Leap of Faith - Chapter 32 - lemonwood (2025)

Chapter Text

I finally muster the courage to talk to Halsin on the day of my mother’s unveiling.

Per Selûnite tradition, the ceremony is held exactly thirteen moon cycles after her passing. It’s a simple ritual. Reithwin’s stone carver, Mason Wulfstan, has done a beautiful job with the tombstone which replaces the temporary wooden marker that Halsin carved for her a year ago. The stone is engraved with ivy leaves and a waxing crescent moon, and with simple words. Emmeline Hallowleaf, 1424–1496. Beloved wife and mother. Forever at peace in the Moonmaiden’s light.

In contrast to her funeral, which was attended by every one of Reithwin’s citizens, it's only my father, Halsin, and myself who gather at her graveside in the darkness before dawn. My father conducts the ceremonial rites – I’d offered to take care of the formalities, but he was insistent – and I complete the ceremony by placing a wreath of elder leaves on her grave. The children have helped me construct it, and it’s rather lopsided. She would have liked that, I think. Then we stand together in silence as the sky lightens from deep blue and the stars slowly twinkle out one by one. My father puts his arm around my shoulder. I feel sad, with a deep, aching sadness that will probably never leave me, but thirteen months has been long enough to blunt my grief a little, and I’m capable, now, of feeling grateful for the four years my mother and I had together in Reithwin: not nearly long enough, but longer than I ever expected to get.

When we return to my father’s cottage, which is off in the woods a ten-minute walk from town, Yenna is just taking a tray of rolls out of the oven, her flame-coloured hair frizzing out of her bun into little damp tendrils around her face. I take a moment just to smile at her, fifteen and coltish and so beautiful that she almost breaks my heart – and, I know for a fact, is quite definitively breaking the hearts of a fair share of Reithwin’s population of teenage boys, and a few of the girls as well. Not that she seems to have noticed.

‘Thanks, Yen,’ I say, going to her and giving her a kiss on the cheek, which she accepts with good grace. She’s not immune to teenage moodiness and sulking, but in general she’s still what Halsin calls our little sunflower, cheerful and thoughtful and kind to a fault. Our younger children are united in their devotion to her. She indulges the smaller ones in their requests to play far more often than a teenager rightly should, and she’s the only person in the whole of Faerûn who can make our next oldest, Gray – thirteen and set to give us a much harder time in his teenage years than Yen has – smile right now.

We’ve farmed the rest of our brood out to other households for the day, to give us a chance to grieve a little in peace, without the usual chaos. It’s one of the advantages of our unorthodox start here in Reithwin: the children all feel free to make themselves welcome in almost any house in the town, and it’s a common occurrence to return home at the end of the day to find a slightly different mix of children around the dinner table than one was expecting. A relic of those early days, when the rebuilding effort was still in its infancy, and all of us, adults and children alike, camped out for months in the Mason’s Guild, the first building we cleared and made weathertight. It took the better part of a year before the last holdouts finally settled into houses of their own. Despite all the little frustrations and pitfalls of that sort of communal living, it was an excellent way to start off for the children. They formed stronger bonds with each other than they otherwise would have, and by the time we were ready to sort out where each family would live, it had become obvious in most cases which of the adults each child had gravitated to, and the task of dividing up households was smoother as a result.

Halsin and I have ended up with six of our own, including Arlen, our youngest at four years old, not one of our original Baldur’s Gate orphans but instead left on the doorstep of my little Selûnite temple in the dead of night two years ago. He isn’t the only child who’s come to Reithwin that way, although it’s a relatively rare occurrence. We’re known in the area as a haven for orphans and refugee families and those with nowhere else to go, so usually our orphans are brought to us openly by caregivers who aren’t able to take them on long-term.

Between the children, two dogs, five cats, my flock of chickens and whatever friends – people or animals – have been invited to join us at any given time, our farmhouse on the outskirts of town is constantly full of noise and laughter and squabbling and warmth. I appreciate it most of the time, but it’s still nice to have the occasional day like today, a day of quiet and peace.

We eat the breakfast Yen’s prepared – with her usual intuitive touch, she’s kept it simple for us, just rolls and fresh cheese and honey and the first of the summer strawberries – and speak a little of Mother, of the good parts of our years together. Of how much she loved watching the children play. Of her garden, which was such a source of joy, even after she lost her ability to tend to it and was only able to sit in it. The image of her there in her wide-brimmed sunhat with a cup of tea, looking out over her wild roses and her rhododendrons. How it brought her tranquillity even in the throes of her confusion.

After breakfast, Halsin and I take care of the washing up, and my father settles into his armchair by the fire, his cat, Jasper, curled up in his lap. An unlikely friendship, that one; neither the man nor the cat was at all impressed when Talviss decided, a few weeks after my mother’s passing, that the two of them belonged together, and presented the kitten to my father with the satisfied air of someone righting an obvious wrong. Despite my father’s protests and Jasper’s pretence at indifference, the two of them took to each other almost immediately, and are now thoroughly inseparable. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. Talviss’s knack with animals has been apparent almost from the first, and even at eight years old it’s clear his heart is set on following in Halsin’s footsteps to become a druid. A fact which makes Halsin himself equal parts proud and uneasy.

‘I don’t know what’s more daunting,’ he says to me once, tucked up in our bed in the garret bedroom of our farmhouse. It’s possibly my favourite place in all the world: floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the forest; potted plants hanging from the rafters and clustered on the floor and gracing almost every available surface as if some of that forest has made its way inside; the enormous bed Halsin made for us, big enough for him and me and the children, too, on nights when they’re lonely or frightened or missing their parents. Big enough, on other occasions, for adult guests, if the children are occupied elsewhere and we’ve met someone who strikes both our fancies. ‘Parenting a child like Larra,’ – our socially outgoing and rather tempestuous ten-year-old – ‘so different to me that I only have an intellectual grasp of her problems, and no experience of dealing with them myself. Or parenting a child like Talviss, knowing exactly what his problems feel like, and watching him make the same mistakes I did at his age, without being able to shield him from them.’

‘Parenting is a daunting exercise no matter what type of children you end up with, I suspect,’ I reply, stroking my hand idly over his bare shoulder and up the side of his neck to run through his hair.

He reaches up to catch my hand and brings it to his mouth to kiss my fingers. ‘And yet you never seem daunted by it, my heart,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

‘It’s because I’ve accepted that I’m going to constantly make mistakes with them, and yet we’ll all muddle through somehow as long as we love each other,’ I say. ‘Lower your standards, Halsin Silverbough, that’s my advice to you,’ and he laughs and pulls me in for a kiss.

My father leans his head back in his chair now, and closes his eyes briefly. All three of us are well aware of the signs he’s had enough, so we don’t need to discuss it: Yenna just goes to him and kisses his forehead. ‘Love you, Granddad,’ she says, and gives Jasper a stroke, which the cat roundly ignores.

‘Come for dinner, if you can handle the mayhem,’ I say to Father, leaning down for my own kiss.

‘We’ll see,’ he says, smiling at me, and I push down my stab of worry at how isolated he’s becoming, and we let ourselves out the door.

‘I’m going over to Prue’s,’ Yenna tells us at the garden gate. ‘I’ll be back in time to cook dinner.’

‘Don’t feel you have to, darling,’ I call after her, and she turns and blows us a kiss.

Halsin and I walk home hand in hand, and then he brews us a pot of tea while I settle myself at the dining table. My second favourite place in the world, perhaps. The sun is streaming in through the kitchen windows, illuminating the mural on the opposite wall. My Midwinter gift to the family two years ago, commissioned from my friend Wren, who’s referred to only half-jokingly by the townsfolk as Reithwin’s artist in residence. The mural depicts a gigantic oak tree, stretching all the way from floor to ceiling and covering most of the wall. The tree’s branches are inscribed with names: Halsin’s name and mine, and the names of each of our children’s first parents, where we know them. Inhabiting the tree are birds to represent the children themselves: a robin for Yen, an owl for Gray, a kingfisher for Freyja, a goldfinch for Larra, a starling for Talviss, and a warbler for Arlen. And nestled at the base of the tree, Wren’s surprise for everyone, including me: a fox cub, curled up and sleeping, to represent Kit from Halsin’s stories.

They’re famous across Reithwin, those stories. They were the anchor point of the early days, a nightly routine that helped more than anything else, I think, to give the children a sense of consistency amongst all the upheaval. Halsin still tells them to all the children of the town, cuddled up in blankets by the bonfire on nights when we’ve gathered in the town square to mark the new moon or the full. His cast of characters has expanded by necessity to include a whole forest’s worth of creatures, and I’m constantly surprised by his inventiveness.

That inventiveness isn’t confined to stories for the children, as I discover after I catch him lying in bed one evening reading a romance novel I’ve brought back from my last trip to the Gate.

‘Excuse me,’ I say in mock indignation. ‘I haven’t finished with that yet.’

‘My apologies,’ he says solemnly, but there’s a playful glint in his eye. ‘Allow me to make it up to you, my heart,’ and he flips to the page I’ve bookmarked and starts reading it to me, in tones of great gravitas but with a little mischievous half-smile quirking his lips. I flop down on the bed next to him to listen, my own mouth twitching in amusement at how seriously he’s taking it, putting just as much effort into his delivery as he does with the children’s stories. His voice is so deliciously warm and deep that he could be reading me the minutes of Reithwin’s last Council meeting and I think I’d still enjoy it. But then he reaches one of the novel’s love scenes, and my amusement fades under my rising arousal, hearing his voice go low and take on a rough edge as he narrates it. He knows exactly what it’s doing to me, I can tell; he’s paying attention to every hitch in my breathing, every slight movement as I press my thighs together to try to relieve the ache between them, but his face doesn’t change from his serious expression, and he doesn’t pause for a second in his reading, almost as if he's daring me to break first.

And break I do: I can’t hold out for more than a few minutes of this torture before all my resolution to outlast him crumbles away like so much sand, and I’m climbing on top of him, plucking the book out of his grasp and tossing it unceremoniously onto the floor where it lies forgotten as he growls and rolls me over to pin me underneath him.

We make a tradition of it after that, not too often, just the occasional evening when the children have settled easily and we make it to bed early for once, and he’ll pick up the book and read me a few pages of it before one or the other of us gets too impatient to continue. It’s months before I discover the liberties he’s taking with it, on one of the rare nights he’s away from home, off giving aid to a village to the north of us that’s suffered a goblin raid. Trying to distract myself from how much I miss him – how much we all miss him, how different the house feels when he’s not here – I pick up the book, intending to imagine his voice reading the words to me, and find to my mystification that the plot doesn’t develop at all how I was expecting it to. For a few moments I seriously consider the possibility that someone’s hit me with a Confusion spell without my noticing, and then I realise: he’s clearly been making quite substantial improvements to the story, telling me a tale of his own devising and only pretending to read. And he’s done an astonishingly good job of it, much better than the original author has managed.

‘You know,’ I say to him late the next evening, after we’ve finally managed to coax the children to sleep and are sitting in front of the fire, too exhausted even to drag ourselves up the stairs to bed quite yet, ‘if you actually wrote down some of these steamy romances you’ve apparently been inventing out of whole cloth, you could probably make a tidy sum selling them to a publisher in Baldur’s Gate.’

He looks surprised for a bare second before his expression melts into an unrepentant grin. ‘Missed me that much, did you?’ he says.

Normally my instinct would be to respond to this in kind, with more light-hearted teasing. But I can see the shadow behind his eyes, one that’s been there since he got back this evening, that tells me without him having to express it in words the sorts of things he saw in Stagsrun in the aftermath of the raid. So instead I go to him and crawl into his lap, and say, ‘We missed you desperately. You’re our heart, Halsin. None of us know what to do with ourselves when you’re not home.’

He puts his hand on the back of my neck and presses his forehead to mine, and I can physically feel the moment he lets his guard down, some of the tension going out of his body as he sets aside the brave face he’s been wearing all evening for the children’s sake.

‘It was bad, wasn’t it,’ I say quietly.

‘It was bad,’ he says, low. And I curl into him and put my head on his shoulder, and he tightens his arms around me, and we sit like that for a long time, my hand resting over his heart and his lips in my hair, no sound but the crackling of the fire.

I have nightmares still, once or twice a year perhaps, about the Gauntlet of Shar. About hurling away the Spear of Night, and slipping, and stumbling into the abyss myself, swallowed up by the great sucking darkness of the void. I always wake with a start, sweating, more terrified than the dream really warrants, and it always takes a moment or two to convince myself that I’m really here, in my own bed. That my life isn’t a hallucination inflicted on me somehow in the Cloister. That I really am free of Shar, that she can’t hurt me, despite the occasional efforts of her followers to infiltrate Reithwin in search of the clout they’d receive by bringing back my head. They’ve never managed to get close to breaching the protections placed here by Halsin and Francesca five years ago, the ones that hide Reithwin from those with ill intent, and their attempts are becoming less frequent over time: Shar might be famed for holding grudges, but her followers have their own plots and battles and internecine squabbles to worry about, and any church-backed attempts to apprehend me stopped years ago. The acolytes who come after me now tend to be the overly ambitious, wet-behind-the-ears sort with an inflated sense of their own competence, improvising an unsanctioned mission to prove their worth and advance in the hierarchy, and I’m confident I could deal with them handily even without Reithwin’s defensive magics.

‘That must have been what I looked like to you when you first met me,’ I say to Halsin after one of these attempts. ‘An over-confident idiot who wasn’t fooling anyone by pretending she knew what she was doing. It’s a wonder you stuck around long enough to fall in love with me.’

‘Nonsense,’ he tells me. ‘You were fighting a losing battle to deny your true nature, but you weren’t incompetent. This lot wouldn’t have lasted five minutes past getting off the Nautiloid ship, much less defeated the Netherbrain.’

Still, despite the fact I know I’m safe here, the nightmares make me uneasy. It’s as if the other Shadowheart, Lady Shar’s blessed warrior, still exists out there somewhere, in a parallel plane to my own, and just occasionally her footsteps bring her close enough to my own path that I can sense her. Can feel what her life might be like, leading Shar’s church, striking down her enemies, spreading her comforting lies.

I never wish I’d made a different choice that day in the Gauntlet. But I can feel a pull, like the irresistible draw of the abyss, from that other life that I so nearly lived. It’s still me, after all, who almost chose it. I wouldn’t have been happy in that life. But there would have been compensations.

I’m happy in this one, though. Happier than I would have believed to be possible when I took my first step on this path. It’s not a life of heroism or extraordinary deeds. It’s a life of making a difference in small ways every day. A difference to my children, each of whom struggles in their own way with the great loss at the core of their childhoods, the loss of their first parents. (Helping them with that loss isn’t, I’ve learned, a matter of trying to fill the hole it left behind, but of accepting it and honouring it, letting the grief be a part of our lives alongside all the other moments of love and joy and frustration and sadness and anger and laughter that make our family what it is.) A difference to the people of Reithwin, in trying, as all of us are trying, to live up to the values on which we founded this community, values of compassion and unity, of helping each other and the world, of living in balance with nature and with one another. A difference to those who worship at my little temple, and who come to me looking for healing or peace or kinship or purpose.

And a difference to Halsin. Halsin, who feels at home here, who feels like he belongs in a way that he’s never belonged anywhere in all his long life. Halsin, who still struggles with that very feeling of belonging, who sometimes feels that he doesn’t deserve it, that he needs to atone for some indefinable failing in order to be worthy of it, that it might all be ripped away from him at any moment. Halsin, who’s gradually learning to trust in this life we’re building, to trust in himself. Halsin who still gives me strength and joy, who brings me peace when I feel lost, who teases me mercilessly and makes unapologetically terrible puns, who soothes me out of my frustrations, who looks at me over the heads of the children, at the times our household is in greatest chaos, and reminds me without words how lucky we are to have each other and our family.

I feel grateful for all the people who make my life what it is: not just Halsin and our children and my father, but all the children of Reithwin, more like nephews and nieces than neighbours. Wren, and the other friends I’ve made here. And my old friends, the ones I made during my brief time as a so-called hero. Rion, with whom I keep up a regular correspondence, although we almost never get a chance to see each other in person. Her letters make me laugh like nothing else does. Isobel and Aylin, leading a much more exciting life than mine, off crusading for the Moonmaiden. Alfira and Lakrissa, who occasionally visit while their bard school is closed for the summer, and who are so sweet and patient with the children that we even invite them back after they earn the enmity of almost our entire household by inducting Freyja into the joys of pan pipes, teaching her just enough to inspire an almost obsessive enthusiasm but not enough that she’s any good at it.

And of course, my former companions. We see Astarion occasionally when his travels take him past Reithwin, though it’s not the sort of place he finds comfortable, so his visits never last for very long and he’s prone to avoiding sentimental goodbyes by disappearing without warning in the night. Gale opens up a portal between Reithwin and Waterdeep once a year, and comes through to see us all, and then takes Yen back with him for a tenday of culture and cooking lessons in the city. Sometimes I go with them and spend a few days visiting the House of the Moon, reporting on matters related to Selûnite worship in the Reithwin area and catching up on church gossip. One year Halsin goes with them, to research a disease affecting elm trees in the forest around Moonrise, though despite Gale’s efforts to convince him of its superiority, he doesn’t like Waterdeep any better than he did Baldur’s Gate, and cuts short his visit the moment he finds a potential avenue for treatment.

We see Karlach and Wyll once a year, too. Karlach has found some new hybrid kind of infernal iron that’s got her engine to the point where she can come home for a few tendays a year before it starts overheating again and she has to go back to Avernus. ‘Probably not great to keep stressing it like that,’ she tells me, ‘but eh. I’d rather live for ten years and get to spend a month a year at home than fifty stuck in the Hells.’

And so we’ve settled into a yearly tradition: she and Wyll spend a tenday with us in Reithwin, catching up, telling exaggerated stories to each other and the children, staying up late dancing in the town square, going on long walks, swimming in the river. And then she and I head off for a tenday to ourselves in Baldur’s Gate. We rent a cheap apartment in the Lower City and spend our time visiting old haunts, stuffing our faces with all our favourite food, spending too much money on outfits that neither of us is going to wear in our daily lives, getting drunk and then lying around all day bickering over who has the worst hangover, telling each other the stories we didn’t want to tell in front of our men. We always go out dancing at least once. We flirt with people in bars, but we don’t take them home with us. For Karlach, that’s because she’s devoted to Wyll. ‘It’d hurt him,’ she explains to me the first year. ‘I’ve been the cheater before, and the one cheated on. It’s not nice. And besides,’ and she looks down and starts fiddling with her beer, turning the tankard around and around on the table, ‘I don’t really want anyone else. It’s funny, being in Avernus. A trial by fire, literally. No one else understands me like he does. I wouldn’t risk that just for a quick fuck.’ And I have to tamp down a sudden sharp ache that I don’t understand her like that. That I can’t understand her like that, living as we do on entirely separate planes and only seeing each other once a year.

For my part, not going home with the people I flirt with in bars isn’t about devotion to Halsin ­– devotion doesn’t look like restriction, when you’re with him – but about devotion to Karlach. I only get a few precious days a year to spend with her. I’m not going to waste that time on one-night stands, no matter how gorgeous or charming the person chatting me up.

They’re a balm to the soul, those tendays. And they also bring pain. I always go home to Halsin in an odd state of mingled exhilaration and grief, and it always takes me another tenday or so to feel like myself again. He’s patient with me, a combination of steadily accepting and indulgent of my wild moods. After the second year, he starts arranging to send the children off to visit other households for the first couple of days after I get back, and occupies those days alternately fucking me in such ingeniously creative ways that I spend long periods unable to even remember my own name, let alone what my problems might be, and sitting with me in peaceful silence, bringing me cups of tea, massaging my shoulders, reminding me, without words, how much I’m loved and cared for. It helps.

And I spend the other eleven months of the year missing Karlach with a low-level but constant ache. I have my other friends, I have my father, I have Halsin, but none of it entirely makes up for the fact that my best friend is off in the literal Hells, risking her life fighting devils and demons, unable to even write to me. I worry that she and Wyll will both die there one day and the first I’ll know of it is when they don’t show up for their yearly visit. I hold on to hope – the sort of desperate, thready, uncertain hope that feels familiar to me from my time cursed by Shar’s wound – that they’ll be able to find some way to restore her engine properly and come home for good.

Halsin sets the mugs of tea down on the table, takes a seat across from me, and gives me a speculative look. ‘Are you ready to talk about whatever’s troubling you, my heart?’ he says.

No real surprise that he’s picked up on my abstraction these last few tendays, I suppose. Or my nervousness now. ‘It’s not something troubling me, exactly,’ I say. ‘It’s just…’ and then I pick up my mug to take a sip of tea, fully aware that I’m stalling, not able to help it. All these years later, it's still a struggle for me to ask for things sometimes. The things that I want so much that it makes me vulnerable to ask for them. I know intellectually that even if it’s not something he wants too, he won’t think less of me for wanting it, won’t use my desires against me. But there’s still some irrational part of my mind screaming that I’ll be punished somehow for asking.

Maybe it will help to ease into it by explaining my thought process. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our life here,’ I say. ‘Partly because of the anniversary of Mother’s passing. It’s reminded me how little time we get, how we need to make the most of it. And partly the children getting older. Even Arlen is so grown up these days. It’s made me think about what comes next. And I’ve realised that there’s something… not missing, exactly. But something else I want.’

Halsin’s looking at me with his neutral expression. The one that says he’s feeling something deeply under the surface, but whatever it is, he’s not going to let me see it. He hasn’t looked at me like that in a long time; it makes me ache, and it intensifies my nervousness. Perhaps he’s already guessed what I’m talking about, and he’s bracing himself to tell me that he doesn’t feel the same way.

‘I see,’ he says, and his voice is careful. ‘You know I’ll support you in whatever you decide to do, my heart.’

‘I don’t want support,’ I say. ‘I only want this if it’s something you want just as much as I do. And if you don’t, Halsin, I’ll understand. I promise.’

His neutral expression melts into a rueful one, and he reaches out to take my hand where it rests on the table. ‘I’m beginning to get the impression that you’re not trying to tell me what I thought you were,’ he says.

I frown at him. ‘What did you think I was trying to tell you?’

‘That you wanted to leave,’ he says.

My mouth drops open in shock. ‘Halsin–’

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ he says. ‘You went from a life of confinement in the Cloister to a life confined to Reithwin with me and the children. You’ve never had a chance to roam, to be free to go wherever your feet take you. I’d understand if that were something you decided you needed to explore.’

Moonmaiden’s grace. I thought his fear that I was going to suddenly up and leave him was something I’d broken him of years ago. ‘It’s not,’ I tell him firmly. ‘Or rather – it is. I’d like to travel and go on more adventures. Later. When the children are grown. And crucially, with you, you idiot.’

He smiles at me, and squeezes my hand. ‘Then what is it that you’re trying to tell me, my heart?’

‘That I want a baby,’ I say crossly, too caught up in my indignation to second guess it. Then as his smile drops off his face, to be replaced by a look of utter astonishment, I belatedly realise that I’ve said it out loud now, and there’s no taking it back. My stomach twists with apprehension.

‘It’s not that I don’t love the children,’ I rush to explain. ‘I do. They’re not any less my children because I didn’t carry them. But they’re growing up so fast, and – and I’d like to find out what it’s like to make one together. Not because it’s better. Just because it’s another way of expressing our love for each other. And a way of staying connected to Mother. Seeing a part of her continue on in them. But I meant it, Halsin ­– only if it’s something you want too – and if you don’t want it–’

‘I want it,’ he says. He’s looking almost dazed.

‘You do?’ I say, a little weakly.

‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more,’ he says wonderingly. ‘Shadowheart­–’

And then both of us are on our feet, chairs clattering noisily back, and I step into his embrace, feel his arms come around me, bury my face in his neck. Relief is roaring through me, relief and love and a little bit of trepidation at the enormity of this step we’re going to take together.

‘I love you,’ I say into his skin.

He doesn’t answer me in words. He just puts his hand on my jaw and tilts up my face and kisses me, slow and tender, and I press myself into him and deepen the kiss, running my hands through his hair.

He pulls back after a moment, though not very far; his mouth is only an inch away from mine. ‘Anyone would think you wanted to get started on the project now,’ he murmurs.

I pull back a little more to grin at him. ‘Seems a shame to waste the first time in months we’ve had an empty house.’

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ he says, and I laugh, almost giddy in my happiness, and stand on my tiptoes to kiss him again.

As an expectant father, Halsin is, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolute nightmare.

Everything he’s learned about prioritising his own needs goes straight out the window. He’s single-mindedly focused on me and the baby, on making sure I’m eating well and comfortable and have everything I could possibly want. He’s not even smothering about it in a way that I can yell at him for. He’s just there, thinking of everything, loving me without reason or limit, giving me space without being asked when I feel irritated, absorbing my crankiness without a hint of being hurt by it, meeting my every need before I’m even aware it exists.

He knows I’m pregnant before I do. It’s an ordinary morning in our second month of trying; I’m waving him and the younger children off for the day, and he assents to their pleas for the bear to escort them to school, but his paws have barely hit the ground before he’s transforming back, deaf to the children’s protests as he comes straight to me and kisses me with such passion that I make a confused noise into his mouth, and draw back to stare at him. ‘Halsin, what–?’

He's smiling at me, possibly the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on him, and there are tears in his eyes. His hand comes to rest, gently, on my belly, and I can feel my eyes go wide as I say ‘Oh. Oh.’

The first emotion to hit me is sheer terror. Lady of Silver guide us, I think, what have we done? But it’s hard to remain terrified when he’s beaming at me like that, and my fear is eclipsed by a sudden wave of joy, as it hits me that what we’ve done is create something together. A tiny flickering scrap of life nestled unseen in my womb, a whole new path for us to walk, leading to an unknown destination whose only certainty is love. And I beam back at him, and wipe away tears of my own.

Then it occurs to me to wonder how he knows, and as the answer dawns on me I wrinkle my nose in distaste. ‘Ugh. You can smell it on me, can’t you? Halsin, that’s disgusting.’

‘It is not disgusting,’ he tells me, quiet but so fierce that I blink at him in surprise. ‘It’s the best thing I’ve ever smelled. Gods, my heart, you smell like… like mine.’ And I see a flash of gold in his eyes as he has to force his Wildshape back at the thought. Then he turns to the children, and says to Larra, ‘Lar. Do you think you’re grown up enough now to help Arlen and Talviss get to school on your own? I’ll come with you again tomorrow, I promise,’ he adds, at the chorus of disappointment from the younger two.

Larra looks like she’s suddenly grown two inches from pride at his faith in her ability. ‘Come on,’ she says, taking Arlen’s hand and gesturing to Talviss. ‘I’ll tell you a Kit story on the way,’ and she coaxes them off like a sheepdog herding its sheep.

I’d been expecting that one or other of the children might have complicated feelings about my pregnancy, but it comes as a complete surprise which of them is bothered by it.

‘You need to talk to Yen,’ Halsin says to me, two months in.

It’s just after dawn. He’s brought me a cup of ginger tea, and I’m sitting up in bed, sipping it slowly and trying to breathe evenly. My symptoms have been relatively mild, thank the Moonmaiden, but I’m trapped in an exhausting cycle of falling asleep in the evenings much earlier than usual and then being woken at dawn by my bladder and feeling too nauseated to go back to sleep.

‘You think something’s troubling her?’ I say. ‘She has been rather quiet these last few days.’

‘I think she’s worked out about this one,’ he says, putting his hand on my belly.

‘Ah.’ I grimace, and take another sip of tea. ‘I suppose it was too much to hope that we could keep it under wraps for long.’

He gives me a fond look. ‘She’s not the only one who’s guessed, I’ll wager.’

‘You think the other children–’

‘No, not the children,’ he says. ‘Gray’s preoccupied with his own problems right now, Freyja’s too busy daydreaming to notice, and the rest of them are too young to suspect. But Wren knows, and your father, too, I think. And so will anyone else we invite for dinner to witness you picking at your food and then falling asleep on my shoulder mid-conversation,’ he adds dryly.

I sigh. ‘I suppose we might as well announce it, then.’

‘Talk to Yen first,’ he tells me.

I glance at him. He’s still stroking my belly gently, and watching me with a serious expression. ‘Do you mean you think she’s upset about it?’

‘She’s been especially well-mannered lately,’ he says. ‘Too well-mannered. Staying closer to home. No grumbling about chores. Not snapping at Larra even when she richly deserves it. It reminds me of what she was like that first year.’

‘But she can’t think we’re going to turn her away now,’ I say, taken aback.

‘She doesn’t think that,’ he says. ‘She’s just feeling a little insecure.’

‘Have you talked to her about it?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not me she needs to be reassured by.’

Another annoying side effect of pregnancy: being a hair’s breadth away from tears at all times. I blink rapidly to try to hold them back. ‘What am I doing wrong with her that she knows you love her but she doesn’t know that I do?’

‘You’re not doing anything wrong,’ he says. ‘Here, put down your tea for a minute, will you?’ I comply, still blinking, and he pulls me into his arms and kisses the top of my head. The tears spill free, and I wipe my face impatiently.

‘You’re not doing anything wrong, my heart,’ he says again. ‘She does know you love her. But it’s different with mothers than it is with fathers, you know. Particularly for Yen, who’s never had a father other than me. I’m an addition to her life, and she loves me and relies on me, but she doesn’t need me the way she needs you. And she already knows what it’s like to lose her mother, remember. Part of her must be terrified that it’s going to happen to her all over again.’

‘But she won’t lose me just because I’m having a baby,’ I protest.

‘Tell her that, my heart,’ he says. ‘She knows it deep down, but she needs to hear it all the same.’

And so the next day I invite myself along when Yenna goes out to walk Scratch and our other dog, Dolly (full name: Dolly Once, named by Freyja, eight years old at the time and obsessed with all things fey). I wait until we’re surrounded by the quiet of the forest, and then I say, ‘Yen, you know that the new baby won’t change anything about how Halsin and I feel about you, don’t you?’

She whips her head around to look at me, startled, but not shocked: Halsin was right that she already knew. She bites her lip. ‘I know I should be happy,’ she says.

‘Nonsense,’ I tell her. ‘There are no shoulds when it comes to how we’re feeling. Whatever you’re feeling is exactly what you should feel.’

‘I know,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound convinced. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful – I know how lucky I am to have you both–’

‘Yen,’ I say, stopping in the middle of the path and taking her hands. ‘It’s Halsin and I who are lucky to have such a wonderful daughter. You don’t have to act a certain way for us to keep loving you. We’ll love you for the rest of our lives, no matter what. Even if you decide you can’t cope with another increase in the noise level and go to live at Prue’s house.’

She giggles, a little teary. ‘Prue’s house is nearly as bad,’ she says. ‘I should move in with Granddad instead.’

‘I’m sure Granddad would love to see more of you if you wanted to spend some time there,’ I say. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable to want peace and quiet. You only have to ask for things like that, darling, and we’ll do our best to work something out.’

She looks down at her feet. ‘It’s not the noise. It’s not anything I can put my finger on, really. It’s just… I feel scared,’ she admits quietly.

‘Me too, to be quite honest,’ I say.

She glances up at me. ‘Really?’

‘Scared shitless,’ I say, deliberately blunt, and she laughs in a slightly scandalised sort of way. ‘It was different with you and your brothers and sisters. We all chose each other. I didn’t have time to wonder about who you might be or how I might feel about you. You all arrived in my life as fully formed people, and it was obvious with all of you that you were meant to be part of our family. Whereas this one is a wildcard. I don’t know who they are yet. I don’t know if I’m going to love them as much as I love the rest of you.’

‘You’ll love them,’ she protests.

‘I’m sure I will,’ I say. ‘But I don’t feel it. Halsin’s loved them from the minute he found out they existed. But I don’t, yet. It still feels theoretical to me. I can’t quite connect to it. I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it, actually.’

‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ she says slowly. ‘Knowing something and feeling it.’

‘It is,’ I say. ‘And that’s my question for you, Yen. How can we make you feel loved, as opposed to just knowing that you are?’

She looks at me for a moment with her lip wobbling, and then she almost throws herself at me, clinging on and burying a wet face in my neck. I stroke her hair gently.

After a minute she steps back, wiping her face and sniffling. ‘Maybe some more walks like this?’ she says.

‘I’d love that. Assuming we still have dogs to walk.’ I glance around the deserted forest. ‘Do you think they’ve gone to live with Granddad?’

‘Not a chance,’ she says, smiling a little. ‘Even Scratch knows better than to try Jasper on for size.’

Karlach and Wyll’s yearly visit falls at the five-month mark. She’s too busy hugging me to even notice at first, and then she freezes, mid-hug, and pulls back to glance down at my stomach. ‘Holy shit,’ she says.

The younger children all giggle delightedly. Auntie Karlach is one of their favourite people.

‘I’m afraid we might have to curtail the partying a bit this year,’ I tell her, grinning. I’m still caught up in the adrenaline rush of seeing her, here and alive and vivid as ever. I’ve spent the last couple of tendays on edge, as I am this time every year, knowing that any day now she might arrive. Knowing this might be the year when she doesn’t. It’s always such a relief when they knock on our door and I can put aside my worry and think, one more year. I get one more year.

‘Congratulations,’ says Wyll, holding his arms out to me. ‘This is wonderful news.’ His voice is warm, but there’s just a tiny undercurrent of something else to it, and I squeeze him extra tightly, feeling a little twinge of guilt for subjecting him – both of them – to one more piece of evidence that life is moving on without them.

It's nice timing for their visit. I’ve recovered from the nausea and fatigue of early pregnancy, and I’m not big enough yet to be too uncomfortable.

‘What’s it like being pregnant?’ Karlach asks me on our second day in the Gate. It’s a lovely day, with more than enough sunshine to counterbalance the autumn chill in the air, and we’ve taken a picnic to Bloomridge Park and found a sunny spot to sit in, up against a stone wall.

‘It has its ups and downs, but overall I like it,’ I say, cutting myself a wedge of cheese and topping it with a slice of apple. ‘It’s nice feeling the baby moving around. Makes everything seem more real. It took me a little while to get used to it enough to like it, mind you. Having an entirely separate entity squirming around inside me brought back some rather uncomfortable memories.’

She winces. ‘Ugh, yeah,’ she says. ‘This parasite hopefully won’t make you sprout tentacles, at least. And you certainly seem happy. You’re doing that glowy thing that pregnant women are supposed to do.’

‘It wasn’t always like this,’ I say. ‘I spent the first couple of months constantly on the verge of either throwing up or falling asleep. But I’m feeling much more like myself now. To be honest, my main issue at the moment is that my libido is absolutely through the roof.’

‘That a problem, is it?’ she says. She’s munching on a fire-spiced sausage. I still can’t face the things after Gale put far too many of them in a stew once. ‘Wearing Halsin out?’

‘Not at all,’ I say wryly. ‘If his libido has a limit I’ve yet to reach it. It’s the logistical difficulty of finding a time and place. Last tenday we almost got caught in a compromising position by the entirety of Reithwin’s Council.’

‘This tenday you almost got caught in a compromising position by me,’ she says placidly, taking another bite of sausage. ‘Luckily you were being loud enough that I realised what I was about to walk into and bailed before I saw anything too eye-searing.’

‘Oh gods, really?’ I groan, feeling my cheeks heat. ‘Sorry!’

‘It’s fine,’ she says, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘Don’t tell me about the other times,’ I say despairingly. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘Hey,’ she says, brightening, ‘did I ever tell you about the time Wyll and I actually did get caught in a compromising position by a gang of merregons and it almost got us killed?’

I choke on a piece of apple and she has to pat me forcefully on the back. ‘No,’ I say eventually, still coughing. ‘How did that happen?’

‘Cave we were in wasn’t as unoccupied as we thought,’ she says. ‘Never try to have a quickie in the hells. Too risky to be worth it. No matter how much your blood’s up after a fight.’

‘I hope you’ve started taking your own advice, Karlach Cliffgate,’ I say severely. ‘If you get killed because you’re too busy having it off to pay attention to your surroundings, I’ll never forgive you.’

‘Wyll was of a similar mind,’ she says, reaching out to steal a slice of apple off my plate. ‘Not the heroic death he envisioned for the Blade of Avernus. He wouldn’t admit to it, but I have a strong suspicion it gave him actual nightmares.’

I giggle. ‘Poor Wyll,’ I say. ‘How are things going with you two, anyway?’

‘It’s a bit complicated,’ she says, sighing, and I freeze with my bottle of lemonade halfway to my mouth.

‘Are you having issues?’ I ask carefully. Gods, I hope they’re not going to break up. And not only because I think they’re good for each other, although I do: every year when I see them, I’m struck all over again by the fierce tenderness between them. How attuned they are to each other, in a way that’s clearly as natural to them as breathing. I know that this closeness was forged in the flames of Avernus, out of hard necessity, and so it ultimately originates in pain. But it still heartens me to see it, to know that however gruelling their lives are, they have each other to help them get through it.

And what would they do if they didn’t have each other any more? What would Karlach do? Six years ago, she thought that death was preferable to being in Avernus alone. Does she still feel that way?

Luckily, before I can get drawn too far into my panic, Karlach shakes her head. ‘No, not like that,’ she says. ‘I love him more than anything. And I know he loves me. But… you remember what I told you about the promise we made to each other when we first got to Avernus? That we’d do whatever we could to feel like we were living an actual life, even if it was only one percent of the time and the other ninety-nine percent was about survival and demon killing?’

‘I remember,’ I say.

‘It does feel like living a life,’ she says. ‘In some ways. It’s a lot like how it felt when we were all travelling together. You’re focused on your mission, and you’re constantly planning your next fight, and you’re scared shitless all of the time, but you still find ways to be people. To make dumb jokes and argue over stupid things and have great sex and talk about your dreams and be silly together. I don’t regret going to Avernus. Wyll says he doesn’t either, and I have to believe him, otherwise I’d be eaten alive by guilt the whole time.’

I make a small noise of pain, and reach out to squeeze her hand. She squeezes back, but she’s not looking at me; she’s shredding a bread roll into pieces on her plate with her other hand.

‘But then we come back home,’ she says softly. ‘And as much as I love coming home, it’s also a lot to deal with. Like… I hope it’s okay to say this,’ she says, glancing up at me. ‘Because it’s my shit, not yours, and I don’t want you to feel bad about it for a second. But sometimes it’s really hard to watch you being so happy. Especially this year, with the baby. And I’m happy for you, don’t think I’m not. I love seeing you all glowy, and the kids so excited, and Halsin, gods. When I think about how unhappy Halsin was when we first met him, and what he’s like now, how much he loves being a dad, how he looks at you like you’re hanging the moon and stars instead of just having his baby, I’m so glad for you both. I really am. But it’s also a reminder that I don’t have any of that. And that I might never be able to have it. I’m thirty-six. It won’t be that long until getting pregnant isn’t even an option for me.’

I’m holding her hand as tight as I can, and she’s squeezing back, still looking at me, with her head leaned against the stone wall. ‘Do you want to have a baby?’ I ask her.

‘If things were different, I think I would,’ she says. ‘I’d be terrified that I’d be useless at it. But Wyll would be such a great dad that he’d make up for any number of my fuck-ups, I bet. And it’s something he wants. We’ve talked about it before. He’d be terrified too, I reckon. But being scared hasn’t stopped us from doing anything else, so why would we let it stop us doing this?

‘And I wouldn’t mind adopting, either,’ she adds. ‘It’s not that it’s reliant on my biological clock. But we can’t have a child together any way while we’re still stuck in Avernus. It’s so godsdamned relentless not having an end in sight. Every time we think we have a lead on fixing my heart, it turns out to be a dead end or a wild goose chase. It’s wearing us down, little by little. And I hate it. I hate seeing what it’s doing to him. How hard we’re both getting. I worry that it’ll reach a point where that process isn’t reversible, even if we do find a way to come home.’

‘Gods,’ I say. How I wish I could do even the smallest thing to help with any of this. I move the picnic basket out of the way so I can shuffle closer to her, and she leans into me.

‘Sometimes I think about ways I might get him to leave,’ she says quietly. ‘So at least one of us could make it out. But I can’t think of a good way to do it. If I tried to break up with him he’d see through me straight away, and even if he didn’t, it’s Wyll. Breaking up with him wouldn’t stop him from sticking around to protect me, it’d just make him sad. I could sneak away while he’s sleeping and strike out on my own, but he’s an expert in tracking people, he’d hunt me down within a day or two. I could try to get myself killed, but any fight I get myself into, I’m getting him into too, and what if it backfired and he died and I didn’t? I just can’t see a way to make it work.’

‘Even if you could,’ I say gently, ‘you’d be deciding on your own what’s best for him. If I were in Wyll’s shoes, I wouldn’t want you to take away my choices like that.’

‘But that’s the thing, isn’t it,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t have a choice, not really. He can’t abandon me, because he couldn’t live with himself if he did. And we can’t have a proper life in the hells. We’re both trapped. And even though I can’t regret going to Avernus, even though I want to live, sometimes I feel like I should regret it. Like it would have been better for everyone if I’d let myself burn up on the docks instead.’

‘Have you talked to Wyll about this?’ I ask.

‘Some of it,’ she replies. ‘He just says he’d have made the same choice even if he knew going in what it would be like. That he has his own reasons for wanting to be the Blade of Avernus that aren’t just about me, and he might still have made that choice even if I wasn’t involved. It brings him a lot of comfort to know that we’re doing good while we’re there, that we’re foiling plots and fighting evil and protecting the mortal plane from devils and demons. But I’m more selfish than he is. I feel like we’ve given enough now, and it’s about time we had a shot at a normal life.’

We both gaze out over the park. It’s crowded with people making the most of the autumn sunshine: couples strolling, children playing tag, a young woman sitting cross-legged on a bench reading a book and glaring away anyone who tries to sit next to her, an old man leaning down to pet a stray cat.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ I say. ‘Bards sing about heroes as if they’re a special breed of people who are destined for greater things. But most of the time it doesn’t feel like that. It just feels like you’ve been thrown into the middle of something by forces beyond your control, and you’re trying to make the best of it. And even if you have a destiny, that just means that the force beyond your control that threw you in the middle of something is a god rather than random chance.

‘Look at us. There’s nothing that separates us from any of the people in this park other than that we were thrown into the middle of a quest to save the city. And it could so easily have been different. If Viconia hadn’t sent me on the mission to retrieve the Astral Prism, you all might have met some other Sharran instead of me, and maybe you’d have gone with them to the House of Grief and I’d have fought you and you’d have killed me and I’d be dead in the ground right now with no one to mourn me but Nocturne. Or if you’d got a job offer from Nine-Fingers instead of Gortash, maybe you’d be a Guild enforcer, and you’d have come to the park today to sit on a bench and wonder whether there could have been more to your life than your boring job and your three kids and your shitty husband who drinks too much.’

‘Hey, I like this game,’ she says. ‘Invent an alternate reality version of yourself who’s somehow even worse off than you are. It’ll be a good one for me and Wyll to play on those long boring nights in the hells.’

I shove my shoulder into hers. ‘I’m trying to make a point here, Cliffgate.’

‘Could’ve fooled me, Hallowleaf.’

‘Look, I know that there’s nothing I can say that will make this any better,’ I tell her. ‘And I know it’s easy for me to say from the vantage point of my normal life. But even a normal life can feel like you’ve been thrown in the middle of something and you’re just trying to make the best of it. And we never really know how things might have turned out if circumstances were different. But I do know that my life would have been a lot emptier if you’d burned up on the docks six years ago. And I know Wyll would say the same thing. So I can’t tell you that the choice you made was the best one. But I’m glad you made it, all the same.’

‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘that doesn’t make it any better,’ and we both start laughing.

‘Well, that’s me completely eviscerated in two seconds flat,’ I say once my giggles have subsided a bit. ‘Shall we move on to the part of the afternoon where we eat too many jam tarts and make fun of people’s outfits?’

‘Sounds good,’ she says. ‘Come here and give me a hug, first, though.’

I lean my head on her shoulder, and she puts her arm around me. ‘My life would be a lot emptier without you in it, too,’ she says. ‘Pass me the tarts, would you? I want to get myself one of the apricot ones before you eat them all and claim the baby made you do it.’

‘What do you suppose are the chances,’ murmurs Halsin, kissing my neck just under my ear and making me gasp softly, ‘that this will actually work?’

‘Honestly? Slim to none,’ I tell him. ‘It seems like an old wives’ tale at best, and more likely a scam invented by enterprising husbands. Oh. Gods, keep doing that. But at this point, if Mrs Gardiner told me I could bring on labour by painting my face with clown makeup and standing on my head, I’d be willing to give it a shot.’

He chuckles, and I feel the sound vibrate through his chest, pressed up against my back. Then he bites the place on my neck he just kissed, and we both moan as the little jolt of pain causes me to clench involuntarily around his cock. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘Call me self-interested, but I like this idea much more. And you have to admit there’s a certain – ah – symmetry to it.’

‘What,’ I say, clenching around him again, deliberately this time, and relishing in the gasp it draws out of him, ‘as in, you ­– gods.’ I break off, distracted, as he slides his hand between my legs and starts stroking my clit, teasingly, not giving me the pressure I like just yet. I close my eyes for a moment, and then manage to regain my train of thought. ‘As in, you fucked the baby into me, so it stands to reason you can fuck the baby out of me again?’

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘It makes a certain – poetic sense, if not physiological sense ­– oh.’

‘Unfortunately,’ I say breathlessly, ‘I want this baby out of me literally, not figuratively – fuck, Halsin, please–’

‘Please what?’ he says darkly, kissing the back of my neck again, and I moan with frustrated need. He knows full well what. He’s got one arm wrapped around my chest and shoulder, holding me firmly in place while he thrusts into me agonisingly slowly. It has to be agonisingly slow, at this point. Being fucked with any real vigour has me more focused on holding onto my enormous belly to keep it stable than on anyone’s orgasm. One of many reasons why I’m desperate for the baby to hurry up and be born. But the need to go slow has nothing to do with why he’s stroking me so lightly, keeping me hovering tantalisingly on the edge of my climax, not allowing me to go over.

‘More,’ I say, panting. ‘Give me more, Halsin, please, I need to come–’

‘Gods, I love when you beg me,’ he growls into my neck, and obligingly picks up his pace, running his fingers over my clit with exactly the right amount of pressure. I cry out in sheer relief. ‘There, my heart. Is that better?’

‘Yes, perfect, don’t stop, oh, oh, ohhh,’ and I’m coming, writhing on his cock as pleasure rushes through me, hearing him groan as my cunt contracts around him.

‘Mm,’ he says, taking his fingers away just as the aftershocks of my pleasure threaten to turn into overstimulation. He hasn’t come himself; he’s still fucking me steadily, almost lazily. ‘How many more of those would you like, my heart?’

‘Planning to give me a choice in the matter, are you?’ I say, arching my back luxuriously. Now that the urgency of my desire has abated, I’m enjoying the warmth in my limbs, the little sparks of pleasure from his cock as he moves inside me. He’s running his hand restlessly over my skin, over my hip and the curve of my belly, cupping my breast and then stroking up the side of my neck and rubbing his thumb over my lower lip. It feels good, amid all the pains and discomforts and bodily indignities of late pregnancy, to give myself over to pleasure for a while.

‘Within certain parameters,’ he says, as I nip at his thumb. ‘I wouldn’t want you to report back to Mrs Gardiner that I played my part with less than the requisite enthusiasm–’

‘Halsin,’ I say, laughing. ‘I’m not going to report back to Mrs Gardiner on your performance in bed–’

‘But if you did,’ he tells me solemnly, ‘I’d want to receive a stellar review. If you don’t have the baby tomorrow, I’ll not have it attributed to any lack of thoroughness on my part.’

‘Gods, I’ve created a monster,’ I say, still laughing. ‘Are you going to insist on keeping this up every night until the baby’s born?’

‘Now, there’s an idea,’ he says. ‘That way, no matter when the baby arrives, we can say that it was my heroic efforts that brought it about.’

‘Your heroic efforts–’ I splutter.

‘And more to the point, my heart,’ he says, plucking at my nipple with his fingers and sending a shock of renewed pleasure through me, very effectively distracting me from my half-genuine outrage, ‘it means more nights spent like this, with you squirming and begging and coming all over my cock. I’d be a fool to turn that offer down.’

‘I don’t recall actually making an offer,’ I say, gasping as heat builds inexorably inside me.

‘Are you telling me no?’ he asks, biting my shoulder. He’s fucking me a little harder now, grinding into me deliciously, and his hand wanders back down to my cunt. ‘You don’t want this? Don’t want to lie here for hours impaled on my cock while I make you come as many times as I can manage? Because if you’d rather I go easy on you, my heart, you need only say the word.’

‘Oh,’ I say. He’s stroking my clit more firmly this time, just the way I like it, and the combination of his touch and his voice growling in my ear is bringing me right back to the peak. ‘Oh, gods–’

‘Tell me,’ he says insistently. ‘You’re going to come for me again in a moment, Shadowheart. Am I going to come with you, and then let you get some sleep? Or am I going to hold off so I can give you another one?’

Gods, this man drives me wild. I grasp on to his forearm where it lies between my breasts to brace myself so I can push back into him, circling my hips down onto his cock, and clench my cunt hard. He lets out a startled moan. ‘Do you think you’re capable of holding off?’ I ask him.

‘I’ll manage somehow,’ he says breathlessly. ‘Though if you keep that up, it’s going to be a close call – gods–’

That’s an opportunity to tease him that I’m not about to pass up. ‘I’m going to keep doing it,’ I tell him, doing it again, hearing him gasp raggedly, ‘and you’re going to hold off – you’re going to keep fucking me just like this – you’re not going to come, no matter how much you want to, do you understand, Halsin–’

‘Ah,’ he says, and drops his forehead to my shoulder, panting. He’s still fucking me hard and slow, meeting my hips as I grind myself onto him, and his fingers haven’t paused for a moment, rubbing over my clit, winding the threads of my pleasure tighter. ‘I suppose I have no one to blame for this but myself – oh – oh–’

‘Oh, fuck, yes,’ I moan, coming again, arching back into him as my orgasm washes deliciously over me. He makes a noise almost of pain, pulling me down onto his cock and then holding me there, his arm an iron band around me as I rock against him as much as my limited range of movement will allow.

‘Stay still a moment, will you,’ he gasps, taking his hand off my cunt to wrap his arm around my hips and hold me more tightly in place. I consider disobeying him before deciding that I’ve put him through enough at this point. I’m still contracting around him with the aftershocks.

We lie like that for a minute as our breathing slows. Then he starts moving inside me again, more gently than before, and kisses my shoulder. ‘Do you want to come like this again?’ he murmurs into my skin. ‘Or would you prefer to change position?’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can come again,’ I say sleepily, and he gasps out a laugh.

‘What was all that for, then?’ he demands. ‘Only to torture me?’

‘I can’t help it if you’re fun to tease,’ I inform him. ‘You can come now, if you like–’

‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘I’m not letting you get away with that kind of bad behaviour, my heart. You told me you wanted one more­, you’re going to stay right here on my cock until you give me one more.’

I draw in a sharp, involuntary breath, and he chuckles darkly, and kisses my neck. ‘I thought so,’ he says. ‘You like that idea, don’t you? Perhaps this time I’ll make you work for it, though,’ and he stops moving, though his arms around me are as tight as ever, holding me firmly in place.

‘Halsin,’ I say, frustration warring with renewed arousal, all sleepiness forgotten. I push my hips down onto his cock as far as I’m able, which isn’t very far. ‘How am I supposed to work for it if you won’t let me move?’

‘You think you deserve to be allowed to move, do you?’ he says.

Gods. I can’t believe he’s brought me from honestly thinking I was done to wanting it this badly in the space of twenty seconds. I try to rock my hips against him again, but squirming really is all I can do. Something about the combination of being ordered to come and prevented from moving has made me suddenly hyper-aware of him inside me. I can feel every inch of him pressed up into me, so close to giving me what I want, and yet without range of motion I can’t quite get there, can’t rub myself along his cock the way I’m desperate to. It’s maddening, an itch I can’t scratch, and the sheer frustration of it, of being so completely at his mercy, is building my arousal higher by the moment. I clench down around his cock, trying to get some relief, but it’s not nearly enough, and I let out an involuntary whine of need.

‘Mm,’ he says. ‘Gods, you’re beautiful like this. I think I could stay here all night and not get tired of it.’

‘No,’ I say, unable to prevent myself from exclaiming out loud. And just as unable to prevent myself from clenching around him again at the thought of it, of him pinning me like this for hours while I sob out my frustrations and writhe on his cock.

‘I felt that,’ he says. ‘You can’t hide how you’re responding when I’m inside you like this, my heart. I know exactly what that idea does to you. However much you might try to tell me otherwise.’

‘No,’ I say again, helplessly. ‘No, please, Halsin, I need to move–’

‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’ he says, kissing the back of my neck tenderly. ‘Being teased like this – wanting release so badly and not being allowed to have it–’

‘Oh, gods, please,’ I whimper, nearly mindless with it, still squirming against him, and his cock twitches inside me in response to my plea. He’s not nearly as in control as he’s pretending to be, I realise through the haze of my desire, and I immediately seize on this advantage. ‘Please, love, please let me move, I’ll be so good for you, I promise–’

His cock jerks inside me again, harder this time, and he lets out a strangled groan. ‘Gods, you drive me insane,’ he says, and I hear the raw need in his voice.

‘Let me be your good girl–’

‘Fuck,’ he gasps – a sure sign of how far gone he is, he almost never swears, even in bed – and he lets go of my hips. I moan in triumph and relief and start rocking against him in earnest. He’s got his forehead pressed to the back of my neck again, and I can feel his harsh breaths against my skin. He’s still not moving, just letting me fuck myself on him, his free hand drifting up to stroke my breast. I push my feet into the bed and reach up to brace my hands against the headboard, trying to get purchase, and he obligingly loosens his other arm.

I lean forward a bit, still rocking my hips onto him, and– ‘Oh,’ I gasp, finding the right angle at last. I brace my hands more firmly and keep going, moving on him, feeling the length of his cock rubbing deliciously back and forth inside me. ‘Fuck, that feels amazing,’ I say, moaning again. ‘Do you like that, love – please – I want to be good for you–’

He lets out a pained, breathless laugh. ‘You’re so good for me,’ he agrees. He sounds almost lost, consumed by his need. ‘Gods, my heart – I don’t think I can last much longer­–’

‘Good,’ I say fiercely. ‘Come for me, Halsin – I want you to come in me–’

With a choked moan, he starts moving inside me, putting his hand under my thigh so he can lift up my leg a little, pushing himself deeper. I push back, closing my eyes, whimpering helplessly as my pleasure builds higher with every stroke of his cock. He’s slamming into me, groaning, all control gone. Fuck, I love bringing him to this point, stripping away his capacity for restraint until he’s mindless, lost to everything but his need for me. I turn my face into the mattress to muffle my cries a little, almost sobbing with the intensity of sensation. ‘Gods, Halsin,’ I say, barely coherently, ‘I love you – I love this ­­­– don’t stop–’

He cries out sharply, and the feeling of his cock pulsing inside me as he starts to come sends me straight over the edge. He grabs my hips again to stabilise me, still thrusting into me as I moan desperately and clench around him, riding out wave after wave of white-hot pleasure. He’s moaning too, gasping out my name, pushing so deep inside me that it sends little half-painful shocks through me, drawing out my orgasm until every last drop of pleasure has been wrung out of me, leaving me unable to think, unable to move, capable only of lying washed out and panting as my conscious mind gradually kicks back in.

‘Well, if that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will,’ I say eventually.

He laughs and pulls out of me, rolling onto his back, and I roll over to face him. Even rolling over in bed is no mean feat these days, and I hiss out a breath as the movement sends a sharp, cramping ache through the side of my belly. Having what turned out to be really quite energetic sex probably wasn’t the best idea, but I can’t bring myself to care when, aches aside, I’m still feeling this good.

‘Come here, will you,’ Halsin says, pulling me into him. I move as close as my bump will allow, resting my head on his shoulder gratefully, putting my hand on his chest and running my fingers idly through the hair there. He moves his own hand to my belly. ‘I’m sorry you’re so uncomfortable, my love.’

As if on cue, the baby wakes up and executes a sort of barrel roll manoeuvre that by all rights there shouldn’t even be room for, stretching my already painfully tight skin even tighter. Halsin strokes my shifting belly, and the baby pushes up into his hand, sticking their feet into my internal organs in the process. ‘Gods, I don’t want to be pregnant any more,’ I grumble – my constant refrain at the moment, he must be thoroughly sick of hearing it, though he never responds with anything but sympathetic understanding.

‘You hear that, little one?’ he murmurs, stroking my belly again. ‘You must be as uncomfortable in there as your poor mama. Time to be born, now. You have brothers and sisters who can’t wait to meet you.’

‘Think that will work?’ I mumble, yawning, snuggling a little closer to him and allowing my eyes to drift shut.

He’s got his lips pressed into my hair, and I feel him smile. ‘I have soon-to-be seven children,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve long since been disabused of the notion that any of them pay attention to a word I say. But you never know. Maybe this one will surprise us.’

Whatever the old wives might have to say about it, I choose to believe that baby Emme simply decides to listen to her father. She’s born the next afternoon, the first day of spring, after a labour that has me almost thinking fondly of the times when I was tormented by Shar’s wound.

I’ve flatly refused Halsin’s offer to deliver the baby himself. ‘It’s not that I think you can’t, darling,’ I had to say to him, more patiently than I was feeling at the time, after he tried to tell me about the other babies he’d delivered in the past. ‘But I want you there as my partner, not my healer.’ He reluctantly conceded, so Mrs Gardiner, one of Reithwin’s midwives, assists at the birth. She’s excellent, calm and no-nonsense and utterly unintimidated by Halsin’s Archdruid persona.

We’ve told the children that they’re welcome to watch the baby be born if they’d like to. In the end three of them are there for the birth: Yen, patient and helpful; Freyja, deeply invested in the idea of a baby sibling and standing ready to act as their second mother; and Talviss, sweet and serious and almost clinically interested in the birthing process. Gray is clearly disgusted even to be asked, but I can tell he’s more anxious than he lets on, and Wren tells me later that he spends most of my labour patiently entertaining Arlen, who hero-worships Gray, is usually beneath Gray’s notice, and can’t believe his luck to have his brother’s undivided attention for several hours in a row. Sensitive Larra, meanwhile, tries to attend but bolts out of the room halfway through the proceedings and is much happier downstairs helping Wren paint a welcome sign for the new baby.

The labour itself is possibly the most physically and mentally gruelling experience of my life, and that’s saying something. It’s enough to put me off having any more children this way, right up until the moment she’s born, and Halsin catches her in his large practiced hands and puts her on my chest, and we look down at her – he’s crying, and I’m laughing, and she’s scowling up at both of us, looking ferociously unimpressed, by us or by her ordeal or by the world at large, I can’t tell – and all of a sudden, I think, oh. Oh, there you are.

Here she is, and she’s a fully formed person, and it’s immediately obvious that she’s meant to be part of our family.

We name her Emmeline Aithne, after both of our mothers, and we intend to call her Emme, but for the first tenday or so after she’s born she conquers our world so completely that most of the time we only refer to her as she. I think she’s hungry again, and can you take her for a minute, and gentle with her, please, and there’s never any doubt about which she we’re referring to.

The other children adore her, and squabble among themselves about whose turn it is to hold her. My father cries when I put her in his arms and tell him her name, and I cry with him, thinking about how Mother would have loved to meet her namesake, and how much I would have liked to have her here, to help me and soothe me and calm my fears.

Everyone except me thinks she looks just like Halsin. ‘Babies always look like their fathers at first,’ Mrs Gardiner says complacently, cycling Emme’s legs to show me how to help her if she has a stomach pain. ‘It’s nature’s way. Men do need their little reassurances, don’t they.’

Personally, I think she looks a bit like Halsin, and a bit like me, and distinctly like Mother around the eyes. She’s an easy baby, the grandmothers of Reithwin are at pains to inform me, although an easy baby is still plenty difficult enough. I have to bully Halsin into resting properly – he’d give it up entirely if I let him, I think – and he’s everywhere at once, settling Emme to sleep, helping me latch her, bringing me cups of raspberry leaf tea, making sure the other children are all fed and happy and given individual attention, somehow keeping up with most of his Reithwin responsibilities at the same time. I try to scold him about being too selfless, but this is one of those times when he has no intention of letting me win.

‘I’ve got the easy job,’ he tells me in a tone that brooks no argument, taking Emme from me and propping her up against his shoulder. ‘All I’m doing is keeping the household running. You’re the one up at all hours feeding her while trying to recover from the birth.’

I have to admit that it’s very hard to maintain a proper spirit of scolding when I’m watching them together. She’s so tiny, snuggled into him hiccupping softly while he pats her back soothingly. It makes me want to have six more babies with him, inadvisable as that may be.

Still, I’m not quite ready to give up on the argument yet. ‘Better for the household to slow to a crawl for a while than for you to get burned out, darling,’ I say.

He smiles at me. ‘I won’t let it get to that point. I promise.’

And with that answer I have to be content.

‘Who do you think she looks like?’ I ask Halsin.

The light of an overcast dawn is filtering in through the bedroom window, and the house is quiet. I’ve just fed Emme and lain her down in the bed between us. She’s not quite asleep: she’s wriggling a little, slowly, and her head is lolled back, her face a picture of milk-drunk bliss.

‘Mostly I think she looks like herself,’ he says. He’s watching her, his eyes soft with the tender look he reserves for his children. ‘Although the face she makes when she’s deciding whether or not to start crying reminds me of Larra. Don’t tell Larra I said so,’ he adds, glancing up to grin at me.

‘Poor Larra,’ I say. ‘She’s been so patient with all these changes. All of them have, really. It makes me think we must be doing something right with them.’

He’s holding one of Emme’s feet, gently, letting her push back against his hand, but at this he releases her and reaches out to stroke my hip. ‘Here, now,’ he says. ‘What happened to we’ll all muddle through somehow?’

‘Hormones happened to it, I suspect,’ I say wryly.

He raises an eyebrow, but instead of commenting he gets up, lifts Emme carefully and settles her into her bassinet. Then he comes back into bed and gathers me into his arms. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Out with it. What’s wrong?’

‘It really is probably just hormones,’ I say, snuggling into him gratefully. Reithwin’s contingent of grandmothers has taken pains to warn me, with I’m sure the very best of intentions, that women stop wanting anything to do with their partners for a while after giving birth: that I’ll be so overwhelmed by the physical demands of caring for a newborn that Halsin’s attentions will feel like just another obligation. The complete opposite turns out to be true, for me at least. I’m desperate for him to touch me, to make me feel grounded in my body, to remind me that I’m a person and not just a mother.

‘That’s not a proper answer, and you know it,’ he tells me. ‘You might as well start talking, my heart. I’m not going anywhere until you do. The children can forage for their own breakfast.’

‘Moonmaiden’s mercy on the kitchen,’ I say in mock dismay, and he chuckles and kisses the top of my head, and then falls silent, waiting.

There’s a long pause while I try to gather my thoughts. ‘I can’t stop thinking about how helpless she is,’ I say at last. ‘How powerless I am to stop bad things from happening to her. To stop bad things from happening to any of them. I feel… out of control, all of a sudden.’ His arms tighten around me, but he says nothing. ‘I don’t know why she makes me feel this way when none of the others did.’

‘I can think of plenty of reasons,’ he says gently. ‘She’s the only one who came to us as a baby. Even Arlen arrived already firmly of the opinion that he could look after himself.’ This makes me smile, remembering Arlen at two, inserting himself into the life of our family with the indomitable air of a brigand boarding a merchant ship. ‘You’re still recovering from the effects of childbirth, as you say. And more than that… I’m not sure you’ve fully allowed yourself to feel how traumatic the birth was for you, my heart.’

I tilt my head back so I can frown up at him. ‘It wasn’t traumatic,’ I say. ‘Well, it was. It was exhausting and intense and it hurt like hells. But it went as smoothly as it could have. Neither of us was ever in danger. Mrs Gardiner said it was a textbook delivery–’

‘And you spent twelve hours enduring agonising pain that was inflicted on your body without your having any ability to control it,’ he says, taking my hand where it lies on his chest and lacing his fingers through mine, and looking back at me seriously. ‘There’s no way it didn’t bring up difficult memories. Even if only subconsciously.’

‘… Oh,’ I say quietly.

He smiles at me affectionately. ‘Yes, oh,’ he says. ‘And now she’s here, and she has a biological link to you that the others don’t–’

‘But that doesn’t matter to me,’ I protest. ‘I don’t love her any more because of it–’

‘Of course not,’ he says patiently. ‘But she does represent something different to you than the others do, all the same. She’s a tangible link to your parents. She’s a part of them the same way you are. And seeing her so small and so reliant on you must remind you that you were like that once. And that your parents couldn’t protect you.’

He’s so obviously hit on the heart of the problem that I burst helplessly into tears. He pulls me closer to him and lets me cry into his shoulder, stroking my hair.

‘Gods,’ I say eventually, after my sobs have subsided. ‘Every time I start to think I’ve come to terms with what happened to me, something comes along to remind me that I haven’t accepted it as much as I thought.’

‘That’s what grief is like, in my experience,’ he says. ‘It never truly goes away. Over time you start to feel it less intensely, and then something reminds you and suddenly it’s as fresh as ever.’

‘Do you worry you won’t be able to protect her?’ I ask him. ‘She’s your first baby, too.’

He’s silent for a moment, thinking about it. ‘I do worry for them,’ he says at last. ‘All of them. I worry that I’ll fail them in some way, and I won’t realise it until it’s too late. And of course if something bad happened to one of them it would devastate me. But I’ve lost so many people I loved already, and I know the chances are high that I’ll lose more. If I allow myself to dwell on those losses before they happen, it will taint the time we do have together. So I try to set it aside, and focus on the blessings I have now.’

‘And how long did it take you to reach such an enlightened perspective?’ I ask, teasing a little.

‘A good couple of centuries, at least,’ he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘And it’s easier said than done, my heart. But it’s necessary if I don’t want to live my life burdened by regrets.’

‘You don’t regret it, do you?’ I say. ‘Coming to Reithwin? Settling instead of roaming?’

‘Never for a moment,’ he says firmly. ‘Quite the contrary. I can’t believe how fortunate I am to have all of you. To have you, my heart,’ and he tilts my face up to kiss me.

He pulls away much too quickly, and I put my hand on the back of his neck and tug him back in for another kiss, opening my mouth to him and running my fingers through his hair. He responds immediately, rolling onto his side to face me, sliding his hand up my thigh to my hip underneath my nightgown, nipping my bottom lip and making me gasp. I drape my leg over his, pressing myself against him, feeling the familiar tide of my desire for him rising inexorably, eclipsing my body’s exhaustion and filling me up with a warm desperate aching.

He breaks the kiss and presses his lips to my shoulder. ‘We don’t have to,’ he says, a little hoarsely, ‘if it’s too soon–’

‘I want to,’ I say, raw. ‘Please–’ and he growls quietly, and kisses me again.

There’s a bang as the door bursts open, and we pull apart reluctantly, both wincing in anticipation of Emme’s cry, but thankfully she must be deeply asleep, and doesn’t stir. Arlen appears at the foot of the bed. Well, that was nice while it lasted, I think ruefully.

‘Good morning, darling,’ I say out loud, trying to recover myself as my heartbeat gradually slows. ‘Remember how we talked about being gentle with the door in case baby Emme is sleeping?’

‘And about knocking on closed doors before you come inside?’ adds Halsin.

Arlen ignores both of us in favour of clambering onto the bed, forcibly inserting himself in between us and crawling under the blankets with little regard to where he’s putting his kicking feet. He lays his head on my shoulder and throws one arm across me, and I kiss his forehead. My grown-up baby, so perpetually busy pursuing his own schemes that I cherish every fleeting moment of affection he bestows on me.

Sure enough, no sooner is he settled than he’s moving again, squirming around to face Halsin.

‘Daddy,’ he says.

‘Yes?’ says Halsin.

‘Talviss is making pancakes all by himself,’ says Arlen. ‘And he won’t let me flip them.’

Halsin’s mouth twitches. ‘Something of a tactical error on Talviss’s part,’ he observes, ‘given that it’s brought you up here to tell tales and risked me putting a stop to the entire operation.’

‘He’s not being kind,’ insists Arlen, aggrieved.

Halsin looks to me. ‘What are the chances that they’ll burn the house down if we leave them to it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say. ‘One in ten?’

‘Probably too high to risk it,’ sighs Halsin. He gets out of bed. ‘Come on, then,’ he says to Arlen. ‘Let’s leave Mama in peace and go and sort this out.’

Arlen wriggles out from under the blankets and stands up precariously on the bed, lifting his arms to be carried. Halsin picks him up and heads for the door, but pauses in the doorway and turns back to give me a heated look.

‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, my heart,’ he says darkly, making me shiver. ‘Later.’

‘Mm,’ I say appreciatively. ‘Save me some pancakes, won’t you?’

‘I’m not fool enough to make promises like that in this house,’ says Halsin. ‘But I’ll see what I can do.’ Then he disappears down the stairs.

On a quiet afternoon in midsummer, there’s a knock on my door.

I think it’s Mrs Gardiner at first. She’s promised to bring me some of her tried-and-true teething salve for Emme, who’s got both bottom incisors breaking through at once, making herself, me, and by extension the whole household crotchety and miserable. Much as I’ve been pinning my hopes on the salve working the miracles Mrs Gardiner promises it will, I can’t help but sigh in annoyance at her timing. I’ve been trying to put Emme down for her nap before the other children get home from school, and she keeps almost drifting off and then waking up and whimpering tiredly, seeming almost as frustrated as I am that she can’t sleep. And now the whole nap will be a lost cause, because Mrs Gardiner will want to stay for a cup of tea and a chat and regale me with Reithwin gossip for forty-five minutes while very kindly not judging me for the state the house is in, and then the children will be home and Emme will be overtired and they’ll all need attention at once, and Halsin has a Council meeting tonight and won’t be there to help manage the chaos, and I can see the whole evening stretching out in front of me in all its inevitable fractiousness and exhaustion.

I remind myself forcibly that none of this is Mrs Gardiner’s fault, and carry a still-grizzling Emme down the stairs to the door, and plaster on what I hope is a suitably welcoming expression to open it.

It’s not Mrs Gardiner. It’s Karlach and Wyll. ‘Surprise,’ says Karlach.

I gape at them both. My first thought is that something must be terribly wrong, to have brought them here a good four months before they’re due and risked straining Karlach’s heart. But they don’t look like something’s wrong. Karlach’s grinning at me, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it was a nervous grin, and Wyll is positively beaming.

‘Look at this wee poppet,’ he says to Emme, sounding utterly delighted to see her, frowny red face and tear stains and all. ‘If you’ll allow me,’ he adds, glancing up at me, ‘I think you’re going to need your arms in a moment,’ and he plucks Emme out of my grasp. She stares at him, gone silent in her surprise.

Much like her mother. I recover myself enough to say, ‘What are you doing here?’

Karlach’s grin broadens until she’s beaming at me too. And I belatedly notice that she’s glowing only figuratively instead of literally, and I clap my hand to my mouth and whisper through my fingers, ‘You fixed it?’

‘We fixed it,’ she says, and I burst into tears and throw my arms around her, and she lifts me straight off my feet and spins me in a circle.

‘Isn’t this a happy reunion,’ says Mrs Gardiner’s voice from behind us. ‘Now, are you two here ahead of schedule or am I getting my dates mixed up again?’

Karlach releases me and grins at Mrs Gardiner, wiping her eyes. ‘Ahead of schedule and home for good this time.’

‘How wonderful,’ says Mrs Gardiner warmly. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m only here to drop off the teething balm for wee Emme.’

‘Emme!’ says Karlach joyfully. She turns to smile at Emme, who’s still silent and round-eyed at all the commotion. ‘What a beautiful name. Hello, sweet pea. It’s so good to meet you.’

After one more moment of staring, the Auntie Karlach effect kicks in: Emme bestows on her a wide, toothless smile and leans forward out of Wyll’s arms. Karlach scoops her up and props her on one hip, telling her, ‘You look just like your mum, you know.’

That conveniently leaves Wyll empty-handed. ‘Wyll,’ I say, my voice still choked with tears, wrapping my arms around his neck and squeezing him tight. ‘You did it. You brought her home.’

‘The Blade of Avernus always keeps his promises,’ he says cheerfully. ‘And that reminds me: I suppose now the Blade is home from Avernus, I’ll be in need of another new moniker.’

‘How about “The Tea Towel of Not Tackling Any Fight More Challenging than the Washing Up for At Least the Next Six Months”?’ says Karlach.

Wyll gives her a small smile. ‘Do you know what,’ he says gravely, ‘it’s a bit long, but I rather like the sound of that.’