kitchen_maid | March 5-6, Palace at Amber

It is precisely twenty-three steps from the top of the stairs to the window at the end of the hall. Step sixteen (seven coming back) carries him to the door to Amy’s room, and step seventeen (eight coming back) carries him past it.

Perry has been walking in this hallway, twenty-three steps up, turn, twenty-three steps back, since just after breakfast when Amy said, calmly as if she'd been asking for the jam, "Perry darling, I think you'd best call for Marta. And the midwife."

Every so often, someone – one of the assistant midwives, one of the ladies-in-waiting – comes out of the room, and Perry stops, and looks up, and get the same silent apologetic shake of the head – no news, nothing to report – before she rushes off after whatever she's been sent to get or do. And then he goes back to walking. Sometimes someone will come to talk to him – a minister, a courtier, Marta, Alfred. Most of them have to walk at an undignified scamper to keep up with the long-legged king.

Just after midnight, Lady Rosalind comes out, tired and rumpled, looks up and down the hall, rather unsuccessfully trying to push her pale hair back into its net. She is Amy's favorite lady-in-waiting and closest friend in Ambergeldar, and this is the first time she's come out of the room since she went in this morning. She comes over to Perry, curtseys in a perfunctory sort of way, then falls into step with him and says, "Your Majesty, Her Majesty sent me with a message."

"Yes?"

"She says, 'Oh, for heaven's sake, Perry, stop being ridiculous and go to bed.'"

Perry stops, startled, and turns to her. "What?"

"She says, 'Oh, for heaven’s sake, Perry, stop being ridiculous and go to bed,'" Rosalind repeats, dutifully.

"I am not being ridicul—" Perry starts, and then stops, and sighs. "How is she?"

"Tired," says Rosalind. "Very tired. But she's in as good of spirits as you could possibly expect, except that she's worried that you're wearing a trench into the flagstones out here."

"I don't think I could possibly sleep, Lady Rosalind," he says, frowning.

"Well, perhaps you could rest at least," says Rosalind, without much conviction that he's going to.

Perry hesitates for a moment. "I—I don't—" and then, finally, "All right. You may tell Amy I've stopped being ridiculous."

"Of course, sire," says Rosalind, with a smile and another curtsey. She turns to go back into the room.

"And tell her –" he stops again, not sure what sort of message he's supposed to send at a time like this.

"I’ll tell her," Rosalind says, with another and very different smile, and then closes the door behind her.

Perry waits until the door closes, then, with a slight shake of his head and a muttered "Being ridiculous . . ." he goes back to his pacing. Twenty-three steps up, turn, twenty-three steps back.

Outside, the great bronze cannon on the castle walls (which is fired only for royal births and therefore hasn't been used in twenty-five years, when it announced Perry's arrival) is being fired twenty times, each "Boom!" echoing out over the city of Amber. The citizens are coming out from their schools and shops and homes into the bright midmorning sunshine, and cheering and throwing their hats in the air. Bells in every church in the capital are beginning to ring, a merry jumble of peals, and a general holiday has been declared in honor of the occasion.

But inside, in this room, there's a profound sense of stillness. Amy is propped up on a half dozen pillows, because quite frankly she's too tired to sit up any other way. But the arm supporting the baby is steady, and there's a smile on her face like nothing Perry has ever seen there before, but which he suspects matches the one on his face – a smile that somehow encompasses joy and wonder and serenity and, yes, exhaustion, and . . . and something else he doesn’t have a word for. Perry, standing in the doorway, doubts Amy would notice if anything short of the entire Ambergeldan army came marching through the room.

But he's wrong, because the moment he steps over the threshold she looks up, and holds her free hand out to him.

"We have a daughter," she says, quietly, as he takes her hand and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.

"Yes," he says, kissing her forehead, before leaning across her to kiss the baby's. "Can I --?"

Amy nods and gently transfers the baby from her arms to her husband's. The princess opens one blue eye, and then the other, and blinks at her father. Perry looks down at her for a long time before he speaks. "She’s beautiful, Amy."

"She is," says Amy, brushing back her daughter's hair, already golden, already showing a tendency to curl. "It would seem that fairy-given Ordinariness is not hereditary."

"No," says Perry. "Apparently not." He is, privately, almost disappointed by that fact. But only almost. It would be impossible to be really disappointed about anything about her.

He hands her back to Amy, carefully, before saying the same thing she said to him. "We have a daughter."

"Yes," says Amy.

"Susan."

"Yes," says Amy, again. "Susan." And as the Princess Susan begins to drift off to sleep, the Queen of Ambergeldar leans down and whispers to her, "Long days and pleasant nights, my darling girl. Long days and pleasant nights."