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When Ulder Ravengard was twenty-two years old, he picked up a girl at the bar.
Or, rather, she picked him up—with her eyes, soft gold-brown glancing at him from her table, appraising and approving when he finally gained enough courage to go up and talk to her; with her voice, her name the prettiest thing Ulder had ever heard; with her skin, dark and smooth as silk, when he asked her to dance; her body warm when she stood just a little too close; with her smile, coy and a little shy, when she invited him back to hers.
Both a little drunk, a little young, a little foolish, and maybe just a bit careless due to all those things. But it was good, even though they were both a little awkward, a little uncoordinated; her breathless little laugh made him shiver, and the sounds she made afterward made the whole business all worth it, because he hadn’t wanted to be at the bar to begin with, but the team had insisted.
Ulder found he didn’t regret it.
What he did regret was having to leave her bed afterward; he kissed her goodbye, and slipped out into the early morning twilight to his hotel. Consigned Francesca to memory, and endured the ribbing of the team about the hickey on his neck. Regretted not leaving his number—but maybe that was for the best.
He thought of her, sometimes; wondered how she was, and whether she ever thought of him. But less and less, as the years went by, as his reputation and his fame grew, and he cemented himself as one of the greats; and hardly at all, after he met Zevlor and thought this is it, this is what they mean when the talk about the one—and he doesn’t regret anything at all about how his life turned out.
When Ulder Ravengard is twenty-eight, he learns he has a son.
Ulder’s recovering from an injury, and is out of play till the next season, when a friend mentions needing a replacement coach for the under-sevens minor team. He’s expected to do community outreach anyway, so he doesn’t need to get paid for it; the kids are an eclectic mix of genders and species, and the minor teams don’t so much “play hockey” as “goof around as a loose unit with knives attached to their feet,” but one sticks out.
Wyll Eltan is six years old, skates like he was born with them, and is a carbon copy of Ulder at the same age—at least, physically. He has a gap-toothed little smile, and seems more interested in skating as fast as he can and trying to do spins than he is playing even the facsimile of hockey performed by young children. He’s friendly, too; gets along with everyone, even the somewhat bad-tempered Githyanki and the shy, blunt little half-Elf, the two kids Ulder had worried about the most. Presumably, he gets that from the maternal side—it certainly wasn’t Ulder’s, who had made exactly three friends in his life and through sheer bullheadedness had managed to generate a handful of friendly acquaintances; but he wasn’t allowed to talk to reporters. “Friendly” and “charismatic” were not words one applied to Ulder Ravengard, as a rule.
Wyll’s definitely his kid, though, or there’s a freakish coincidence going on here.
He knows you can’t just ask a woman if you knocked her up, and if she’d mind awfully if you wanted to actually be the kid’s father and take some damned responsibility for the life you helped make. Prove you were better than your own parents—and fuck, he has to talk to Zevlor too, who didn’t sign up for this, but Ulder has a responsibility to do the right thing and that’s his kid, he’s sure of it—
Except.
Wyll’s mother is Baroness Francesca Eltan, according to his registration sheet. He’s never seen her up close; it’s usually Wyll’s nanny who drops him off and picks him up. The one time it had been the Baroness collecting him, Ulder had only got a glimpse of the tall, willowy figure Wyll called “Mama.” What were the chances that she had been slumming in a Silverymoon dive, picking up hockey players?
He gets his answer pretty quickly, as it happens.
Because Baroness Eltan comes to pick up Wyll, for once, and it’s definitely her: the pretty university student had become a beautiful, perfectly poised woman somewhere down the line—elegant and self-possessed, like she was better than you, but that wasn’t your fault, because she had been blessed to be an Eltan and you, poor soul, were not. The sort of woman Ulder Ravengard wouldn’t even have the inclination to approach, usually.
He notices the moment she recognizes him. Twenty-two and twenty-eight haven’t changed him that much. He can see it in the widening of her eyes, the straightening of an already perfectly straight spine; but she says nothing, merely slips him her cell number discreetly so they can discuss the situation privately: over tea in her parlour, because baronesses do not lower themselves to have living rooms like normal people.
There’s no doubt Wyll is his, she admits; there had never been anyone else afterward, because a double major in university precludes a great deal of social interaction; and there wasn’t anyone now, because between Wyll, the estate, political obligations, and grad school, there was neither time nor desire. There is no step-father to negotiate around; only Francesca, like a woman like that was only anything.
He wonders, briefly, why she never tried to find him, why this had to be happenstance. He’s not exactly unknown, and he could have been there for her, and for Wyll—
But he had never given her his surname, had he. She never watched Men’s hockey, so she had no idea who he was beyond “guy from the bar.” Which was…fine. It was fine. She’s the mother of his son, and he’s the guy who never bothered giving her a name or a contact number, and she’s willing to let him make up for it, for not being there; and Zevlor’s willing to stick it out, be a stepdad, because he’s a better man than Ulder deserves.
They’ll have to ease into it. They’ll need a paternity test, for legal reasons; Francesca insists on a background check for him and Zevlor, because this is her son and Ulder is, despite everything, a stranger; a preliminary custody agreement— supervised visits at first, either with Francesca present or her monster of a bodyguard, who had played hockey when there had been far fewer rules, and broke them all anyway; who had left the game when it started getting “soft”; who went to ground for years afterward, who Wyll called “grandad Brennan” and everyone else called a living nightmare in tones of admiration or horror or occasionally lust.
The terms are offered like a treaty to a defeated enemy, and Ulder’s nickname might be the Grand Duke, but what was that compared to a queen protecting what was hers?
Ulder capitulates immediately, because he can’t not.
As he watches the ink dry on the paper, it sinks in.
Ulder falls in love with fatherhood the way he falls in love with everything else: hard enough to bruise, picking himself up, wiping the blood from his mouth, and getting on with it.
He buys a sensible three-bedroom house in Bloomington to replace his cheap studio apartment, and Zevlor finally moves in like they’ve been discussing off and on. It’s close enough to Wyll’s school that Ulder can pick him up sometimes, watching while he runs around the playground with his friends: a large tiefling who Ulder is shocked to find out is only a few months older than Wyll, and Lae’zel and Jenevelle from hockey, because apparently this specific baby baron went to the same schools as a common slub’s.
Ulder knows he doesn’t want to be a father like his own, and has the vague idea that the father he actually wanted is not the sort that Wyll needs; but he tries his best, and reads the books on childcare Francesca lends him. Zevlor works for a non-profit for foster children, so he’s pretty good with kids—which helps when Ulder doesn’t know what to do in the face of a tantrum or a sulk. Which isn’t often—Wyll’s a sweet-natured child, with an unexpected level of emotional self-regulation that Ulder suspects comes from Francesca’s finishing-school polished manners.
The first time Wyll calls him “Da,” Ulder very nearly cries.
Wyll’s loved, is the thing. Wyll’s loved so much—by all three of his parents, his surrogate grandad, his nanny; by all the staff at both Francesca’s townhouse and her country estate, that she still stays at when it’s not being rented for weddings and the like, because Wyll is going to be an honest-to-Gods baron, which is still weird as hell when Ulder thinks about it. Which isn’t often; there’s a recklessness in Wyll that doesn’t allow for much time for reflection, because a baby baron is just as likely to break his neck climbing too high in a tree as a regular kid, and there’s an adoration of water that keeps Ulder up at night.
They like to blame Zevlor for it, despite the fact that Zevlor has never been reckless in his life, and had no part of Wyll’s genetic makeup to begin with. Besides, it’s pretty clear the recklessness can be blamed squarely on his mother, once Ulder caves and stalks her Instagram on the urging of a teammate with druidic persuasions.
Where Wyll gets a lot of his nascent personality becomes very, very clear.
Aesthetic pictures of tea trays and ads for environmental causes are intermixed with Francesca delightedly holding giant, horrifying looking bees in swamps with clear signs of dragon habitation, paired with cheerful screeds about fire-breathing insects and the importance of protecting wetlands. She’s nuts, in a delicate, proper sort of way, and it makes her impossible not to like.
Gradually they all become friends: Francesca stealing Zevlor to accompany her to the opera, or the symphony, leaving Wyll and Ulder to their own devices for the evening; or they all go hiking, Wyll running along the trail delightedly, pointing out things like frogs or mushrooms or bees for his mum; falling asleep on Ulder’s shoulder as they walk back, exhausted, something warm and scared thundering in Ulder’s chest the whole way. This tiny life trusting him, depending on him; the dark spectre of what if I fuck this up always just a little too close for comfort, even in the sunshine with the three people he cares about most in the world. He knows what to do on the ice, with its rules and regulations, its winners and losers, and he knows how to recover, how to get better, when the other side takes the win.
But he has this, for now; his little boy a heavy weight in his arms, getting so big right in front of his eyes; Zevlor at his side, ember eyes watching the trail and warning Ulder away from the trip hazards he can’t always see; Francesca just ahead, or behind, as the fancy takes her—or watching Wyll with an expression he can’t place, something fond and wistful in her eyes, and it makes the scared part of Ulder ache, a little, and he can’t place that either—wants to fix it, whatever it is, because she’s not supposed to want for anything, the same way Zevlor isn’t—
And Ulder Ravengard takes that thought, locks it up in a little mental box, and punts it into the harbour—because that’s a surefire way to turn might into will and he’s not going to risk it, can’t risk it, not with so much at stake. He loves Zevlor and he loves Wyll and he likes Francesca, and that’s how it’s going to stay.
(He’s not wrong, but he’s not entirely right, either.)