Page 79 of Omega’s Fealty

I am the one exception. I asked to be.

The circlet the Archbishop hands him is plain. There are no stones. Aurelio takes it in both hands. His fingers are cold. I can smell him from here, over the incense and the wet wool of three hundred coats. Vanilla and strawberry.

He puts it on my head. His thumb touches my temple, where the gray is, and stays there a second longer than the rehearsal.

“Up,” he says, very quietly, in English. “We are done.”

I get up.

The Archbishop says the last of it. The organ comes in again. Aurelio turns and takes my hand and we walk down the aisle together. He is slower than he was in Washington. I match him.

Outside the doors, the square is full and the noise hits us like a wall of sound. I can hear his name. I can hear mine, which is stranger. The snow is coming down in fat wet flakes.

He waves. I don’t, but then he nudges me and I do it. Nobody has ever wanted a wave from me before. That is weird too. I suppose I will have to get used to it.

When we finally leave, the car is warm, Gerhard is in the front and the glass is up.

Aurelio takes the crown off the moment the door shuts and sets it on the seat beside him. I do the same with mine. Then he leans his head on my shoulder and breathes out through his nose.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “My back hurts.”

“It’s been hurting all week.”

“It’s different.”

I look at him. He is very calm. He is always very calm. The first time I met him he was locked up and he was calm then too, right up until he wasn’t.

“What kind of different?”

“I was not going to stop the coronation, Roan.”

“How different?”

He thinks about it. He is actually thinking about it and while he is doing that his hand goes to the side of his belly and his whole face changes.

Not much. Someone who didn’t know him wouldn’t have seen it. His mouth goes tight and he stops breathing for a second and then starts again.

“That different,” he says.

The car has stopped at the palace gates. Aurelio puts his hand on my arm, the bad one, and squeezes.

“I think,” he says, “that you should ask Gerhard to drive somewhat faster.”

23. Aurelio

They built the birthing suite in six weeks. It is on the ground floor of the east wing, in what used to be a music room, and it has a bed that goes up and down, an enormous bathroom and a pool.

The pool was Havel’s idea. He read that water birthing was modern. It is sunk into the floor in the corner, tiled in blue, and it is already full by the time Roan gets me through the door, because somebody radioed ahead from the car.

There are too many people in the room. I count them while a contraction goes through me and I hold onto the doorframe.

Two doctors. Three midwives. A nurse I don’t know. The Chamberlain, with a folder. Havel, at the wall. Gerhard, in the door behind us. A young man with a camera around his neck who I think is from the palace press office, and a woman in an apron holding a stack of towels.

“Your Majesty,” the Chamberlain says, and opens the folder.

“Not now.”