Chapter Text
Dutiful wailed for milk, clean linens, and sleep. Dutiful wailed when the nursery was cold, and he wailed when the nursery was hot. Sometimes, in the night, when Kettricken lay asleep on her pallet beside the cradle, she startled awake to a quiet room — his phantom wails had followed her into her dreams. She’d sit up and look at him anyway.
It was the same tonight. It had been a particularly rough day. She’d raised her voice at Dove. She tried never to be harsh with the nursemaids, but Dutiful had been shrieking an ear-piercing shriek, and Dove kept insisting that Kettricken be off to bed, and let her handle the young prince. But who can care for him better than his mother?
She’d sent Dove away, and all the rest. She could care for her little son. She fed him at her breast and rocked him for hours, all alone in their nursery, watching a silver moon ascend to its place among a thousand stars. The nursery window faced Farrow, and beyond it, the Mountains. She’d requested that. She walked back and forth beside the window, singing lullabies in her native tongue, pleading with the Chyurdan gods to let her baby sleep.
She felt less alone, knowing that beyond those hills lie the colorful homes of Jhaampe, the sheep in the valleys, the pink wildflowers in the highlands. Her father. Her aunts and uncles and cousins. The grave of her brother.
“So many people you will never know,” Kettricken whispered to Dutiful in the language of Chyurda.
Now Dutiful rested in her arms, his lips parted in sleep. Blessed peace. She kissed him and placed him in his cradle, and then she sank down beside him, too weary to stand another moment. Her fingers crept through the cradle slats to touch his hand. “Jhaumet,” she said to him. My son.
In her nursery, with only the light of the moon to reflect off of cold Buck stone, her tears shimmered silver.
Kettricken did not mind rising for his weeping, nor rocking him until his wailing ceased, but a bitter helplessness welled in her at Dutiful’s sorrow. A child should not cry so much. In Jhaampe, as a child, Kettricken had loved to play the nursemaid for her small cousins, for friends of the family. None of those children had cried like this. Or had they, and I was too young and foolish to know better?
Kettricken did not know how to help him. Chade had offered her a sleeping herb to use on Dutiful, but she little trusted his concoctions. If her mother was here to teach her… or the Fool, who had so entertained the children of Jhaampe… Fitz, with his earnest counsel…
And then it was Verity she thought of. Verity, who should have been here. Verity, who should have made the crib with his own hands, carved from the tree Kettricken selected at the riverbank. It was Verity who should have comforted Dutiful, Verity who should have comforted her—
“You should have been here,” she cried through gritted teeth, and she bowed her head to the pain.
She did not know how long she wept. But when she lifted her eyes again, Dutiful stared back at her. Kettricken flinched. “No, no,” she whispered hurriedly, reaching. “All is well, jhaumet. All is well. Please, don’t cry.”
And for once, he didn’t. He only stared. Her little son, so perfect after so much sorrow. He had great brown eyes and long black lashes, like his father, and there was a mole at his temple, which reminded Kettricken so much of the mole on the back of Verity’s neck. She’d searched and searched her baby for traces of herself, but Dutiful was his father’s son.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” Kettricken said. The fussy baby watched her with seeing eyes, and she took in a shuddering breath. “Oh,” she said brokenly. She stroked his cheek with the tip of her finger. He was so warm to the touch. “I wish Verity could see you,” she whispered. “I wish your father were here. Dutiful, do you even know that he is gone? Can you even tell what is missing?”
But Dutiful said nothing. Kettricken sat beside his cradle and stroked his cheek until Verity’s eyes closed to her.