Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,67

from her leather bladder and gazed back at Gwen. She was sweating, focused on something Ari couldn’t see, riding her pain.

It was already happening.

“Do you know how long you have?” Ari asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. They were still hours from the lake by Ari’s rusty geographic calculations.

Gwen shook her head.

“Okay, so we keep going,” Ari said. “Do you need anything?”

Gwen shook her head once more.

And they kept going.

When the lake appeared on the horizon, along with Camelot in the far distance and the woods between the two, Gwen whimpered loud enough to spike alarm. Ari stopped the horse and went to Gwen. Water streaked with blood had flowed from Gwen, over the horse’s side and into the dark soil of the road.

Gwen was looking down at it in utter alarm. “It’s supposed to be clear. I read that. It’s supposed to be clear…”

Ari pulled her down from the horse, her own pulse a storm of nerves. “We’re going to walk now, lady. On Ketch, the mothers always walked through the last of the pain. The transition period is supposed to be—”

“Don’t say it.” Gwen inhaled sharply. They walked with their arms around each other, and even though the terrain was mostly downhill, their pace was epically slow. Gwen had to stop so many times. She gritted her teeth and squeezed Ari’s forearms until Ari was sure that they’d bruise. Her long hair was plastered to the skin on her neck, and Ari gently peeled it away and blew a cool breath across her skin.

Gwen suddenly doubled over, leaning low, gripping Ari by the shoulders. She swore gorgeously and then came back when the contraction was over to glare at Ari, her lips brilliant red and her face glistening. “Mistake. This whole thing was… a really, not-good mistake.”

Ari tried not to laugh. “Yeah, how’d it even come up in conversation with my brother? I can only imagine how he’d react.”

Gwen gaped at her. “Are you asking me about Kay? Now?”

Ari lowered her voice, keeping Gwen’s gaze firmly locked with her own. “Yes, now.”

“This is a poorly chosen distraction, Ara.”

“You bet.” Ari looped an arm around Gwen, judging that they had mere minutes before they would need to stop again, and kept walking. At first Ari thought Gwen might not tell her how the baby scheme had occurred, but then she did.

“There was this night on Lionel, well into the siege. Val wanted to have a starlit picnic with the last of the real food before we went to hard rations. He was trying to seduce Merlin. Gods, you should have seen that circus. Those boys…”

Gwen took a few short breaths and then an exaggerated long one that seemed to rip her open slightly. When she was done, she kept talking, her voice far away, wafting after the memory. “We ate the last of the non-space-dried fruit and drank the last of the wine. The four of us. Jordan was off sharpening something somewhere and Lam was more interested in hosting underground resistance rallies. It felt like a double date. Which, of course, felt wrong.”

“Agreed,” Ari said, allowing her jealousy to have a single, tiny moment.

Gwen smiled, and the feeling evaporated. “Val made us drink and talk about what we wanted. Not what we wanted now that Mercer was steps away from claiming the entire planet, but what we wanted period. All I could think about was you, how it felt like you were mine for the smallest slice of time. Like you were my family. And then I’d lost you. I told them I’d always wanted a baby. I wanted to make a family, and Val and Merlin laughed, but Kay didn’t.” She paused. “He didn’t. He missed his moms so much. He missed you.”

“An odd request,” Ari whispered, remembering the words that had first introduced the idea of this baby, this new person, into her life.

“Gods, he was so dumb and smelly and cute and never serious, but he was serious then and it was sort of… beautiful.”

Gwen didn’t have to explain what that looked like. Kay had been famous for being the levity in Ari’s life. The person whose life goals were locked on attaining the next bag of chips or an energy drink—until they weren’t. Until he was pulling Ari back from the brink of her most arduous nightmares, the fake ones and the real alike. His own kind of hero.

After all, would Ari have had the strength to take down the