At long last, I can deliver the fic that spawned from my DM and I getting on the topic of the AU “what if all the Lamburn kids had been tieflings instead of just Taber?”
cw: pregnancy, mild misgendering/deadnaming of a trans character (Taber is the second baby mentioned and was too young to name herself)
Blood was Our Inheritance, 2.2k words
Astrid can’t summon any joy when Julianna announces that she’s pregnant again, a year later. All she feels is apprehension.
At one point the announcement would have been exciting. The first time, when Astrid and Julianna had been expecting almost simultaneously, it was cause for celebration; the Lamburn line would have heirs soon, the family would be growing and deepening its roots. All of Hightower would look forward to the new children. It wouldn’t hurt at all, Astrid also felt, that both of the children would have a friend their age within the family. There had been so much hope.
The first baby to arrive was Julianna’s. The girl’s appearance had made her mother scream; her skin was a greyish-red that would have made her seem dead or dying, were it not for her perfectly healthy lungs. Her coloration did not improve with time, and when the girl opened her eyes, all that could be seen was white.
Julianna had been frightened by this development, yes, but Astrid had been even more so. For the first time in years, Astrid had remembered stories that had been told about the family since she was a little girl. Drivel, scandalous rumours, and little more—at least, that’s what she was told about these claims relating her family to a dark history that entangled them with the hells… She held her belly and prayed to each of the Triad of Pelor, Erathis, and Avandra, in the hopes that her baby would not break her heart like the baby girl had broken Julianna’s.
Three months later she delivered her heir, and the baby’s skin was a brilliant red that wasn’t just flush. Another tiefling.
The gods either hadn’t heard her, or had thought that this was a very funny joke.
A week later, the estate was closed to visitors indefinitely. The story the staff told their friends was that neither heir had survived more than a few days; the family was in mourning, they told the city, and it wasn’t really a lie. Astrid had felt as though she was grasping at sand running through her fingers, as the rumours surrounding her family’s history had become sobering fact. They really were cursed by a fiend from the hells: that’s why these children had been marked by devil-like features. It would take a miracle to recover their dignity if anyone were to find out.
Astrid and Julianna had spoken at length about what to do, and her sister-in-law wasn’t about to give up Judoc—gods, Astrid had scoffed internally, Julie had even named her—despite the scandal that the girl could cause. Gwilherm seemed to agree with his wife, but Astrid could tell her brother was just as scared for the family as she felt. Maybe he could see it in her, too, but he was tactful, always had been, and said nothing about it; he only said that they could keep Judoc within the estate, and they could do the same for Astrid’s heir, too. “At least the children shall get along” were his words.
In the end, it was the baby himself who wore her down. Despite those empty eyes of his, Astrid could see so much of his father in his tiny face. Even the hair, short as it was in one so young, could have been Ciro’s brown were it not tinted red. Ciro hadn’t spoken twenty words to her since Judoc’s arrival—she didn’t know what she would have said even if he would speak to her, truth be told—so seeing his face in their baby was the nearest thing to comfort she’d get through this miserable situation.
Dameron would stay. She just hoped it had been the right decision.
And now, Julianna was pregnant again.
Astrid stays her tongue just short of calling her sister-in-law a fool, but Julianna insists that lightning couldn’t strike the same place thrice. It could have just been the timing of the first births, she muses, as close together as they were. A third child after a year of waiting would surely be safe from the curse that had befallen the eldest two.
Astrid appreciates the optimism, even if she doesn’t say so out loud. Maybe she could be more hopeful herself if she had the same support that Gwilherm gave his wife; she’s still barely heard from Ciro. The babies are still too young to do much else than accidentally hit one another and cry when one tugs on the other’s tail, but they’re growing. What the hell could he have been doing in the last year? Astrid wishes she knew.
She also wishes she knew whether or not Julianna was naive to feel so optimistic. She’s correct about lightning, but what do any of them know about infernal curses? Two demon children, one right after the other, doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Not when large numbers factor into the stories she’d grown up hearing about Antilles Lamburn: the man who had tricked a fiend into granting him wealth and status by making the fiend believe it would get to claim his descendants’ souls. She’d once dismissed such rumours completely, and not in the least because her mother had claimed the number of descendants the fiend was meant to damn was one hundred and her aunt had sworn it to be five times that. But now, she finds herself wondering which of those numbers had been closer to the truth. Would it matter either way for Julianna’s next child?
Her sister-in-law decides on a name before the child is even born: Allegra for a girl, Felix for a boy. She has so much hope for this child, so much hope that their arrival will be easier than their sister’s, that she wants to make it true. Astrid’s belief in hope is tenuous at best, these days, but she would be grateful if the gods would humour Julianna, if no one else.
⁂
They’ve only made themselves fools. Felix is born with berry-red skin and the same pale eyes as his sister and cousin.
They couldn’t claim he was stillborn: that’s what Hightower believed had become of Astrid’s child, and they believed that Julianna’s first hadn’t survived her first three days. People would start to lose faith in the legitimacy of the Lamburns if they could not produce heirs, and using the same excuse too many times would yield the same result. To reveal plainly that the family was indeed cursed as the rumours had long claimed, however, would be to invite an angry mob to the door of the estate.
Damnit. Damnit. Damn them all for daring to hope they could get out of this without a scandal. Damn them for trying to outrun a curse.
This wasn’t a time where she had the luxury of being able to panic, however. She’d had that time, and she’d only used it to simply hope that this problem would go away on its own. Curse or no curse, the burden on the Lamburn name—the future of Hightower, of the family—rests on her shoulders and hers alone, and it’s up to her to decide what was best for everyone. She has no good options. She needs to think.
She needs to protect these children from the fiend that wants to claim them. By whatever means necessary.
⁂
“Have you been down here this entire time?”
‘Here’ is some kind of laboratory, a room that’s been converted from one of the house’s many hidden passages. Stacks of books and papers are illuminated only by candlelight, but their shadows reach up the walls.
“Well… that depends on how long you mean by—”
“No. Do not give me that, Ciro. No clever wordplay, no pedantry, just talk to me. You’ve been here for the last year and a half, and you didn’t even bother to tell me what you’re doing?”
“…You want the full truth, then?”
It takes a lot of restraint not to slap him.
“Yes, clearly.”
“Fine. I’ve been researching the origins of tieflings in order to find out what’s going on with these children, so we can try to cure them.”
Some of the books bear religious symbols on their covers: Pelor’s sunburst, Erathis’ gears, the green winds of Avandra, all clearly tomes borrowed from the Sun Circle’s libraries.
“You are very lucky none of the churches thought this was suspicious. This alone could have affected our reputation with the churches, and for what? There is no curing a curse.”
“Well—no. That may have been a poor word choice—”
“And why didn’t you think to tell me this is what you were doing? I could have told you that this was a hopeless task from the start.”
“No. There has to be an answer somewhere, I just haven’t found it yet.”
“Ciro.” She grabs her husband’s shoulders, forces him to look up at her. “We are well past the point of trying to ‘cure’ this. Or have you spent so much time down here, leaving me and everyone else to their own devices, that you hadn’t noticed we now have a third child in the estate?”
“I know—”
“Judoc, Dameron, and now Felix. That’s three tieflings. The Lamburn curse is a real and present issue. You may not have realized that, but I have.”
“Astrid.”
She watches his candlelit face and holds her tongue. She wonders if he’s going to follow that up with anything, but eventually:
“Just because I haven’t found the answer yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I thought I would have made more progress by now, but—well, this is complicated subject matter. Besides… what choice do we have? If we can’t fix three tiefling children, we can’t recover from the scandal.”
“…You know, Ciro? That’s the first thing you’ve said that I agree with.”
Silence hangs in the air between them. She lowers her arms.
“…What?”
“I agree, we can never recover from the scandal. They public will tear us apart if we say anything at this point. But even without your research, we know that there is a fiend after these children.” She sighs, willing her hands to stay still at her sides. “…So, we need to protect them. And to me, it looks as if the first way we can protect them is by removing the public from the equation.”
⁂
When the Governor General sends a party to pay visit to the Lamburn estate two years later, not a soul answers the door: the same response that they’d received just last week. This time, however, the party isn’t solely composed of diplomats, and the dragoons that have accompanied them confront the locked door head-on until it opens. Surely, Lady Astrid would understand that the violence came from a place of concern for her and her family’s well-being.
It had been more than two years since the Lamburn estate had been open to visitors. Once the doors had closed, Lady Astrid had begun reorganizing her estate, seemingly wanting to invest in different business partners closer to Hightower. She had been making fewer and fewer public appearances, increasingly allowing her capital to be generated by the family’s more trusted partners. The last time anyone could remember seeing her in person was roughly three months ago. Rumours had been circulating that she may have fallen ill, or worse.
The Governor General’s party searches the estate per their orders, looking for anyone still alive inside. Not only do they not even find a single servant or maid, however, but they also don’t find any bodies. No one has died in this house, but it’s clear no one still lives here, either. The rooms are left in a very tidy state: there are no books or shelves, no clothes or dressers, no tapestries or paintings on the walls, not even a single gold coin left in the coffer.
Beneath the music room, they find a hidden passage—this wasn’t unusual, given the age of the house, but the footsoldier who notices it is hopeful that there may be some sign of life inside. She gets mixed results, as there aren’t any living people in the room at the bottom of the stairs, but there are a handful of papers scattered about. There are scribbled notes related to the political history of Corellia, hidden under maps of Veniano port cities, thrown together with half-finished descriptions of clockwork devices from Shikonai… Each note that she discovers is more disjointed than the last.
At the end of an hour, the party regroups in the foyer. All that is clear is the fact that the Lamburns are no longer here in any way, shape, or form, and they were able to slip away without the Governor General having any idea of their intention to do so. But where could they have gone? The closest thing to a lead are all the notes left behind, but why would the entire family follow such eccentric ramblings? In the end, they’re no closer to an answer. They will have to locate former members of the Lamburns’ staff for answers.
This will be an odd report to bring back: Hightower’s oldest noble house, gone without a trace.