“Beguiled,” he corrected austerely. “I don’t think mice have brains enough to fall in love.”
She dimpled. “I never noticed as it took brains.”
“There is that, Spark.” He creaked to his feet, peered a bit blearily around the room, found his slat box, tipped it on its side in front of the staring mice-whose heads turned in unison to track him-and chivvied them into it. Carrying them out the door onto Arkady’s roofless porch, he poured them over the rail. They fell with only a few faint squeaks, bouncing unharmed in the grass below, and, shocked out of their trance, scampered away. For now. Dag shook his head and trod back inside, where Fawn was sitting up lovely-naked and laughing behind her hand.
“The poor things!”
He grinned and opened himself to her bright ground as if basking in sunlight. Then went still, blinking.
Within her vivid swirl spun a brighter spark yet. He knew it at once, from that heartbreaking almost-month that he and Kauneo…
Fawn had no groundsense. It was his task to track when the brilliant changes in her ground signaled her time of fertility, and switch to alternate forms of pleasuring each other. For all the eight months of their marriage and before, she had trusted him to do so. How had he missed the signals last night? Blight it, he’d known it was almost time…!
No, not blight it, never in the same breath with this. That breath tangled in his throat in a ball of guilt, terror, and joy. If he’d taken one of Challa’s surgical knives and laid open his own chest wall, his heart could not be more exposed in this moment.
It might not catch. More than half of all such conceptions never did; many of the remainder failed in the first few weeks, barely delaying the woman’s monthly. It was one of the strongest, if least discussed, Lakewalker social rules to make no comment upon those blazing signs in a woman’s ground unless she brought them up herself. Should he say anything until he was more sure? When would that be? Fawn had been pregnant once before; how soon would she recognize her own symptoms?
Would they be the same, for this half-blood child? If that spark survived to become a child…?
“Dag? ” said Fawn doubtfully. “You feeling all right? Why’re you lookin’ at me like that? ”
He fell to his knees beside her, crouched, gathered her up in his arms, hugged her fiercely and protectively. Feeling as helpless as he’d ever been. “Because I love you,” he told her.
“Well, sure,” she said, a bit shaken by his fervor. “I knew that.” She hugged him back, bemused.
Absent gods. What do we do now?
10
So, when are you going to tell her, Dag?” Arkady asked curiously.
Dag re-furled his reaching groundsense, anxiously following Fawn down the road toward the medicine tent. She was off early to help the herb girls prepare the morning’s load for the farmer’s market. Five dizzy days it had been since that careless hour in their bedroll…
He glanced up to find the Oleana boys grinning at him over their tea and plunkin, and clenched his teeth. He could endure, he supposed, their smirking at him; never at her. For that alone, he ought to tell her soon. Or pound them, whichever came first.
“It’s not going to be-we’re past that-gods. That horror you told me about. When it plants in the wrong place. And I’d have to-my own first-”
Barr and Remo looked blank.
“Safely past,” Arkady soothed him.
Dag let out a pent breath. “That other thing-like Tawa Killdeer-”
“Not that, either,” said Arkady. “It looked this morning like a very nice implantation up in the right rear wall of the womb, just where it should be.”
And not twins, as far as Dag could tell. Lakewalker women almost never bore twins, but when they did, Arkady had said, there could be more problems, the added stress on the mother cascading to other troubles, or an even more bizarre tangling together of the children’s bodies. And Fawn was so little… Not that, either, Dag reminded himself. None of that. A whole category of complications he could cross right off.
“You know,” said Arkady, “almost all apprentices go through a phase where they’re convinced they’re coming down with every new disease they’ve just learned about. I thought you were going to be the notable exception. I suppose I didn’t think it through quite far enough.”
Barr snickered. Dag didn’t lunge across the table at him, and took a moment to feel proud of his self-control. He needed some positive thoughts, just now.
“It’s the women’s game,” Remo assured him, with all the certainty of his vast inexperience. “They look after all that stuff, Dag. Relax.”
“It’s not a game,” growled Dag. “Absent gods. Was I that stupid when I was your age? I suppose I was.” And Remo’s careless remark reminded him once more that Fawn had no kinswomen here to wrap their care around her like an heirloom quilt.
Barr shook his head. “I’ve never seen you dither like this, Dag.”
I’ve never been faced with this before, you young dolt…! It’s all new! New to him, at least. Old as the world. “Entertainin’, am I?” Dag snapped.
He rose abruptly. “Come on, Arkady. Let’s go talk out on the porch. Leave these two to their swill.”
“It’s breakfast!” Barr protested in mock outrage. “We don’t swill breakfast!”
“Well, maybe the tea,” allowed Remo, tipping back his mug.
Arkady followed him out without protest. Dag slammed the porch door on their laughter.
It was better, leaning on the railing in the mild air. The sun was not high enough yet to warm Dag’s back, but it lit the golden haze across the surface of the lake and along the farther shore. The first faint green breathed in the trees, with a pink splash of redbud bright against stark gray branches. And, when Arkady leaned alongside him, Dag didn’t have to look him in the eye.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Dag said.
Arkady chuckled. “You can’t expect me to believe that.”
Dag’s hand clenched the rail; he bit back swearwords. “You know that’s not what I meant! I thought… not till we were more settled. Till we knew what we were doing. With this wedding trip behind us, which has gone on so long now I suppose I better start calling it a marriage trip. I even reckoned it-a child-was something I’d let Fawn choose, where and when. When-where-she’d be safe.” His grip tightened. “I don’t know enough!”
“You are aware,” said Arkady carefully, “nine out of ten women sail through this without special problems. Lakewalker, farmer, or half blood.”
Dag brooded. “Those used to sound like good odds.”
Arkady gazed out over the lake. “New Moon Cutoff would be about the safest place you could find for this, you do realize.”
“That thought had crossed my mind,” Dag admitted. “Maybe even safer than with her own kin. Certainly safer than somewhere in the north with just me, trying to figure out how to go on.”
“Then it might be time for a slightly more, ah, conciliating approach to people around here, do you suppose?” Arkady suggested mildly.
“More adaptive? ”
“What a delicate tongue you have, Arkady.” Dag sighed and turned to lean sideways, watching his profile. “Reckon you could near make lace with it.”
“I’d be satisfied if I could make a good groundsetter.” Arkady tilted his tea mug in toast to Dag, and drank. “But I think you know that by now.”
Dag stood silent for a while, letting the balmy air caress his winter skin. “You could find another apprentice. You always have. Where is the north going to find another Dag ’n Fawn? ”
“Service is service. One man can only do his day’s work no matter where he is.”
“True enough.” So much rode on this pivot point of their lives, so unexpectedly aimed at Dag’s heart. Strange for such a tiny spark to weigh so heavily; it might move worlds.
Yet it all could still prove in vain. Dag reconsidered Arkady with new respect. How many times had he gone through these same gyrations, only to have his hopes wash away in sorrow? Dag felt abruptly ashamed. “Sorry to be dithering like this. It’s my first time, see.” It was surely as profound a ground transformation as any he’d experienced this punch-drunk year, when he’d become first Fawn’s patroller, then Fawn’s husband, then captain, makeshift mage, then not a patroller at all. An uprooted seeker… a new maker. And now, once again, Fawn remade him. Fawn’s child’s father. When this is over, I will be a different man.