The Heart and the Fist

(Paige’s POV)

The first real pain is a surprise. A sharp, clenching fist deep in my core, so different from the dull, anxious ache that’s been my companion for hours.

Boom.

Another impact shudders through the mountain’s bones. Dust sifts from the ceiling of the solar, where they’ve moved me for “safety.” It’s the most defensible inner room, with only one narrow entrance. A fortress within a fortress. My new cage. Two of Alex’s most trusted men stand rigidly outside the door.

Boom.

The siege engines have found their range. Greymont isn’t just trying to starve us out. He’s trying to pound Blackstone into gravel.

Another pain, closer this time, stealing my breath. I grip the edge of the heavy oak table, my knuckles white. It’s too soon. Weeks too soon. The stress, the fear, the running, the vision… my body is screaming its protest.

Mara is here, her weathered face grim. She’d been among the families brought inside the walls. She’d taken one look at me, pale and sweating, and had simply rolled up her sleeves. “Babies come when they please, my lady,” she’d said, as another crash echoed. “War or no.”

“Where is Noah?” I gasp as the pain recedes.

“Where he needs to be,” Mara says, her voice steady. She’s heating water over the small fire, tearing clean linen into strips. Her movements are calm, a ritual in the heart of the chaos. “Defending your walls. And you.”

Boom.

This one is closer. A different sound—a direct hit on the outer curtain wall. A shout of alarm echoes down the stone corridors, followed by the roar of Noah’s voice, indistinct but ferocious, rallying the men.

The next pain is a wave, dragging me under. I cry out, bending over. Mara is at my side in an instant, a solid arm around my shoulders. “Breathe through it. Like the wind on the ridge. In… and out.”

I try to focus on her voice, on the metaphor of wind and stone, but all I can see is Noah’s face when he read that note. The true price is for the witch. The pain is not just in my body; it’s the terror that they will come. That while he fights an army, silent knives will slither through the cracks to find me, to take my child, to “extract” my mind.

“I need him,” I whisper, ashamed of the weakness but unable to contain it.

(Noah’s POV)

The world has narrowed to a slit of freezing air, the rough stone of the battlement under my palms, and the seething mass of darkness below, punctuated by torches and the hellish glow of burning huts.

“Ladders!” Alex bellows from my left.

They come out of the night like spiders, dark shapes scurrying up the cliffs, planting hooks, swarming up ropes and wooden rungs. My archers find their marks. Men scream, falling away into the void. But there are too many. Always too many.

An arrow whines past my ear, chipping stone. I don’t flinch. The wound on my arm is a dull, hot throb, bandaged tight under my vambrace. It means nothing.

My entire being is split in two. One half is here, calculating trajectories, shouting orders, feeling the tremor of another catapult stone striking the lower gatehouse. The other half is in that solar, feeling every tremor she feels, wrapped in a fear more paralyzing than any army.

A ladder clatters against the wall to my right. A helmeted head appears over the crenellation. I am moving before I think. My sword is a silver arc in the torchlight. It’s not a duel. It’s butchery. Efficient. Cold. The man dies without a sound, tumbling back onto his comrades.

This is what I am. This is what I was made for. Not for ballrooms or subtle plots. For this. For holding a line of stone against the tide of madness. For turning men into meat to protect what is mine.

Mine.

The thought is a fire in the frozen dark. She is mine. The life struggling to come into this violent world is mine. And I will paint this mountain red with the blood of any man who tries to touch them.

“Fire arrow on the central engine!” I roar.

A whoosh, a trailing line of light across the black sky. It falls short. Curses ripple along the wall.

Another wave of pain hits me, but it’s not physical. It’s a ghost of hers. A sympathetic wrench in my gut. My hand tightens on my sword hilt until the leather groans.

Hold on, Paige. Just hold on.

(Paige’s POV)

Time loses meaning. It is measured only in pains and crashes.

The midwife, an old woman with hands like bird bones but a grip of iron, has arrived. She and Mara move around me, a practiced team. The world shrinks to this room, to the fire, to the relentless pressure building inside me.

“The babe is in a hurry,” the old woman mutters, her fingers pressing low on my belly. “Stress will do that. Fool men and their wars.”

Another contraction seizes me, longer, stronger. A cry is torn from my throat. It’s not just pain. It’s power. Primal, terrifying, undeniable power. My body is doing something enormous, something beyond my control, in the middle of a nightmare.

“I can’t,” I sob, as it finally ebbs. “Not like this. Not here.”

Mara wipes my brow with a cool cloth. “You can. You are. There is no ‘here’ or ‘there.’ There is only this. You are a mountain, girl. And mountains endure.”

The door bursts open.

Noah stands there, framed in torchlight from the corridor. He is a vision of the night war. Soot and blood streak his face. His armor is dented. More blood, not his own, is splattered across his chestplate. His eyes are wild, scanning the room until they find me.

In that moment, he isn’t the Duke of Ashes or the fearsome general. He is a man staring into the heart of his own vulnerability. The sight of me, pale and sweat-drenched, surrounded by the stark realities of birth, hits him with more force than any siege engine.

He takes a step into the room. “Paige.”

His voice is cracked, raw. That one word holds everything—the fear from the walls, the love, the desperate need to be here, to fix this, to protect.

The old midwife turns on him. She is a fraction of his size, but she puffs up like an angry hawk. “Out!”

He ignores her, his eyes locked on mine. He starts toward the bed.

The midwife plants herself in his path. “Your Grace, with respect, you reek of blood and death. You will frighten the life right out of her and the babe. This is my battlefield now. Yours is out there.” She jabs a bony finger toward the door, where the sounds of combat are a distant thunder.

Noah’s gaze doesn’t waver from me. “I’m not leaving her.”

A new pain crests, a tsunami this time. I arch off the bed, a guttural sound leaving me that I don’t recognize as my own. I see his face fracture.

“Noah,” I gasp when I can speak. “The wall… they need you.”

“I need you,” he says, the words stripped bare, agonized.

The midwife puts her hands on her hips. “What she needs is to focus on bringing your child into the world, not worrying about you getting an arrow in the back because you’re distracted! You fight your war! I’ll fight hers! Now GO!”

Her words are like a slap. He flinches. His eyes, wide and desperate, search mine for permission, for a sign.

In this moment, I love him so fiercely it is its own kind of pain. This mighty, terrifying man, brought to a standstill by the sight of me in labor. He wants to defy the war, the midwife, the world, to stay.

But she is right. His presence is a turbulence I can’t afford. His fear is a second storm in the room. And his men need their mountain king on the wall, unbreakable.

With a strength I borrow from the very life struggling to be born, I meet his gaze. I try to make mine strong, sure. “Go,” I whisper, echoing the midwife. “Keep them out. For us.”

A shudder runs through him. He nods, once, a sharp, military motion. The duke slams back down over the man. But the man’s eyes are still there, blazing.

He turns to leave. At the door, he stops. He doesn’t look back, his broad back tense. His voice, when it comes, is low, a vow meant only for the stones and for me to hear.

“I will hold this line,” he promises. “Until my last breath. For you. For our child.”

Then he is gone, the door closing, shutting out the torchlight and the sound of his boots on stone.

The silence he leaves behind is filled only by the distant war and the roaring in my own ears.

The next contraction hits instantly, as if his departure was a signal. This one is different. Urgent. Final.

“Ah,” the midwife says, her tone shifting. “The head. Now, my lady. Now is the time. You must push.”

Mara’s hands are on my shoulders. “You heard your duke. Be a mountain. Push.”

I bear down. The world dissolves into a white-hot nexus of pressure and purpose. The screams from the walls, the crashing stones, the fear of Greymont’s knives—it all funnels into this single, monumental effort.

I am not a seer. I am not a witch or a prize or a duchess.

I am a woman, bringing life into a world of death. And in this moment, it is the most powerful, most terrifying, most sacred thing I have ever done.

(Noah’s POV)

I kill a man on the stairs back to the wall. He’d slipped through a postern gate, a infiltrator with a dagger meant for dark corridors and soft targets. My sword takes his head before he can blink.

The violence is clean. Simple. It focuses me.

I reach the battlement. The scene is worse. A section of the wall-walk has been shattered by a boulder. Men are fighting hand-to-hand in the breach. The night is alive with the shrieks of the wounded, the screams of the dying, the metallic tang of blood on the frozen air.

Alex is a demon, his two swords moving in a blur, holding the left flank of the breach. He sees me and his eyes widen, not with relief, but with a question.

I answer it by wading into the fray.

My world becomes a series of mechanical actions. Parry. Thrust. Hack. Shove. The faces of the men I kill are blanks. They are not men. They are obstacles between me and that room. Between the world and my heart, which is currently splitting itself in two down in the keep’s belly.

A giant of a man, wearing Greymont’s boar sigil, comes at me with a war hammer. I duck the swing, feeling the wind of it pass my skull. I come up inside his guard, my dagger finding the seam of his armor at the hip. He bellows. I shove him off the wall into the seething darkness below.

Are you safe? Are you alive?

The questions are a frantic drumbeat in time with my heart.

An arrow sprouts from the chest of the man next to me. He looks down, surprised, then crumples. I snatch up his fallen shield, raising it as a volley of arrows clatters against it.

Hold on. Hold on.

I risk a glance back toward the keep, toward the high, narrow window of the solar. A faint, steady glow comes from it. The fire. The life-fire.

A new sound cuts through the cacophony of war. Not a scream of pain or rage.

A thin, high, furious wail.

It pierces the night, clear and undeniable.

It is the sound of a new voice announcing itself to the world.

My breath stops. My sword arm falls to my side.

For one heartbeat, two, the world goes utterly silent. Even the battle seems to pause, as if the mountain itself is listening.

Alex, panting and bloodied beside me, turns. A slow, disbelieving smile breaks through the grime on his face. “My lord…?”

The wail comes again, stronger this time. A proclamation.

My child.

The ice that has encased my soul since I left that room shatters. A feeling so vast it is terrifying floods in—relief, awe, a love so sharp it is agony.

They are alive. She did it. My Paige, my fierce, impossible Paige, brought our child into this besieged, broken world.

The enemy chooses that moment to surge forward again, seeing my distraction.

The love and relief crystallize in an instant into something harder than diamond, colder than the deepest glacier. A protective fury so absolute it transcends rage.

I turn back to the breach, to the men scrambling over the rubble toward us.

My smile is not a human thing. It is the grin of the mountain given flesh.

“My wife,” I say, my voice carrying over the din, “has just given me a son.”

I raise my sword, the steel gleaming red in the firelight. The new, pure cry from the keep seems to ring along its edge.

“Now,” I roar, the sound echoing off the stones, “let’s show these southern pigs what they’re truly up against!”

And with a sound that is part battle cry, part raw, exultant joy, I lead the counter-charge into the heart of the breach.