Chapter Text
“There’s no going back, you know. That podge it’ll leave under your breeches… the shrieking thing attached to your ankles, the one that goes and falls in the sea when you just wanted five minutes alone with your shandy… the one that eats raw molluscs and does an absolutely enormous-”
“First of all, Mother,” Jaina interrupts, pinching the bridge of her nose, “Tandred did not fall in the sea, Derek pushed him. Secondly, the only person who’ll be seeing that podge is Sylvanas, and she’ll have been jointly responsible for the whole venture so she’d better not complain- and thirdly, there are no molluscs in Quel’Thalas.”
“She’ll find something,” Katherine says breezily. “Mark my words. And it’ll smell awful.” Uncrossing her legs, she leans closer, easy chair creaking softly beneath her weight. “You need to be sure about this.”
“I am very sure.”
“You’ll need to have the utmost trust in the… do I call her the father? Other mother?”
“The minn’da.”
“It had better last until the Tuesday.”
The gimlet-eyed look Jaina casts her way even has Katherine Proudmoore shrinking back a little in apology. “She has my trust, and I hers. And her jokes are better than that. Marginally. But better.”
“Well, that won’t do. I’ll have to dispatch Daelin with all due haste when she’s born. Can’t have Sylvanas letting the side down, can we?” But Katherine’s lips quirk up as she reaches out to place her warm, weathered palm on Jaina’s forearm. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before you got all broody. I blame the elves. Their younglings have the temerity to look cute. And you’ll make a fine mother,” she continues, and plumps back against her cushions. “Big heart, big laugh and a bright spark to boot. I’ll keep everything crossed she gets my features. Oh bollocks, DAELIN! WHERE DID WE PUT THE PERAMBULATOR? YOU’D BETTER REMEMBER!”
“We sold it after Tandred said he’d rather be a eunuch,” Daelin hollers back from a few doors down.
Katherine tsks, already reaching for her knitting again. “Well, your father’s going to enjoy his weekend building project. Do you have any names in mind?”
“We’re not calling her Katherine.”
“… Kat?”
“No.”
“Aw. Worth a shot.”
-0-0-
“There’s no going back, you know.”
In the silence of Eversong, Lireesa speaks so suddenly Sylvanas’s knife slips, clattering against the ribs of the deer she’s gutting. “I had realised that,” she says, as evenly as she can, and runs careful fingers over the edge of the pelt. Swallows hard against the dryness rising in her throat. “A child is not impermanent.”
“Children are hard, messy work, my Lady Moon. Messier even than that doe you skin, for the bedside rug your wife does not yet know she’s receiving.” Lireesa places her arrowheads down on her lap, peering at Sylvanas past the smooth forelock of her hair. Above the fire warming their feet, a pot of soup bubbles idly. “There will be times you will ache for the peace and quiet you had before. Your nights will be broken. Your possessions will be “borrowed” and returned in pieces. You will swear to Belore that if they ask “why” one more time, you will throw them in the Elrendar for an impromptu swimming lesson. In fact, Vereesa did end up in the river. Twice.” She sniffs, tilting her chin up. “And one day, they will break your heart by falling for a human. Not one of the pretty high elven girls following her around Silvermoon like a flock of particularly gormless sheep. A human. With small ears. Small. Ears.”
Sylvanas feels the flush rising on her face even as her own ears wilt. “I did not choose to fall for a human, minn’da,” she forces out, staring down at her buckskin-clad knees. “Just as she did not choose to be so witty, so charming, so confident, so beautiful, so… herself, so very Jaina… and make it purely impossible for me not to fall for her.” And she drops her gaze to the blood-spattered grasses. “Her ears do move, you know. Just not very much. And why is that such a bad thing any-”
“Belore, do not take me seriously, my red-faced romantic. Would that she had been here to hear that little monologue.” Almost-silent footsteps creep closer the moment before Lireesa’s fingers wrap around her own. “But you need to know what a child means. It means vigilance on a level you have never attained before. It means looking past your own needs to care for them and most of all, it means burying your love and your attention and every nurturing moment you can manage into this tiny creature that will repay you by pulling your hair and calling you menoor-pants.”
Sylvanas sniffs, her eyes still on their interlinked hands. “That was Alleria.”
“Only because you had thought of something worse by the time you managed to make your p’s. Those baby fangs kept getting in the way. It was adorable.” Her mother’s other hand runs slowly up and down Sylvanas’s knee. “You wait until you hold that little warm weight for the first time. Smell her hair. Touch those soft cheeks. You’ll be almost as proud as I was the first time I cradled you to my chest.”
Lireesa suddenly finds herself pulled tight to her daughter, as Sylvanas hauls her closer and buries her face in her mother’s hunting jerkin.
For a long moment, it is just them and the moon shining idly down, and Sylvanas’s shuddering breaths.
At length she loosens her grip, and watches her mother seat herself calmly back on her tree stump; the firelight is flickering and fading, casting their sharp features into shadow, yet her mother’s eyes shine with an intensity that belies their fatigue this late in the day. “I am placing a lot of trust in my siblings, Minn’da. This would be a poor time for Alleria to stage a prank.”
“If she even thinks of doing such a thing at your aranel’dorei, she’ll find herself mucking out the hawkstriders for the next two hundred years. She of all people would know the stress such a ceremony brings.” Lireesa pauses in her carving, the arrowhead held delicately in two fingers. “You will need a gown.”
“Belore, Minn’da, I will be perfectly at ease in my-”
“Jaina was telling me only last week how she loved seeing you in a gown at the Midsummer Fire Festival. I knew it wasn’t the bonfire making her cheeks so red.”
“I will tolerate it this once.”
“Wonderful!” Leaping to her feet, Lireesa reaches to give the soup one final stir and snatches their bowls up from her hunting pack. “And on that note, let’s get some soup into you before you pass out on that rock. I can tell you all about burping.”
“… Burping?”
“Oh yes! Sometimes they vomit all down your back. Vereesa was legendary for it. Alleria thought it was hilarious until it happened to her.”
“I don’t feel like soup any more, Minn’da.”
-0-0-
“Well,” Vereesa chirps, bumping elbows with a slightly stunned Jaina, “definitely no way back now.”
Windrunner Spire is a blaze of festivity. Lights are strung from every possible anchor on the parapets, the myriad of stained-glass windows brightly backlit with candles that flicker sedately over the throng of elves and humans mingling and drinking and dancing in the courtyard below; Lirath, ever the party animal, is on stage with his lute and a rather tipsy Daelin Proudmoore’s attempts to dance the can-can. Derek hovers nervously by the side of the stage, glancing occasionally to the only door in the Spire that sits closed. His mother is too busy at the wine table with Lireesa Windrunner to pay any heed to her husband’s drunken antics.
Heaving a sigh, Jaina straightens her shoulders. “Sylvanas is hiding, isn’t she.”
“She didn’t call it ‘hiding’, but she’s locked herself in Lirath’s music room with a bottle of Minn’da’s finest, so in an acorn, yes.”
“In a nutshell.”
“Even your nuts live in the sea? Belore, I would hate to be a squirrel in Kul Tiras.” And Vereesa’s gone, hauled into a throng of Rangers who offer Jaina hurried bows and immediately pull each other into a huddle, whispering behind their hands.
Well, time to climb the mast. And maybe Vereesa has a point about Kul Tiran sayings.
Rather than try to navigate her way through the crowd, Jaina flexes her magical muscles and Blinks right past them to thud face-first into the locked door; a quick check of her nose and a mumbled cantrip and she’s scooting through the open door and into the humble little entryway to the right-most spire. To the left, Lirath’s bedroom. To the right, the spiral staircase to Sylvanas’s quarters, stairs she has padded up more times than she cares to remember, stairs she used to smile as she ascended in the knowledge that Sylvanas would hear her coming and would be stood at the top of them waiting for her, arms outstretched and bed ready made.
In front of her, a room with a piano and a harp and a whole selection of Kul Tiran fiddles and an elf in a Windrunner-green gown, plucking at the smallest and shabbiest.
“I suppose you want me now,” the elf says quietly, and the jewellery in her ears clatters softly as they wilt against her scalp. “Before Alleria has too much to drink and hexes us into frogs instead.”
For a moment, Jaina stands. Watches her muscles shift in the backless dress. Watches her brow furrow and twist at each flat note, at each overzealous twang. “She hasn’t drunk a drop,” she says, and smiles at Sylvanas as she swerves, wide-eyed. “I think she may actually be more nervous about this than we are.”
“Impossible,” Sylvanas murmurs. She places the fiddle down with the same care she would afford Thas’dorah or Thori’dal, and eases herself up. The skirt flows like water about her legs. “I have had fewer butterflies in my belly raiding troll settlements.”
“Have you ever seen yourself charging into battle? No wonder the trolls wear brown loincloths.” But she doesn’t raise so much as a smile on Sylvanas’s carefully-painted lips. “Look, I’m about as happy as you are that so many blasted people got invited-”
“Somebody told Lirath.”
“Tidemother’s tits. We should count ourselves lucky it’s this few, then. But all we have to do is go out there, smile at them, stand in that circle and wait for the smoke to obscure us and then it’s just us. Just me, and the wife who brings me a hand-embroidered bedside rug because I whinged one morning that my feet were cold. Us and our future, and… whomever shall be joining us in nine months’ time.” Jaina leans down to press a kiss to Sylvanas’s nose, and another to her lips. “It’s our day. Let nobody spoil it for you.”
A great crash from outside has Sylvanas’s ears shooting upright. “Sorry!” cries Daelin Proudmoore’s muffled voice. “This stage’s a bit wobbly. Or I’m a bit wobbly. Derek? Talk t’me, Derek!”
“Least of all, my pissed-as-a-newt father,” Jaina mutters. Strokes down those long, elegantly-adorned ears until Sylvanas sighs, melting into her wife’s embrace. “Come, dalah’surfal. Before anyone else is taken out by a squiffy Lord Admiral.”
Lips press to Jaina’s collarbone, sending a shiver down her body. “Well, when you put it like that,” Sylvanas whispers, and clasps Jaina’s hand in her own. “Let us fetch you one final tipple.”
“As tempting as that sounds, I’d rather we get this over and done with.”
Sylvanas goes rigid in her arms. “Are you having second thoughts? I swear to you, dalah, I am not, though it may look like I am because I’m hiding- I mean thinking on my own- but I’m not hiding from you and I want this too and to that end I am quite happy to tell them all to, what was the phrase you used, sling their anchors-”
“Vereesa definitely had a point about Kul Tiran language. I don’t want anyone to sling their anchor, and I want this so, so much, and I also want this over and done with so I can take you upstairs and ravish you in that beautiful gown. Understood?”
And Jaina watches with a grin as a slow smirk and a soft flush spread over Sylvanas’s face.
Only for both their smiles to vanish at the cacophony of trumpets from outside, and the muffled holler of “ALL STAND FOR OUR GLORIOUS CROWN PRINCE, KAEL’THAS SUNSTRIDER!”
“Except him,” Jaina mutters. “He can definitely sling his anchor.”
“There’s a rowboat moored at the end of the pier. We can elope.”
“We’re already married, dalah.”
“Ah.”
-0-0-
“You definitely know what you’re doing, Alleria?” Sylvanas keeps her voice low, watching the royal carriage retreat back down towards Windrunner Village and the throng of partygoers bolting for the winery. “For sure?”
“Yes, my dear overwrought sister. Place the gifts you gave one another between you, make sure your hands are linked, throw the blooms in the fire, throw the incense in the fire, and call upon Belore to bless the expectant mother and her partner. And then give Minn’da a handkerchief.”
“I meant whatever you told Kael’thas to persuade them to move down into the village.”
“Ah.” Alleria scratches one ear and attempts a smile. “Look, let’s get this over and done with, and then we can all run for Kul Tiras before they realise that whatever Kael’thas is conjuring from those poor grapes, it’s not wine. Are you ready?”
Sylvanas turns back, and her eyes meet Jaina’s, and the excitement shining in them as her wife extends a hand towards her. “Yes,” she says softly, and reaches to intertwine their fingers. “I’m ready.”
“Perfect!” Grabbing their sleeves, Alleria hustles them into the circle of gently glowing runes, fussing about them like a mother springpaw as the rest of the family approaches, Daelin leaning rather heavily on Katherine. “Stand there.” She rummages in her bag and tugs out the doeskin rug and an engraved skinning knife, placing them in front of their respective owners. “Right there. Don’t move.”
Sylvanas blinks. Jaina’s fingers tighten on hers. “Why, what happens if we move?”
“Don’t know. Let’s not find out, shall we?” And any protests Sylvanas might have had are cut off as the runes fizzle into bright bursts of arcane-scented flames, licking at the ground around them as they huddle tighter on instinct. “Alright in there?”
“Yes,” Jaina calls back. Though her hands are shaking, her face is stretched in a bright beam. “We’re very alright,” she adds in a whisper, and sneaks a kiss before Alleria’s flame-distorted form lifts a book and clears her throat.
“Anar’alah belore. Bind’arkhana, bind’aminor. Thas’belore’dorei, rea selama’belore, belono sil’aminor rea dela’dorah.”
Sylvanas squeezes Jaina’s fingers, watches the flames cast her face into handsome profile. A single tear track sparkles in the lilac firelight.
“Minn’dae band’sel, sil dalah’arkhana rea sil’elu’me. Felo’shala, ashal’dela thas’alah.”
Jaina’s shuddering breath tickles Sylvanas’s cheekbone. In that moment, when all she can see is Jaina’s eyes glimmering, she feels her own breath catch in her chest.
“Malanorae, alorae, minn’dae. Thas’dorei. Shorel’a morin’aminor. Bal’a sil’eigene’medivh. Alleria, don’t bother with any of this paragraph, you just have to say their names, love Minn’da. And now we shall- I swear to Belore Minn’da!”
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” Lireesa’s shimmering form gasps, both her and Katherine bent double and clinging to one another. “It sounded lovely, dalah.”
“I’ll give you lovely,” Alleria hisses. “Sylvanas and Jaina, before we begin, do you wish to ask anything?”
Jaina, shoulders shaking with laughter, shakes her head.
“Sylvanas?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“I didn’t know you could read, sister?”
Katherine snorts, claps a hand over her mouth and fumbles a sniggering Daelin to the grass.
“I’m so glad I got the looks and not the wit,” Alleria mutters, and delves in her pocket to throw something into the flames that sends them roaring even higher into the sky. “Behold, the blessing of Azeroth and of Nature.” Another small something hits the fire, and Sylvanas’s hold on Jaina tightens as they are enveloped in sweet-smelling smoke. “Behold, the blessing of Alchemy- achoo!”
“Bless you,” Jaina calls back.
“No, that’s my bit- oh right, yes, thank you.”
Blindly, Sylvanas reaches up and strokes a soft, full, slightly damp cheek. Feels Jaina’s hand come to rest over her own.
“I can’t wait for this,” Jaina whispers. Sylvanas can hear the smile in her voice. “I will take broken nights and sleepless mornings. I will take endless questions and grubby hands on my breeches. I will take worry and anger and frustration and exasperation, and I will weather all these storms, as long as I have you by my side to steady the rudder.”
Sylvanas swallows against the thickness in her throat and the stinging in her eyes. “The sea is not my friend,” she murmurs, “but if it’s you I sail with, the briny depths hold no fear for me.”
“Belore! I ask for your blessing, for Sylvanas and for Jaina and for their child, it is done!” The runes blaze with such ferocity Jaina squeaks and grabs Sylvanas closer and the blaze licks at their skin as the arcane closes in on them and Sylvanas’s world is consumed in white heat-
-0-0-
The flames sputter out.
“Well,” Katherine says, rubbing her eyes. “That was dramatic.”
“Why are you surprised, elves made it,” Derek mumbles.
Lireesa peers at the column of smoke just starting to dissipate, swirling away in tendrils on the wind. “My dalae?” she calls softly. “You can come out now. It’s all done.” Takes a step closer. “Just us here.”
A tiny whimper from within the blackened grass.
“Sylvanas,” Jaina’s voice croaks. “Say something to me. Please.”
Shoulders slumping, Lireesa lets out a weak laugh. “My poor daughter! I knew her emotions would get the better of her eventually.” She bats at the incense still thick in the air. “Shall we go and have our own party-”
“Sylvanas, wake up.”
Lireesa’s whole body goes cold.
An arrow flies over their heads and scatters the smoke like frightened deer to reveal Jaina knelt on the ground, sobbing into the limp form in her arms.
“Help her,” Jaina cries. “Help her!”