#upsets like this have major impacts upon the powerless. esp since part of defaming the lord and lady is to mismanage their lands

[tummy-bump-king]

What's the pregnant lord carrying? 👀

just a normal baby! this is what I have for him so far:

He is trans and stealth; nobody except his (now deceased) parents and his wife know. currently toying with the idea of him having taken the place of a brother who died when they were children

he cares for his wife, but their marriage was a political one, an effort to unify their families, as a power struggle had begun to ramp up in their parents' generation, and there was increasing risk of coup/assassination/etc. he is banking on both his lady's affection for him and the fallout her reputation would suffer if she told anyone, to keep his secret

he has a relationship with his head guardsman- that's who the other father is. the lady knows and consents, and the baby was accidental. the relationship was meant to be casual because they both know they can never commit to each other fully, but they fell much harder than they expected

they had just discovered the pregnancy, and he and the lady were making plans to keep it and spin the optics as her being the pregnant one when the story begins. they are dragged out of bed by strange soldiers in the middle of the night. the last thing our lord sees before being pulled away is the bloody body of his guardsman in their antechamber

they spend a long night in terror and uncertainty before it is revealed that the perpetrator is the lady's family who is responsible when her father comes to gloat. they had been dissatisfied with the minor power granted to them with only a daughter in the ladyship, and with the long (a few years) wait for offspring, so they finally decided to seize power for themselves

the lady's family know there would be much more political risk, like backlash from other members of the peerage or even the crown, if they were to commit an all out hostile takeover. so instead, they are going to keep the lord and lady alive, to parade around as the nominal rulers, while they make the real decisions.

most especially, they want the lord and lady to seem lazy and incompetent, so that they can justifiably install themselves as regents when their lands begin to fail, and the lord and lady have every appearance of abdicating in all but name. when the lord's belly begins to swell visibly, this only adds to their narrative that he is fat and complacent

the lord and lady are kept in separate rooms, only permitted to see each other extremely sparingly. while it is not a dungeon, their cells are normal stone rooms in the castle, but with almost all the furnishings removed and restraints added, so it might as well be. this also means that no outsider would think their residence odd unless they were to physically enter the rooms, which they cannot do

obviously the pregnancy is revealed eventually, I would say around the 6 month mark, when it becomes clear that it is not possible for the lord to continue growing in this way with the food he's given and the conditions he's kept in. once the lady's family discover the truth, they adopt a similar plan to the lord and lady's original one, to present the child as of the lady, and then to rule through the child as a puppet heir.

I don't have an ending put together yet, but basically heavy on the angst and whump. I'm contemplating a miscarriage or stillbirth, because theres only so much hunger, cold, and physical injury a fetus can take, and only so much the parent can take before it rejects the extra strain. I do plan on an ultimately not tragic ending, so our poor lord isnt going to die in pain and ignominy, he is at least going to escape with his life. I will have to think on it more