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Cecil watches as Rosa unbinds her hair; there’s moonlight coming through the window, the light of their single moon, and it lands on the pale strands as she unweaves them from the braid she wears with her crown. Her hair sparkles, and he’s again filled with a rush of emotion: love and adoration, fear and panic, for Rosa and for the child she is carrying, this blessing they have created. He’s enthralled and terrified and he spends every other minute on his throne thinking of it, full of wonder and awe.
She catches his watchful gaze in the mirror and smiles, half-shy and half-playful as if she can read his thoughts. Cecil feels his mouth crook in response, and some of the fear dissipates; he may doubt himself, doubt his place on the throne, doubt his own ability to be a father - but he has never doubted Rosa. She will be as exceptional a mother as she has proven to be Queen - graceful Baron steel in a silk dress - and as loving a caretaker as she has been wife to him.
“Have you thought,” Rosa asks gently, “about names?” Her tone is light, and Cecil knows it’s to give him an out in case he doesn’t want to talk about it. But he smiles, and sinks down onto the bench by the window to undo his boots.
“Only a little,” he says, slowly, because he has had a few ideas, and they are strange on his tongue: the entire concept of the child is still strange to him, the idea that he is a father; naming this wild creation is almost beyond his capacity for thought. Almost. “Have you?”
Rosa says, “Somewhat,” and her mouth quirks upwards. “Somewhat less than the Chancellors might have. I think they want to lay all the names of Baron’s past kings on our poor boy.”
“Oh,” Cecil says, and he huffs a pale laugh: “But what if it is a girl?”
Rosa meets his eyes in the mirror and they share the same look, excited-terrified-joyous, and Cecil feels so full of love for an instant that he thinks he could see it sparkling in the moonlight.
“If it is a girl,” Rosa says, then, slowly, almost tentative. “Would you consider... what about my mother's name?”
“Joanna,” Cecil says. He lets the name resonate in his mouth: not just Rosa’s brilliant mother, the Golden Jo a few old invalid dragoons still tell war-stories about, but their daughter: his eyes and Rosa's hair, and likely to be blessed with her mother’s magic as well: three generations of Farrells, touched by holy light. “Joanna Harvey.”
“I had thought,” and here Rosa ducks her head, pretending to untangle her hair, and Cecil drops his boot, fascinated. “I had thought, perhaps,” she continues, “that we might name a daughter after both our mothers, in their honor. Joanna Cecilia.”
“It is a regal name,” Cecil says slowly, and Joanna Cecilia Harvey’s image fills his mind: she is tall and pale one moment, and then bright and laughing the next; one second armed with her mother’s longbow, and then she runs through his mind’s-eye carrying a broadsword, with a wooden shield strapped to her arm. What would she be like, their daughter? How would Princess Joanna Cecilia Harvey grow?
“It was just a thought,” Rosa adds as an afterthought, and Cecil hears the doubt in her voice. “The Chancellors would be pleased with a Queen’s name. I had thought maybe Jennica, who was the Lady of the Bower, if we had to choose one.”
It has been hard, for he and Rosa both - and separately - to take so much in; Rosa particularly has issues with a handful of the Chancellors, who occasionally when frustrated with her wonder aloud why they were not allowed to marry Baron’s most eligible White Mage to one of the other kingdoms, for an alliance. Yes, they’d had a good chuckle in private about Rosa marrying Edge, but the laugh had never really reached her eyes.
“Oh, Rosa.” Cecil stands up, and he crosses the room to rest his hands on his wife’s shoulders; “Rosa, the Chancellors are not allowed to name our child.”
Her lips eventually curve in a sad smile. “I know. I am teasing.”
All of it has been hard on them, Cecil thinks, and fate must have a cruel sense of humor: they were barely ready to take the thrones, and have barely held on to them by the grace of Mount Ordeals and some well-applied stress-relieving White Magic, and here they are to have a child. Baron’s heir. Or, Cecil muses, heiress.
He bends to rest his chin on her shoulder; meets her eyes in the mirror of her vanity. "I love it," he says, and squeezes his hands around her shoulders, thumbs stroking her soft skin. He smiles at her in the mirror. “I was just lost in thought, love, thinking about her. Joanna Cecilia Harvey. Our daughter. What she might be like.”
“Oh,” Rosa says, and her eyes fill with a brightness that might be tears, except for the brilliant smile on her face. “I assume she will drive us wild, like most children.”
“Hmm.” Cecil does not want to commit to an answer, because it terrifies him. “Do you have any equally fitting names for a boy?”
Rosa bites her lip, and she glances away - but then meets his eyes again in the mirror, shy but straightforward. He admires this so much of Rosa: she does not shirk things she might; she does not shrink from the hard conversations, and she is faster to recognize such emotional potholes than Cecil. “Not - not really. Do you?”
“I have decided I do not have any desire to name my firstborn son Kluya,” Cecil says gravely.
Rosa laughs, as she was meant to, and Cecil’s heart and face light up with it. He pecks her on the cheek and returns to the bench to take off his other blasted boot.
“I have had,” he begins, and then he pauses - suddenly he is the shy one. He ducks his face behind his hair and concentrates on the strap about his ankle. This is new, too: a shyness between them, being more careful with each other. In the joy of surviving, of knowing they were safe, they had clung to each other; now, months later, they are learning to be gentle, to give space. He is unsure what Rosa will think of his ideas.
“I have had one idea,” he says into the silence. “But I am almost embarrassed to share it.”
He hears Rosa take a breath, and he risks a glance upward; she is still looking into the mirror, at him, and her face is calm and placid and just a little reserved, but her mouth is twisting in a tiny amused smile. “Well,” she says, her tone even in the way it gets when she’s nervous. “I told you my idea. Let us hear yours.”
Cecil takes a breath, and he blurts out, “I thought, Theodor. After my brother.”
Rosa’s eyes widen, and she gives a little gasp - but then she laughs, a little, and says, “Oh, Cecil, I love it.”
He laughs a little, relieved beyond belief. “You looked so concerned.”
“Well.” Rosa looks down into her lap, knits her fingers together. There is space for a breath, and then she sighs and confesses, “I was afraid you were going to suggest Kain.”
“Oh.” Cecil breathes in on it, sharply. “Well-”
“It isn’t that-” Rosa says hastily, at the same time.
They laugh, uneasy and calmed at once. This is another new thing, Cecil thinks, a strange and uneven area between them, soft and treacherous. He thinks of the odd addition and subtraction of their trio: they were three, and now he and Rosa have become two-in-one and Kain has left; how many does that make them now? He and Rosa are more, perhaps… but they also feel the lack of their companion, and know that they are also less.
"It isn't that I think him unworthy," Rosa says finally into the silence. "And I think perhaps – maybe a second son, named in Kain's honor, I would be very pleased with." Her face creases into a slow smile, and it's so heartbreakingly sad and beautiful that Cecil loses himself in it for a moment. "But," she says finally, and he can feel in the air how carefully she is choosing her words. "For our first son, I would prefer something that is ours. A name that is our legacy."
"I had not really considered Kain," Cecil admits. It feels a little funny, because Kain is and isn't his best friend, his brother – things Rosa now is, and is not – and it is an honor he isn't sure Kain would appreciate, to be honest. "Have you had any thoughts?"
"None that I really like." Her fingers still in her hair as the plaits finally come undone; Rosa is looking at her own reflection in the mirror now, pensive and thoughtful, and Cecil watches her face from across the room and waits for her to speak. "I thought of my father, of course," she says slowly, "but… I barely knew him. Davidon Harvey… if you like it, and think it meaningful, that is one thing. But somehow it's more fitting to honor my mother's name than my father's, with this child." Her hands begin moving again, soft strokes along the tendrils of her hair, tugging out knots. "And I thought of Odin, which would be fitting, but somehow too much for our firstborn." Her eyes flick to his in the mirror. "The idea I like best is to name a son for you. But now that you have mentioned it, Theodor is… fitting."
Cecil watches his wife in the mirror. Somehow this conversation, so casual and yet so intimate, is easier to have with the glass reflection between them, gazes meeting in the mirror rather than directly, in the air. "Does it – would it bother you to have our children all named for others? Rather than picking new names?"
One brow arches in humor. "How many children do you think we'll have, Cecil?"
He laughs. "As many as we can manage, I assume."
"I don't…" Rosa smiles, her face softening. "No, I don't mind. I think naming in remembrance is a beautiful gift. I think… I think a good name will help tie our child to who we are. Not to Baron, not to the world, but to us, our baby's parents. We can't control where our child will go," she says, her voice rich. "But we can let her – or him – know where he's coming from."
She gives a little half-shrug. "That's why I thought of my mother – she's really all the family I have known. I would like a daughter of mine to feel that connection, to know it is important to me." And now she turns on her vanity stool to look at Cecil, and the thoughtful frankness and love in her eyes is like the beat of a drum as her gaze hits his. "You have nothing left of your family, love, nothing but names. And here in Baron, I would think it a mark of pride – pride in your heritage – to name a son Theodor. Your brother; your legacy."
He had thought of that, too: the ramifications of naming Baron's heir after Golbez, who had nearly brought the nation to its knees. But Theodor and Golbez are not the same person, and Cecil can't help but feel it fitting to remember that in every person there is darkness, and light, and all of the chances and choices that lie inbetween. It's what he thinks of when he thinks of his brother. He fancies Golbez – Theodor – would be honored and exasperated by it, and while he can't really remember what it was like to be a family, some small part of him feels like that's a younger brother's job.
"You said," Cecil asks tentatively, "you had thought of naming him after me?"
Rosa blushes, to his surprise. "There is a Baronian tradition, so old most people don't know about it, of naming the son a variant of his father or forefathers. My father, Davidon, was named for his grandfather Davin. I had thought maybe we could follow that tradition. So it would be … it would be a way to honor the Farrells, too."
Cecil doesn't really know what to say, except the truth: "I would be honored." It comes out soft, and unreal, and Rosa's eyes light up with it, the same powerful look that has overtaken her face occasionally as she slips into motherhood.
"In that case," Rosa says, equally softly. "What do you think of Ceodore?" She watches his face for a reaction, and bites her lip. "It isn't too silly, is it?"
"Ceodore," Cecil says, slowly, letting these syllables roll about his tongue. "Ceodore Harvey." A boy appears to him, Rosa's fierceness in his face, the white magic they share on his fingertips: he is wielding a sword, but defensively, the way a Paladin might train a young child to fight.
"Ceodore Odin Harvey," he suggests slowly, and Rosa's face glows with her smile.
"I like that," she says, simple and true.
This child, Cecil thinks, is terrifying because it is unknown, but he cannot think of a way to describe it. He would say they walked across thin ice, and yet that isn't as terrifying, because he trusts Rosa's Float; he would say maybe they travel into the dark of an unknown cave, the mysterious night of the moon's core, and yet he trusts Rosa's Sight: it isn't as terrifying because she is here, beacon-light for all his hopes and fears. It is terrifying maybe because it is so wondrous, because even white magic's light can't see this far ahead. He can put a sword in the hand of his son – or his daughter – and Rosa can bind magic's protective weave and teach its calling. But neither of them will fully be able to control or choose the path their child will have to walk – and maybe that is what is the most terrifying thing of all, looking at the horrors he and Rosa have both had to face and wondering what the future has in store for a son or daughter as blessed as theirs will be.
"We have months to choose," Rosa says, lighthearted, and it's as if she's reading the words and shadows off of his face. "If you wake up tomorrow and you hate Joanna Cecilia, I will dive into the archives and find a suitable queen's name, I promise."
Cecil laughs aloud as he stands; he returns to Rosa's side and takes her hands in his own, pulling her to her feet. "We have months to think and doubt and be afraid, love. For now, though, I would be more than happy to welcome either Joanna Cecilia or Ceodore Odin into our lives."
She smiles up at him and then leans forward, pressing her face into his chest. He rests his chin on her head and sighs: content in the comfort, excited and scared for the days that lie ahead of them both.