"So, when I name my child, they’ll be named for the people who saved them, and not a trace of you!"

Samira’s words echoed through Owain Lothian’s ears, and somewhere within his chest, something he didn’t realize he had cracked in two, caught between the hammer blows of Samira’s words and his own answering fury. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

He couldn’t understand, and more than that, he couldn’t accept what he’d just heard.

If Ashlynn had come to him with this woman, claiming the child was his in the midst of her efforts to unseat him, he could have understood. If she’d demanded to name herself the Regent of Lothian March, ruling as Marchioness until his bastard child was of age, he could have understood her scheme. If Samira had demanded a title for bearing his child, a position, a stipend or anything of the sort... he could have understood that too.

But this? This he couldn’t understand.

To come before him carrying a child in her belly, his child, his son... To stand before him like that and reject him, his name, his family... To give up a century of inheritance and legacy stretching all the way back to the Second Crusade, so she could do what? Run off to some hidden village in the wilderness?

Owain had given everything a man could give to claim his throne. He’d slaughtered demons, murdered his witch of a wife, or at least he’d tried to. He trekked from one side of the kingdom to the other, brokering deals with conceited merchants, and when he came home to find his own brother scheming against him and his father preparing to betray him, he killed the old man before his father could send him into exile.

What more did he have to do in order to claim what should have been his by right from the moment he first drew breath?

Yet the thing he’d struggled so hard to grasp and hold... Samira wanted nothing to do with. She treated all of the power, wealth, and prestige of the Lothian name as though they were worthless.

It was an intolerable insult, and an even greater humiliation that he would repay in kind one day... Just like he would repay Loghlan Dunn and all the others who stood against him tonight. But first, he would deal with this trollop... and if the child she bore was truly his, then he would find a way to separate it from her, whatever it took.

If the child was truly his.

"Lady Samira," Owain said as he stood up from his throne.

The hall stilled when he addressed her as a Lady, just as he knew they would. The words tasted like ash on his tongue, but he said them anyway, because he needed to create room to move... and because he needed to stake his claim.

"I will admit to a bit of weakness after Ashlynn’s ’death,’" Owain said. "And to finding comfort in the arms of a woman who resembled her. You can all imagine the pain I felt to learn that my wife, the woman I’d courted for years, bore the Mark of the Witch," he said, reminding everyone that their ’saintess’ was a marked woman.

"I transgressed," Owain said, bowing his head in a performative gesture of contrition. "That does not mean the child is mine," he added. "But if it is, then I will make amends."

"I will commission the Church to perform a Reading of the Stars," Owain said, locking eyes with the white-haired priest at the far end of the hall. "So that all may know the child’s origin and his destiny."

Throughout the Great Hall, there was an audible ripple of shock and amazement. A few people were confused, poking and prodding their neighbors for an explanation about the ’Reading of the Stars’, but at the High Table, there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t understand what it meant.

Tybal Aleese swallowed heavily, suddenly wishing for stronger wine to drown out the nagging voice at the back of his mind that he thought he’d silenced years ago when he decided not to seek a Reading of the Stars to confirm his suspicions about Rain’s paternity.

The ritual Owain had referenced was expensive enough to make even a marquis wince at the cost because it revealed far more than just a child’s lineage. It was said that it took a High Priest, thirteen under-priests, and nearly two hundred acolytes just to begin the ritual, and that didn’t factor in the amount of expensive incense, gold, and jewels that were consumed by the ritual.

In exchange for the exorbitant costs, the Church could reveal much about a child’s path through life as the Holy Lord of Light had written it in the stars. A reading couldn’t foretell a man’s fate, but it could suggest the moments along his path when he would have to make the most important decisions, and it could help his parents to guide him through the earliest days of his life when it was easiest to wander astray.

By tradition, the Church performed a reading for every child born to the Royal Family in Gaal, and the Saint himself was said to lead the rite. For everyone else, however, it was far too expensive, especially as a way to settle questions of paternity unless the dispute over parentage was extraordinary.

Tybal could have done it when Rain was born. His coffers were overflowing with plunder from Airgead mountain. Gold and jewels he had in plenty... But if he’d done it, if he’d learned the truth with absolute certainty, then it could have torn his family in two. Better to live with a sliver of uncertainty and cling to a happier illusion, he thought, than to risk it all and destroy Reynold’s chance of growing up in a home with two loving parents and a brother he could recognize as kin.

For Reynold’s sake, he’d let things go. But Lord Owain was in a different position altogether, and if he was willing to go this far, then he must have something in mind...