Page 72 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“You’ll eat first, and then you’ll sleep,” she said, like a mother, “for I don’t need the skills of divination to know you’ve been walking most of the night.”

She would hear of nothing else. He had to content himself with watching her flit across the kitchen, into the sunlight and out of it again. How is it that she is like a bird, too, he thought, and felt he was on to something, but then the food settled him, and Candle had proven right, for his head was nodding on his spine. She helped him to the room where they had so chastely slept, and after she had taken his shirt off and lightly run a damp cloth under his arms and behind the lengthening mane of hair at his nape, she dropped the cloth on the floor and pressed her hands against his bare chest, as if trying to interpret the arcane language of his heartbeat.

“Later,” she mouthed at him, and kissed the space where his lips would have been if he hadn’t just then begun to keel backward against the pillow.

The sleep was devoid of character. A good sleep.

He awoke well into the heat of the day, such as it was at this time of year. She had set out a tunic and fresh leggings. What a capable scavenger she was. The trousers, cut for a slenderer man, cinched too tightly at his thighs, but they were clean, and the tunic scented of pomander. In new garb he felt a new man, and looked out of the window to find her.

She was hard at work in the patch she’d mentioned. Using a sharp segment of the printing press’s broken iron wheel, she was levering aloft a resistant root of apple tree. Smudged now, where he was pristine, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and in vain tried to scatter a late population of midges who found the smell of her sweat enticing. He called to her, and she waved and fell heavily to her knees as the root chose that moment to yield.

“Let me do that,” he said.

“Done now. But I’ll rest a spell. Come down.”

They walked to the edge of the orchard, by turns sipping sweet well water from a single pipkin. “You’ve done good work here,” he told her gravely.

“I’ve had good reason.” With her little finger she picked at a bit of wax in one ear. “You’re back, now, and there’s one on its way.”

He arched an eyebrow, feeling very Commander Cherrystone-ish. “Company’s coming?”

“You could put it suchly.”

What was she reading out of this sunny hour that he couldn’t see—oh, he couldn’t, but then he could. “It’s not so. You’re not old enough.”

She said, “Though like you I can’t exactly say how old I am, apparently I am old enough, Liir.” Her tone was easy and a bit bored, but he thought he knew her well enough by now to suppose that she was at least a little frightened.

Many of the fellows in the unit had talked about this. They’d shared their observations. Women always knew, and a preternatural calm swept all other earthly considerations aside when it happened. But Candle was hardly a woman!—and not inaugurated into those mysteries. Or not by him.

“I’ve been gone only a few weeks,” he said, trying not to sound cold. “Or had you already charmed a local farmer with your domingon even when I was still recuperating inside? Is that how you got the goat, the cock, the hen—a bartering for your farmyard needs with your farmyard skills? Is that why you encouraged me to leave on a wild Bird chase?”

“You needn’t fuss so.” She bit her lip and looked at him levelly. “It was no other man, Liir.”

“It is not by me. Candle!” He slipped out of Qua’ati for a moment, to spew expletives in the orchard air. “I am a fool and a naïf and a monster, all at once, but I am not stupid about how a girl becomes pregnant. It is not by me. Don’t embarrass me with a hopeless ruse. Do you think I would abandon you over it?”

“I don’t think—”

“Or maybe you want me to? Well, I won’t. I haven’t that crooked a soul. Just don’t lie to me, for that’s intolerable. Candle! The whole thing is beyond belief.”

“Liir. I ask nothing of you. You’re not married to me. You didn’t choose me. I didn’t choose you.”

“You chose to save me,” said Liir despondently, “when I might have slipped away, and a good thing, too.”

“I chose to try to save someone. Someone sick in an infirmary, that is all. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know you yet. I don’t know you yet.”

“I am not the father,” he said. “Am I required to remind you how it works? I kept my distance, Candle. I never slept with you; I never buried myself in your trove. I thought about it, yes, but thinking’s not doing, and no child is begat by the midnight thoughts of an adult sleeping alone.”

“But you did,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “It would be easier to pretend you hadn’t, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The infant grows. I won’t turn it out of its nest now.”

“I didn’t!” he insisted, and then she told him how he had, and when, and why.

A small rain came up over the orchard, and in an eddy of chill, the drops turned to snow. The season turned several more notches in an instant, as can happen.

They made their way inside without further remark, and Candle put herself to kitchen tasks. She measured two handfuls of coarse flour and shook it through a boulter of cloth. The light greyed, and faded, and he pulled the shutters tight, and built up the fire. There were the cock and the hen to bring in, and the donkey to stable, and whatever else he could think of to do, he did: shifting firewood, scattering clean straw for the floor, arranging things on shelves. Things with handles and spouts, items with purposes he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine anything.

They ate, and after eating she said softly, “This is a good thing, Liir.”

“Then it couldn’t have come from me.”

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