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It’s the middle of a summer’s night, bright as it always is in Sharlayan, where the sun at solstice sets for all of half a bell. Thancred isn’t sleeping. The sun is streaming through the window, warming that square of the floor, the glass pane itself hazy with ice crystals and radiating cold. It’s above the head of his bed, and he reaches out to touch it, leaving clear, wet fingerprints behind. It’s cold; it feels real in a way his body doesn’t.
Louisoix left the room a few minutes ago. Closed the door behind him gently. Before that, lips on Thancred’s forehead, good night. And before that, lips on Thancred’s lips, good girl. Good girl, so good for me.
He is, and he hates it. Thancred is Louisoix Leveilleur’s good girl, and he never fights back, never curses him, never throws one of the old man’s books at his head and screams at him I’m not a fucking girl, or go rape your son like you want to and leave me alone. He does what he’s told without complaint, makes all the right noises in bed, makes no noise at all under Louisoix’s fancy desk made of dark-stained lignum vitae. He spends time with that friend of Louisoix’s who says he’s got the makings of a good spy, because Louisoix wants him to be good at things, and Thancred knows he needs to make himself useful to him somehow, because someday—probably sooner rather than later—Louisoix’s going to stop wanting to fuck him.
Thancred’s not stupid. Louisoix doesn’t even want to fuck Thancred, really. He wants to fuck Fourchenault, his son and heir. Maybe he wants to fuck Fourchenault’s little sisters, too—but they’re still little, five and nine to Fourchenault’s nineteen and Thancred’s sixteen. Then again, both of them are late bloomers, Fourchenault still barely four and a half fulms tall even though his towering new wife, who’s only a few years older, is pregnant with twins and already starting to show; meanwhile, Thancred only had his first cycle three months ago and his tits are so small he doesn’t have to bind them to look like a boy.
So. Thancred is Louisoix’s good little girl and does whatever he wants, whether that’s lapping at his prick or learning the parts of spywork that aren’t lying on your back and lying through your teeth. Sharlayan pretends at disinterest in the affairs of the rest of the world, but really there’s whole archives full of other states’ secrets in the Noumenon. Sharlayan has total control over the aethernet, so a Sharlayan spy can get anywhere he wants, easy as that. Sharlayan’s just as sinister as the Garlean Empire, really—they just don’t need to declare a war they’ve already won. Not that Thancred is criticizing. The thing is, the thing that makes Thancred hate himself, is that Louisoix Leveilleur is the best thing that ever happened to him.
Because of Louisoix, Thancred got off the streets of Limsa Lominsa. Because of Louisoix, he sees a healer any time he needs one. He has clean, straight teeth. Clothes and food and new shoes and a room all his own in an actual, literal palace. He knows how to read, now, and speak three languages. He’s no good at magick, but he’s good at other things, and if one of those things is riding politician’s cocks, well, because of that when he gets his Archon mark, he’ll get to go anywhere in the world, do anything, as the shadowy enforcer of the most powerful nation on this star.
He just has to make it there. So he swallows down all his vitriol for his personal savior and spews it at safer targets: the servants, and the boys who linger in the square after dark dicing and drinking mulled wine, and Fourchenault Leveilleur.
They have a comfortable mutual antipathy, he and Fourchenault, ever since Fourchenault walked in on his father fucking Thancred three years ago—almost four, now. Thancred hates Fourchenault for existing. His foster brother is the most privileged boy in the Three Great Continents, and that probably isn’t even exaggeration. He’s a genius, only two years away from an Archon mark at all of nineteen, and he stands to inherit a fortune bigger than some whole countries from his father and a government from his uncle. He’s well-liked and perfectly composed and has an obnoxiously pretty face, even with the baby fat that still clings to his cheeks. When he finally hits his growth spurt and sprouts up to six or seven fulms, with the sharp chin and cheekbones adult elezen always have, he’ll become handsome, which is even more irksome. Thancred wants to give him a black eye or two.
Fourchenault hates Thancred for making it impossible to forget his father is a rapist pedophile who only isn’t coming to his room at night because it would ruin his own reputation the way that fucking some Eorzean brat doesn’t. It’s distasteful, and it’s beneath the great House Leveilleur (which is probably why Louisoix, for all his political and magickal genius, was passed over by his father for the seat of basileus on the Forum of Archons in favor of his rather less impressive brother), but it’s different with outsiders. Sharlayans consider themselves better than the rest of the world.
And so Louisoix Leveilleur keeps a hyuran teen with the same white-blond hair as his son in the family wing of the sprawling Leveilleur manor without a word of lip service to matters like ‘fostering’ or, Twelve forbid, ‘adoption’, and everyone knows what Thancred is doing there but no one speaks of it, not even the servants.
Louisoix’s leavings are sticky between Thancred’s thighs, and he’s sore all over, especially the muscles of his thighs, stuffy in the head, and a little bit sick to his stomach. His heartbeat is a throbbing pulse in his cunt, hot against the chill of the night air with the quilts all shoved aside, and he feels dirty. He’d felt like he needed to piss, when Louisoix was fucking into him, and he knows what that means: that he liked it, that some part of him, however animal, wants to be hollowed out by the old man’s cock.
He closes his legs, rolling onto his side to stare at the square of light inch along the tile floor. There’s a patch of wetness under his hip, and coupled with the sensitivity of his cunt it has Thancred panicking suddenly, stupidly, that he might be bleeding. He hasn’t bled for Louisoix’s prick in years: Louisoix isn’t that big, long but not girthy, like the rest of him, and Thancred learned quickly to open himself up at night with spit-slick fingers to ease the way.
He reaches between his legs again now, pressing his fingertips inside that used hole. When he pulls them back out they’re wet with the faintly pearlescent sheen of semen and nothing more. No blood.
Thancred sighs in relief, wiping his fingers clean on the bedspread, and then something occurs to him, because there’s no blood. But there should be, shouldn’t there? If not now, then the sennight before? Or the sennight before that, even? Suddenly, terrifyingly, Thancred cannot remember when his last menstrual cycle was. He only started in the spring. But it’s been too long, he knows that.
He clambers out of bed, tugging his nightshirt back down, and slips out of his bedroom in bare feet, making his way down the quiet hall. He knocks on a door.
No one answers.
He knocks again, louder, insistent. He’s about ready to start making threats when the door opens. On the other side is Ameliance Leveilleur, towering above him in her own nightgown, its high waist brought in just below her breasts, which are small but growing more substantial by the day, nipples dark beneath the thin white cotton. Thancred can’t see the slight bulge of her belly, but he knows it’s there. Twins, apparently—arriving in the winter.
“Thancred,” says Ameliance, confused. Her accent is thicker than usual, syrupy with sleep. She’s not been here very long; give it a few summers and the Leveilleurs will have trained even the nighttime trace of her foreign origins out of her voice, as Thancred’s had been.
“Lady Ameliance,” Thancred acknowledges impatiently. He tries to look past her, but can’t see much more than the dark of the heavily curtained sitting room. “I need to speak to Fourchenault.”
“‘Tis half one in the morning, Thancred. Can’t it wait?”
“It really can’t,” he says. He’s afraid he’ll have lost his nerve by morning. And besides, he needs Fourchenault’s guilt. He needs to be dripping Louisoix’s spend down his naked thighs, fingerprint bruises pressed into his hips. “He’s not asleep, is he?” he starts to say, at the same time Fourchenault appears behind his wife, slight and boyish, wrapping a dressing gown around his silky pyjamas as he mumbles, “What’s toward?”
“I need to speak to you,” Thancred repeats, and then his gaze cuts to Ameliance. “Alone.”
Fourchenault’s shoulders tense. “Aught you have to say to me you can say in front of my wife.”
They glare at each other a long moment. Eventually: “Fine. Inside.”
Ameliance looks to Fourchenault, and he nods. She opens the door wider, letting Thancred slip inside. Fourchenault lights a table lamp in the dark sitting room with a bit of arcanima, ozone-sharp smell and a twisting motion of his hand. “Could have just opened the curtains,” Thancred mutters. But it isn’t about light, it’s about intimidation. A reminder that Fourchenault has a power at his disposal Thancred stands no chance against. It isn’t your place to make demands of me.
“Well? What is it?” Fourchenault demands, crossing his arms across his chest in a way that he must think makes him seem more imposing. In slippers and a dressing gown, standing waist-high to his wife, it just makes him look like a child, even though he’s three years older than Thancred and working on his thesis.
“There’s magick for sensing a—a child, isn’t there?” There must be, because Fourchenault and Ameliance knew they were pregnant months ago, and she’s barely showing now.
“What did you do,” Fourchenault says, voice totally flat and face unreadable.
“The hells do you think? I thought you were s’posed to be some sort of genius.”
“I fail to see why it should be my problem you’re a slattern.” (“Fourchenault!” his wife hisses.) He sighs. “You’re afraid of father’s reaction, I expect? Grow up. You made the choice to lay with…” waving a hand in the direction of Thancred’s belly, “whoever it was, and were fool enough not to wear a diaphragm. Go admit it while it’s early, take the beating, and if there is a child, I’m sure he’ll have it taken care of.”
Ameliance is looking at Fourchenault with a tight expression, something like worry. Thancred knows they did what they did on purpose, hoping a pregnancy would force Louisoix’s hand so he would allow them to marry; he wonders, suddenly, how close they came to having it taken care of instead, and if Fourchenault had to take a beating, too. He decides this is a little too close to sympathy for comfort, and chooses to think: I hope he did worse. He doesn’t mean it, really. The thought, face to face, turns his stomach in a way it doesn’t when Thancred’s staring at his bedroom ceiling.
“It’s his,” Thancred snaps. “If it exists, which I don’t know yet, which is why I’m here, you utter bastard.” His voice cracks, and he realizes his eyes are burning, he’s crying, how utterly pathetic—
“Hush now,” Ameliance Leveilleur is saying, her hand hovering over Thancred’s shoulder like she’s waiting for permission to touch. She’s a healer too, Thancred remembers—or whatever they call them in the empire, a ‘medic’ or something. Her bedside manner is much better than her husband’s. “Come on, let’s sit down? It’s all right.” She carries on a steady stream of soft-voiced nothing commentary, the sort of thing he’s meant to listen to for the sound of her voice, not for the words.
Thancred is sobbing, this broken, little-boy thing like a brat with a scraped knee, and once he starts he can’t stop. Eventually Ameliance’s voice filters back through. “Thancred? Fourchenault is going to cast something now, to see if you’re in the family way. You’ll feel the magick settle over you. It shouldn’t hurt.”
It doesn’t—it just feels cold, crawling over his skin and down his spine like fear. In its wake: a sense of calm, unnatural and unasked for. Thancred can’t find it in himself to be angry, nor to be afraid., and he goes looking for both those feelings. “What did you just do?” he asks Fourchenault, who’s standing there with his nouliths hovering about his shoulders, faintly glowing. Fourchenault’s face is pale.
“That was me, dear,” Ameliance says. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you.”
“Oh.”
“You were right,” Fourchenault says. “You’re with child.”
Ameliance looks between the two of them. “What do we do now?”
“Tell Father?” Fourchenault says helplessly. “He can’t want to make Thancred keep the thing.”
He hasn’t got much in the way of conviction. The thing is, who knows, with Louisoix? Five years ago anyone would have said he’d never bring a stray home with him out of some Limsan back alley, but here Thancred is. And it’s difficult to square his methodical nature with the refusal to take basic precautions. It wouldn’t have taken more than a simple casting of Esuna to ensure nothing ever came of their coupling, but he didn’t.
“We’re not letting that man beat a child for his own deed.”
“What else can we do? It would get back to Father if we took him to Physis Technon, and a clinic is obviously out of the question…” Anyone affiliated with the Leveilleur estate going to one of the city clinics would spark the worst kind of gossip. Whatever they needed a healer for must be illicit, or they’d keep the matter in-house. The whole family are—
Oh. “You’re a healer,” says Thancred. “You’re both healers. You can get rid of it, can’t you?”
Fourchenault blanches. “I,” he says, and stops. “Gynecological somanoutics is a specialty field,” he tries again, “and not one I have any training in.”
Ameliance says, “I suppose we could poison you, wait for it to result in miscarriage, and then heal up the rest of the damage?”
“That’s a horrible idea.”
“Have you any better?”
“If we could, I don’t know, focus target the womb somehow, then we could set a Kardion tether between the moth—between Thancred and myself and induce a dyskrasia of the womb. The tether would, theoretically at least, allow me to channel the aetheric discharge caused by the injury to soterial effect elsewhere in the body.”
“Making the damage to the body itself a physick for the very same! If it will work, it’s beautifully clever,” Ameliance praises, reaching out to take her husband’s small hand in hers and give it a squeeze. Still under that heavy, unnatural spell of calm she placed on him, Thancred’s should-be-amazement at how effortlessly she takes hold of Fourchenault’s leash is a mild appreciation. She’s given him a problem to solve like an question on an exam, someone to outsmart, and the praise his father never gave him—and now it’s not about Thancred, the boy he loathes, at all. Beautifully clever indeed.
Fourchenault’s solution isn’t too bad either. Somanoutics is a field with a wide range of applications, from experimental surgeries to workplace safety (at the Studium, Fourchenault is perhaps most positively regarded for the protective shields he puts up around anyone working a potentially explosive experiment), but it is first and foremost healing magick for the front lines. Sages can target an enemy with offensive spells, and channel the aether let loose in the process of murder into healing themselves or their allies. It’s sages who get sent in to survey Allagan ruins whose security measures are still online, thousands of years later; it’s sages who get hired up by the Hyperesia, the shadowy intelligence organization that doesn’t officially exist. Thancred’s mentor has bemoaned his lack of magickal talent more than once.
Fourchenault took up somanoutics because his father is an arcanist, and Louisoix’s decades-long friend with Mace Byrde meant astromancy was off the table, too. Thancred can respect the spitefulness of it all, studying a combat magick when the closest Fourchenault Leveilleur, future Archon Basileus, will ever come to combat is his and Ameliance’s diplomatic trip next month to Dravania to oversee the final shutdown of the Sharlayan outpost there, where between the researchers employed at the Athenaion and the Great Gubal Library and Antitower, some two to three thousand Sharlayan citizens presently live at the edge of a war zone.
“Well?” Fourchenault puts his hands on his hips, open dressing gown bunched up around his wrists. “I’m willing to try it if you are.”
It’s Thancred Fourchenault’s talking to, but it’s Ameliance he’s really offering for, to earn being called ‘beautifully clever’. That’s fine by Thancred. “Do it.”
“It may not work. I’ve never tried to do anything like this. If it is successful, it will probably do enough damage you’ll never bear a child again. It’s possible you’ll never even bleed again.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Thancred mutters.
“I’m serious, Thancred,” Fourchenault snaps. “This is dangerous, and untested, and the only reason I’m willing to try it at all is because Father would—” he cuts himself off. “Well. If something goes wrong, he’ll have both our heads.”
“Then we shall have to pray nothing goes wrong,” Ameliance says, with feigned levity. “While the two of you prepare, I think I shall go find the kitchens so we can avail ourselves of the icebox. This will be taxing for all concerned, I expect, and there’s like to be bleeding. You’ll want something to replenish your sugars.” A moment’s hesitation, then: “I don’t suppose either of you knows where the kitchens are?”
“Uh…” says Thancred, at the same time as Fourchenault’s, “I haven’t the slightest.” There’s a bell pull on the wall to summon a servant who’d bring whatever they asked for, but that would defeat the attempt at secrecy.
“Oh, very well. I’ll have to manage. Don’t kill each other while I’m gone, please?”
Thancred and Fourchenault have spent years avoiding each other whenever possible. They’ve been alone together on only three occasions since Louisoix brought Thancred home with him from Limsa Lominsa. The night Fourchenault saw a thirteen year old Thancred sucking his father’s cock, Thancred let himself into Fourchenault’s bedroom and threatened him if he told anyone, if he did anything that would jeopardize Thancred’s place in the household. They’d been colorful threats, drawn from a childhood with sticky fingers in the piracy capital of the Three Great Continents. Ya know what a Limsan grin is?
The second time they were alone together was an accident, Thancred letting himself into the manor library late in the evening on the same night Fourchenault had escaped there to cry himself sick. The Scholarch had been over for a friendly dinner, and after that a few drinks; over cards, they discussed their children, Fourchenault sixteen and still not engaged to be married, the Scholarch’s daughter five years old, the perfect age to marry once Master Fourchenault has earned his Archon mark and established himself, their families on friendly terms and of the appropriate social class. “He got to marry for love, or, or, or scholarly admiration, whatever it is he and Mother have,” Fourchenault ended up blubbering to Thancred not very long after accusing him of spying and illiteracy and several other nasty things. “I thought… It’s stupid, I know it’s stupid, but I thought he’d at least let me have this. Let me make one choice for myself in my whole miserable life. But no! Of course not!”
Thancred should have scoffed at all of this, a privileged brat’s whining over what was expected of him. His ‘miserable life’, really.
But Fourchenault was—honestly, he was so pathetic in that moment, scrawny and knobby-kneed, snot shiny on his upper lip from his sobbing fit, and Thancred’s stomach churned when he imagined a pair of old men deciding to marry off a teenager and a little kid, no matter how far off in the future it would be. There was something uncomfortable about it, somehow both clinical and lecherous: oh, they’d make a good match, what with their pedigrees, and your son is good looking. And most of all, Thancred was lonely, and there weren’t any adventure novels in the whole blasted library, it was all treatises on arcanima and history, and he would have liked to band together with perhaps the only person who stood a chance at understanding what it was like to grow up Louisoix Leveilleur’s property. So he didn’t scoff. He commiserated, and found Fourchenault a handkerchief, and for one night they were allies.
The third and final time they were alone together was a mistake, and that’s all that needs saying.
Now they’re alone again, together in the dark of Fourchenault’s room, a few steps away from where almost four years ago Thancred had threatened to knife him. “I’ll blow you if you don’t fuck this up,” Thancred says. He knows Fourchenault’s old enough his prick works, because he got Ameliance pregnant.
Fourchenault pulls a face. “I’ll pass.”
They don’t kill each other. They don’t do much of anything. The spell Ameliance cast on Thancred to make him calm slowly wears off, and he finds himself able to be annoyed at her for it, but he can’t muster the energy for a stronger emotion than that, by way of utterly mundane exhaustion. Panic is draining—and, of course, he hasn’t slept.
“If this does go sideways,” Thancred says eventually, “and he finds out, I’ll say I forced you to do it. And if it works… whatever you want, whenever you decide what that is, it’s yours. I’ll—I’ll owe you.” He’s never thanked Fourchenault Leveilleur in as many words, and he doesn’t plan to start now. He still hates him; that hasn’t changed.
“You don’t owe me anything,” says Fourchenault. They fall silent again.
Eventually, Ameliance returns, having evidently found the manor’s kitchen. She elbows her way back into the suite holding a tray atop which she’s balanced a silver pitcher of some deep purple-colored juice, a teapot that smells unmistakably of catnip and valerian root, cups, a small server of creamed honey, and a plate stacked high with the least dreadful of Sharlayan confectionaries: dense, unspiced and fiber-packed wheat and walnut biscuits that taste almost pleasant once slathered with creamed honey or jam. Thancred’s stomach growls at the sight of them, but Ameliance swats his hand away. “Wait until after to eat,” she says, so reasonably he’s getting irritated again, “in case it comes back up. I can pour you a cup of tea for now?”
He drinks a cup of tea while Fourchenault and Ameliance pore over her copy of G’ray Tia’s Anatomy together, speaking to one another in low voices. They’ve opened the heavy, light-blocking curtains up, just leaving the gauzy privacy curtains in place, and sunlight streams into the room. There’s some sort of test they’re doing, Fourchenault’s nouliths hovering about his shoulders, and he’s casting something on Ameliance, maybe? The ozone smell of magick isn’t in the air, but he’s definitely doing something.
And then Ameliance comes back over to the loveseat she earlier ushered Thancred into, and she places a light hand on his shoulder. “We’re ready,” she says.
He takes a deep breath. “What do you need me to do?”
“We shouldn’t do this in the sitting room,” says Fourchenault. “I don’t know how we would explain blood in the grouting.”
“Oh, that’s a good point! Let’s take this to the ensuite then.” Ameliance guides Thancred deeper into the apartments, through their scrupulously clean bedroom with its double-wide mattress, into the ensuite bathroom. “The soaking tub is probably best,” she says.
Thancred climbs into it, and Fourchenault stands awkwardly at the side of the bath. “I’m going to cast Kardia now,” he says. “It will make an aetheric connection between us, like a bridge or a tether, through which I can monitor your humours and keep them in balance, as well as fortify your corporeal aether.”
He seems to be waiting on something. “Right,” Thancred says. “Kardia. Tether you can heal me through. Sounds good.”
Fourchenault closes his eyes, maybe in frustration, maybe just concentration. His nouliths pulse with cold blue light. The air smells sharp and chemical, and is heavy with power, like static electricity. The tether forms: Thancred can’t see it, really, but he has a sense of it, of Fourchenault on the other side. When he closes his eyes, he imagines he can see the connection stretching between the two of them on the backs of his eyelids.
“All right,” says Fourchenault. “Now I’ll attempt to individuate the womb and treat it as my focus target. It shouldn’t be too—hmm,” he says, “I can’t quite seem to…”
“How early is it?” asks Ameliance suddenly. “The pregnancy, I mean.”
“Oh, early. No heartbeat yet that I could tell. I detected it through the humours.”
“Then it probably doesn’t even have its own aetheric signature yet,” Ameliance says. “I expect that’s why you succeeded when we practiced.”
“That shouldn’t matter,” Fourchenault insists, trying again, failing again. Repeat. “The astrologians are always doing things like this. In the most recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Alchemy there was a case study where, in the case of a deep vein thrombosis, a time dilation field was able to be set around the patient’s limb to stave off necrosis until the local alchemist could acquire grass viper venom to craft an anticoagulant.”
“Those were Archons, and they’ve probably spent their whole careers working with aetheric partitions. Like you said, you’ve never tried anything like this before! It isn’t your field of specialty! I’m not surprised it’s difficult.”
“I don’t know what to do,” says Fourchenault. He sounds bereft. “I can’t get a grip on it. But we need to—”
“I know what you have to do,” Thancred cuts in unhappily.
“I’m not cutting you open,” Fourchenault says at once. “There must be another way.”
“There is.” He sighs. “You said it yourself. You need to get a grip on it.”
“I don’t—oh.”
Most healers aren’t Archons doing bleeding-edge experimental magick funded by Studium grants in their free time. The sages, astrologians, and arcanists Fourchenault and Ameliance are studying under, and even the two of them, still students, would never think of, say, healing a broken bone as a difficult task. Assuming it was set correctly, they wouldn’t need to lay hands on their patient to heal it—from the stories Fourchenault sometimes told about his residency at the dinner table, they’d consider needing to a sign of mana depletion and exhaustion, reason enough to send a healer home for the night. But that was the norm, at least at the Arcanist’s Guild monthly clinic back in Limsa. Thancred had always had a healer’s bare fingers wrapped around his sprained ankle, or clearing up a bout of strep with a few fingers pressed unceremoniously down his throat while he tried not to gag.
“Let’s just get it over with.” Thancred shucks off his nightshirt.
Ameliance averts her eyes at once. Fourchenault doesn’t. Out of the corner of his eye, Thancred can see Fourchenault’s gaze finding the fingerprint bruises on his hips and his upper left arm, then travel to his tits. A flush darkens his cheekbones, and he makes himself look at Thancred’s face. “If you’re certain.”
“Obviously,” Thancred snaps.
Fourchenault climbs inelegantly into the soaking tub behind Thancred. “Ameliance, can you get the jar of coconut oil? Atop the vanity, right there. Thank you.” To Thancred: “This will be cold, and—unpleasant.”
He slips his little hand between Thancred’s thighs. Louisoix’s spend is still on him, all dried and flaking, faintly white. Fourchenault makes a sound of distress, but doesn’t tug his hand away. Two fingers press inside Thancred’s cunt.
He’s right—it’s cold and unpleasant, but the oil on Fourchenault’s fingers means it doesn’t actually hurt, and he’s being too careful for it to feel like a sex act, even when his fingers aren’t long enough to make contact with the mouth of Thancred’s womb and he has to withdraw, coat his hand in more of the viscous, nearly jellylike oil, and, “I’m sorry about this—”
“Just do it,” Thancred says through gritted teeth, a white-knuckled grip on the rim of the bath. Fourchenault’s other hand settles on Thancred’s hip for balance, overlapping with the bruises his father’s fingers left behind. Four slim fingers slip easily into the gape of Thancred’s cunt, followed by a thumb. Fourchenault pushes in, and in, and his hands are small enough that Thancred doesn’t really feel the stretch until his knuckles are seeking entry.
His hand slides home. Thancred lets out an involuntary gasp. Hatefully, a pressure starts to build low in his belly, like needing to piss. Slattern, Thancred’s inner monologue repeats in Fourchenault’s voice.
“All right,” Fourchenault says, sounding almost out of breath, clearly relieved. “I’ve got it. I’m going to begin performing an ablation now. That is, removing the unwanted tissue. It will destroy the embryo. It will likely also sterilize you.”
“Good,” says Thancred, with feeling.
Fourchenault takes a breath. “This will probably hurt.”
It isn’t too bad, at first. It stings almost like the scrape of fingernails over skin, but inside his body. But as it goes on, it builds, growing sensitive, then painful, and his stomach starts cramping up. Thancred becomes aware of something like the sense-memory of a wave breaking over his back, cold and refreshing in Limsa Lominsa’s summer heat, which follows shortly behind every scrape.
It feels like claws. The wave—the Kardion tether, Thancred realizes—leaves him feeling disoriented, almost drunk on the amount of magick in the air, the amount of magick inside of him, but it doesn’t lessen the pain at all, nor the panic that’s starting to build. His heart is pounding. There’s something going wrong inside of him, horribly wrong, one of his organs is dying and every system is going haywire, being healed as quickly as they’re damaged. There’s a high-pitched noise in Thancred’s ears, and it takes him a very long time to realize it’s his own voice.
“It’s all right,” he thinks Ameliance is saying to him, her voice calm and firm, inarguable. There’s a hand in his hair, combing it back from his sweat-slick forehead with long, cold fingers. He leans into the touch.
It feels like he’s dying. His thighs are wet and hot and sticky, and everything hurts. Fourchenault is speaking, but Thancred can’t make out the words. The next thing he knows, he’s curled up on the floor of the bath in a little puddle of his own blood, and his cunt aches worse than it ever has. His pulse beats heavy in the tender, swollen flesh.
“It’s done, you’re done. You made it through.” Ameliance, it must be, for how kind the words are, though her voice sounds strange. Thancred nods, dizzy with blood loss and the cotton-stuffed sensation of so much healing magick pumped through him. “Can you sit up?” Someone gives him a glass and congratulates him when he doesn’t immediately let it slip through his fingers.
He drinks several glasses of juice as dark as the tacky pool on the bottom of the bathtub, and slowly comes back to himself. Ameliance helps him wash up. Fourchenault makes himself scarce.
Thancred spends a sennight terrified Louisoix will confront him, but their secret doesn’t get out, all the evidence washed away from the servants’ prying eyes. Fourchenault acts as though Thancred doesn’t exist; for a whole month, he says not a single word to his unwanted foster brother and partner in crime, and then he and Ameliance leave for the Eorzean colony.
That month, Thancred doesn’t bleed, and he’s fearful at first, then he remembers what Fourchenault said: It will probably do enough damage you’ll never bear a child again. It’s possible you’ll never even bleed again.
Relief floods through him like cold, fresh water. And then he thinks, probably.