Chapter 20: The First Child

Min-jun had answered the rice cake question in the tent the only way the seal allowed.

"Because you are the kind of man who says thank you," he had said, and it was a lie about the cause, and it cost him nothing.

Seo-jun had looked at him for a long moment and let it stand.

He left a rice cake on the little shrine every morning of the ride north, and he never asked again.

By the night of the first snow, Wolfhold's east wing had been barred for six weeks, and in all that time only three people had crossed its threshold.

The elders called it the winter retreat, an old wolf custom for a mated pair before an heir.

They bowed to the barred door every morning, and asked no questions.

On the night of the first snow, Min-jun woke with a pain that went through him end to end.

He gripped the bedpost and said Seo-jun's name through his teeth.

Seo-jun was already out of bed with the lamp lit.

"Now?"

"Now."

"I'll get the healer."

"Not yet. Hold my hand."

Seo-jun held it.

The healer came, a stooped woman who had delivered half of Wolfhold and been told only that the prince was ill.

She took one look at the swollen belly under Min-jun's shirt and shut her mouth.

"It's blessed," Seo-jun said, in a flat voice. "Say nothing."

"Highness, I have not said anything in forty years."

The labor went on until the window went gray.

Min-jun's body was a man's body, and it had been made to do this by a god.

It opened where it had no right to.

He wept and cursed and bit through his own lip, and Seo-jun knelt on the bed behind him and took his weight against his chest.

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