else, if you’d like a complete accounting.”

  A flicker of a smile tried to find his mouth, but it couldn’t settle. The worry underneath it was too constant.

  He reached for the pitcher on the table instead, pouring into the cup. She took it and drank too fast, water spilling down her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her wrist, embarrassed in a childish way, and hated herself for that too.

  “Slowly,” he said, and in the bond there was something almost… tenderly amused, quickly smothered.

  Lain set the cup down, breathing through the nausea. “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Long enough,” he said. He glanced toward the door as if he could see through it. “I found someone. A midwife.”

  She stared at him, surprised.

  “She’s worked with Kelthi before,” he added quickly. “Sailor’s wives, mostly. There are women who come in from the northern coast to trade. A few have… your kind of legs.”

  The phrase was clumsy, and he knew it; she felt his regret for it as soon as it formed.

  “A midwife,” Lain repeated, tasting the word. It felt strange in her mouth. The Dagorlind had never used it. There were no midwives for the Sisters because there were none that bore children. Or if they did, they must have been secreted away somewhere. Lain realized suddenly that this was most likely. The Dagorlind were nothing if not keepers of dark secrets.

  “Yes,” Morgan said, and his certainty pushed gently at her through the bond, asking her to take it. “She’ll tell us what you need, what the child needs. I can’t guess at it and I won’t pretend I can.”

  Lain drew the coverlet higher without thinking, as though modesty mattered. “When?”

  “Now,” he said. “After you eat.”

  His eyes flicked to the small tray on the table: bread, a bit of cheese, a bowl of oats gone cool but still smelling faintly of honey.

  “I told them you’d woken sick,” he said. “They brought what they had.”

  Lain’s throat tightened. She hadn’t expected anyone to feed her without being asked. She hadn’t expected Morgan to be the one who asked.

  She pushed herself upright, more slowly this time. Morgan’s attention tracked her every movement, not hovering over her like a threat, but like a man trying to memorize where she hurt so he could take the pain into his own hands and crush it.

  “You’re going to ruin your own nerves,” she said.

  “I can’t ruin what’s already been ruined.”

  Lain let out a small laugh, then reached for the bread. The first bite tasted like dust. The second stayed down. By the third, her body remembered hunger and reached greedily for it. She ate gracelessly. When she finished, Morgan rose again, moving with that purposeful economy he had when forcing himself to slow down.

  Lain swung her legs to the side of the bed. The floor was cold under her hooves, the sensation bracing and fresh. She stood, wobbled, steadied. Morgan’s hand hovered near her elbow. It didn’t close until she leaned, just slightly, toward him. Then his palm settled, warm and firm, steadying without claiming.

  They moved through the inn quietly, down the stairs and into the early afternoon. The wind pushed at washing lines, the salt air so sharp it made her eyes water. People looked up as Morgan passed. They greeted him as though he belonged to them. He returned their nods, their brief touches to his arm, his shoulder. His name moved through their mouths without fear.

  And when they glanced at Lain, there was curiosity, and a careful awe that made her skin prickle, but there was no immediate disgust. No one flinched, or shouted scripture. They just seemed to take in what was strange, and tried to decide how be kind around it.

  Morgan kept his hand at the small of her back as they walked. She wanted to shrug it off out of instinct, but she didn’t.

  The midwife’s house sat on the edge of the bowl of fields, stone walls wrapped in creeping vine that had no business being that green this early. A pot hung from a hook by the door, steaming. The smell of it made Lain’s stomach fold over itself.

  Morgan stopped, turning his head toward her, and she felt his instinct to ask if she was alright.

  “I’m fine,” she said before he could. “Just… get me inside before I throw up on your boots.”

  His mouth twitched. “That would be a tragedy.”

  Morgan knocked. The woman who answered was older than Lain had expected, late fifties, perhaps, her hair gray and braided back, her eyes the clear hard blue of coastal stone. She looked from Morgan to Lain and didn’t bother with polite surprise.

  “You’re the Bellborn,” she said.

  Lain went very still.

  Morgan’s hand tightened at her back, a warning not to bolt. His own posture shifted, gentle but ready, as though he’d put himself between Lain and any sharpness.

  “Yes,” Lain said.

  The woman nodded, as if that solved something. “Come in. You’re pale.”

  Inside, the house was warm. Herbs hung in bunches over the beams, dark and fragrant. A kettle hissed softly over the hearth. The air felt like it had been steeped in leaves.

  “I’m Brigid,” the midwife said, and gestured toward a bench near the fire. “Sit. You can stand there if you like,” she added to Morgan, in the same tone one might use to address a dog that had come in muddy.

  Morgan’s eyebrows lifted. That was the only protest he offered. He stayed close enough that Lain could feel him, but he did not press into her space.

  Brigid washed her hands in a basin, dried them on a cloth, then came to stand in front of Lain.

  “How far along?”

  Lain opened her mouth and realized she didn’t know. How long had it been since Vaelun? Since she’d chosen? And how long after that had she bonded with Morgan? Time had gone strange, stretched and snapped by travel, by fear, by the collapse of Morgan’s laboratory and the flight of the Dóthain.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, and the shame rose quick and hot.

  Brigid sighed. “Of course you don’t. You were probably never allowed to know your own body.” She reached for Lain’s wrist, two fingers pressing lightly against the pulse there, then her hand moved to Lain’s temple, briefly. “Any fainting? Bleeding?”

  “Fainting, yes. Once.”

  Brigid’s brow creased with worry. “Vomiting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Constant?”

  “Most mornings,” Lain said, and tried to make it sound like a complaint rather than an admission of weakness.

  Brigid hummed. “And you.” Her gaze flicked to Morgan without turning her head. “You’re feeding her?”

  “Morgan’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”

  Brigid turned fully, giving him the kind of look that measured whether a man had ever been useful for anything besides trouble. “Then you must do better. Kelthi carry hot. They burn through stores fast. Five months is what you get if you’re lucky. Shorter if she’s been starving.”

  Lain felt Morgan’s shock, raw in the bond. Five months must have surprised him as much as it surprised her.

  Brigid’s hands came to rest against Lain’s belly with practiced care, palms warm through the fabric of the shift. Lain’s body tensed on instinct.

  “It’s alright,” Brigid said, not soothing, but very certain. “Breathe.”

  Lain forced herself to let the breath go.

  The midwife pressed, listened with her hands in a way that made Lain’s skin prickle, then nodded to herself.

  “There,” Brigid said quietly, and Lain’s throat tightened and her eyes burned.

  Morgan stepped forward one pace without thinking. Brigid held up a hand and he stopped, caught by it.

  “Don’t crowd her,” she said, then looked back at Lain. “It’s early. But it’s there. Your belly feels right for it. Hard in the way it should be.”

  Lain breathed like she’d been punched.

  Brigid moved away to a shelf, pulling down a jar of dried leaves and another of something darker. “Fenleaf,” she said, glancing at Lain. “You’ve had it.”

  “Yes,” Lain replied, remembering Vaelun, the cup passed without shame, the ordinary way the Kelthi had spoken about Heat as weather.

  “This will help with nausea,” Brigid said, tapping the darker jar. “And mint. Not too much. You don’t want to dull yourself into sleep all day. You need to eat. You need to walk. You need to keep the blood moving so the child doesn’t steal everything from you.”

  She turned back to Morgan, and this time her voice sharpened. “And you. You don’t let her go hungry. You don’t drag her until she drops. You don’t make her fear you in her own bed. If she’s carrying, her body will remember every fear twice.”

  Morgan’s face went very still. His shame flared in the bond, immediate and violent. He swallowed it down a breath, and then nodded.

  “I understand,” he said.

  Brigid’s eyes narrowed, as if she didn’t quite trust the ease of that surrender. Then she handed Lain a small wrapped bundle of herbs.

  “Steep these,” she said. “Sip, don’t gulp. Eat salted broth if you can. Cheese. Nuts. Any Kelthi foods with fat. Kelthi babies pull hard.”

  Lain managed a nod. She tucked the bundle into her cloak.

  Brigid’s gaze softened, just a fraction. “And if you feel pain low in your belly,” she said to Lain, “real pain, not cramping, you send someone for me.”

  When they stepped back outside, the wind hit Lain. She drew a breath and felt the salt air settle her stomach in a way the warm house had not.

  Morgan walked beside her in silence for several minutes. His mind was loud in the bond, full of plans he was building so he wouldn’t have to sit with fear.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “Five months,” he said, and the wonder in it made Lain’s chest ache. “That’s nothing.”

  “It’s everything,” Lain replied.

  He looked at her, and she felt the way he wanted to reach for her hand and didn’t.

  “We should move,” he said, but the urgency had changed. It was no longer only the Dóthain. It was her. It was the child. It was the future pressing close.

  Lain’s belly turned again, exhaustion sliding back into her.

  “We’ll move,” she said. “After I sleep for a year.”

  A soft amusement moved through him, brief and precious. “Fine,” he murmured. “Half a year.”

  They were nearing the inn when Morgan slowed, gaze lifting. Someone across the street had straightened from a crate of fish, wiping his hands on his trousers. He was broad-shouldered and weathered, his hair threaded with gray, a scar cutting through one eyebrow. His eyes met Morgan’s with a familiarity that struck Lain as intimate.

  For a moment, Morgan went very still.

  Then the man’s face broke into a grin. “By the Deep,” he called, loud enough for half the street to hear. “Morgan Balthir. I thought you’d finally gone and drowned somewhere private.”

  Morgan smiled. Something in hom loosened so suddenly that Lain almost swayed with it.

  “Eamon,” Morgan said, the name carrying a startling warmth. “You’re alive.”

  “Spite keeps me that way,” the man replied. He stepped forward, gaze flicking to Lain with immediate interest. “And who’s this? You finally stealing girls off the road?”

  Morgan’s hand came, light, to Lain’s back again. “This is Lain,” he said simply. “You’ll be polite.”

  Eamon barked a laugh. “Lord Balthir giving orders about politeness. The sea really is changing.”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed in mock threat, but the bond was bright with something close to joy.

  Eamon’s grin widened. “Come for lunch,” he said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “My wife will skin me if she finds out you were in town and I didn’t feed you. And I’ve got two little monsters who need fresh targets.”

  Morgan hesitated. Lain felt the old reflex in him to refuse, to keep moving, to keep the world at arm’s length.

  Then, softer beneath it, the new thing: the hunger for belonging he hadn’t known was there.

  He glanced at Lain.

  She didn’t know why she nodded. She only knew that she wanted, for one evening, to be in a house that held laughter.

  Morgan nodded too, as if he’d been given permission to be human.

  “Lunch,” he said, and the word sounded like a promise.