Chapter 70: While They Were Small

On the first morning, Io took her healer’s bag.

There were perfectly sound reasons to return to Greykeep. Adriana needed examining. There were questions to ask, notes to make, ordinary signs of recovery that should be checked by someone who would not accept a cheerful answer simply because everyone wanted one.

Io did all of that.

Then she asked to hold Roderic.

He settled into the crook of her arm with one small fist beside his face. His dark hair lay softly against his head. When his mouth moved, she found herself waiting to see whether he would wake.

He did not.

Adriana was resting. There seemed no reason to disturb either of them.

An hour passed.

The next morning, Io measured him with a ribbon and listened to his breathing. He expressed a strong objection to part of the examination, then appeared to forget the grievance as soon as he was comfortable again.

She pronounced him healthy and predicted that his appetite would become a household concern.

Then she held him through most of the afternoon.

By the fourth day, she no longer needed to pretend that examining him was the whole purpose of her visit.

She kissed Adriana’s cheek, accepted the baby, and went to the chair beside the nursery window.

The light was good there.

She could see every part of his face.

Seraphina and Ignatius came with her every day.

Io had explained the rules carefully. Babies were small. First Flame was not. Wanting to help did not mean reaching for the power that came most naturally to them.

Both children listened with unusual seriousness.

Their solution was to remain as close as possible without touching.

Ignatius could sit beside the cradle for so long that Io sometimes checked to see whether he had fallen asleep himself. Seraphina had more difficulty with stillness, but an astonishing capacity for returning to the same place after briefly deciding to do something else.

Carol and Garrick preferred a formal arrangement.

They stationed themselves beside the nursery door and asked visitors for their names and intentions. Io had heard Thor answer with the solemnity she would have given an actual sentry. She had watched Mary submit to questioning about the registration of the birth.

Writing Roderic’s name down so that people would know he existed had struck the children as urgent work.

Io understood the impulse.

Every day he did something that seemed to deserve a witness. A different sound. An expression that resembled Adriana’s. A yawn so complete that his whole face appeared to participate.

She kept finding reasons to look again.

On the day Roderic was six days old, Ignatius asked Uriah when he would begin doing things.

Io was folding a blanket across the room.

Soon, Uriah told him. Watching, reaching, rolling over.

“How long?”

Io’s hands stopped.

She knew what answer she would ordinarily have given a parent asking about a child’s development. She also knew how little those expectations had told her about her own children.

Uriah hesitated.

“We’ll see.”

Ignatius accepted this and returned to his watch.

Io looked at him over the blanket.

His feet. His hands. The intent expression that made him look older until something delighted him and his whole face changed.

He had grown again. Of course he had. There were measurements, clothes that no longer fitted, latches he could now reach without assistance. Rysa had records. Io could have retrieved them and traced the changes exactly.

None of them would show her how he had looked the morning before she noticed.

She lowered the blanket into her lap.

Ignatius leaned forward slightly to see Roderic’s face.

Io watched her son.

Adriana waited until the children had gone to the garden with Julian and Helena.

Io heard their voices below the window. An argument was developing about a moat, though she could not yet distinguish the positions being defended.

Roderic slept against her shoulder.

“Io.”

“Hmm?”

“You’ve held my son for nineteen hours this week.”

Io looked up.

“Have I?”

Evelyn had counted, Adriana said.

Estimated, Evelyn corrected.

Very precisely.

Io looked down at the baby. One of his hands had slipped free, the fingers loosely curled against the fabric of her gown.

For the first time, she saw her visits as they must look from elsewhere in the room. The examinations that had become shorter. The time in the chair that had become longer. Her reluctance to move when someone suggested she might want tea.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should give him back.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

She did know. Adriana had spoken gently. Evelyn’s face held none of the polite patience people used when they wished a guest would leave.

That made answering harder.

Evelyn sat on the floor beside Io’s chair.

“When did it start?”

Io laughed softly.

“The night he was born. When Ignatius asked whether they’d been red.”

She had answered immediately. Yes. Very.

Then she had tried to remember.

Not the account she could give a healer. Not the details repeated at council meetings, the things people asked because they feared what the twins might become.

Their faces.

That first morning.

“And?” Evelyn asked.

“And I couldn’t.”

Saying it aloud felt disloyal. She loved her children. There had never been a moment in which she had doubted that. She knew their voices from another room, their silences, the particular ways they became suspicious when an adult offered an answer they considered incomplete.

But she could remember the fear around their arrival more clearly than the children themselves.

The delivery. The fire around the cradle. Lexander holding the shield while the healers worked. Prophecies. Visitors who came to examine possibilities instead of meeting two new people.

Council discussions about what they might become.

Those memories returned readily.

She could not remember whether Ignatius had yawned the way Roderic did.

As though he had heard the question, Roderic yawned against her shoulder.

Io laughed.

Halfway through, the sound changed.

She told them about Seraphina choosing her own clothes.

It had been a perfectly reasonable request, delivered with considerable dignity. Io had agreed. Her daughter had walked out, pleased to have settled the matter.

Io had remained sitting on the bed.

For an hour.

There had been no reason to call Seraphina back. Nothing to correct. She wanted her children to learn, to choose, to ask better questions than the adults expected.

She had not known that wanting those things could exist beside such a sharp wish to be given one ordinary morning again.

“They grew so fast,” she whispered. “And I was so busy keeping them safe that I forgot to watch them be small.”

Evelyn put a hand on her knee.

Adriana reached for her free hand.

Uriah remained quietly on the bed.

Io was grateful that no one tried to supply a reassuring list of all the things she had done correctly. She knew there were such lists. She could have written one herself. It would not restore a sound she could no longer remember.

After a while, she wiped her face.

She called herself foolish.

Evelyn disagreed.

Adriana told her she could hold Roderic whenever she liked.

Io thanked her.

Then she looked at the baby and understood that gratitude was not quite the answer to the question she had been avoiding.

“I want another,” she said.

The words surprised her.

She looked toward the garden. Seraphina and Ignatius were still arguing with Julian about the moat. Their voices carried the absolute confidence of people for whom a satisfactory arrangement ought to be possible if everyone else would only listen.

She wanted them to know a younger brother or sister.

To be old enough to hold the child. To teach something. To remember what small meant before their own swift growth carried them too far beyond it.

She wanted to meet another baby without fear occupying every place where a memory might have settled.

“Have you told Lexander?” Evelyn asked.

Io gave an unsteady laugh.

“I haven’t told myself until just now.”

She looked down again.

Roderic slept on, unaware of the change he had helped bring into the room.

The message said Io would remain for supper.

Lexander read it, found nothing unusual in it, and returned to his work.

Later, she would remain for the evening.

Then the children had fallen asleep with Carol and Garrick, and Io would stay the night.

By midnight, Lexander went through the gate.

He did not hurry. There was no alarm in the messages, no request for assistance, nothing to suggest that Adriana or Roderic needed him. Yet something in the succession of small decisions drew him more strongly than any one of them should have done.

He found Io asleep beside the window with Roderic in her arms.

He stopped in the doorway.

Her face was peaceful.

He had seen her resting in chairs before, usually after refusing to admit that she needed to stop. Those rests left a crease between her brows and one hand curled as though she still held a pen.

This was different.

“How long has she been like this?” he asked Uriah.

“Four days.”

“Since the night he was born?”

“Yes.”

Lexander looked back at her.

He took a blanket from the bed and laid it carefully over her and the baby.

Then he sat on the floor beside her chair.

He stayed until morning.

He brought her tea before breakfast.

Io accepted it. Then she set it down.

“Lexander, I want to have another baby.”

She picked the cup up again.

For a moment, every useful thing he might have said disappeared.

“Now?”

“Not this minute.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m holding tea.”

She looked at the cup still in his own hand.

Then she laughed.

It helped. He sat down before he could add anything worse.

Io told him about the conversation with Evelyn and Adriana. She spoke of the children, of what she remembered too well and what she feared she had lost.

He listened.

He remembered that first night too. The shield. The need to keep his attention fixed. The terrifying certainty that looking away from danger might be the thing that allowed it to reach them.

He had never thought to ask what Io remembered when she pictured the twins as newborns.

He had assumed her memories would be fuller than his.

Now he wondered how much of parenthood they had each experienced while believing the other had managed to hold on to the part slipping past them.

“There’s still a war,” he said eventually.

“I know.”

People remained in cages. Othellos was building false shrines above the Keeper’s house. Surtr remained beyond the ford. Concordia needed them, and Greykeep needed its allies, and no report suggested that any of this would be neatly concluded soon.

Io listened without interrupting.

Then she told him that if they waited for safety, Seraphina and Ignatius might be grown before it arrived.

The world had not been safe when the twins were born.

She had spent so long being afraid for them that fear had become the first response even to things she wanted to celebrate.

“I want a chance to be glad first,” she said.

Lexander looked at her.

He could not promise her an easy pregnancy, an ordinary child, or a year in which no urgent messenger arrived at the wrong moment. He would not begin by offering promises neither of them could trust.

But she had not asked for any of those things.

She had asked whether there was room in their lives for something they wanted.

He set his tea down.

There were practical matters to discuss before he could answer properly.

Io was on three councils.

She ran the Concordia infirmary. She trained healers. She attended assemblies because she feared a decision about the children might be made in her absence.

Lexander named those things, one after another.

“I know what I do,” she said.

“I know you do. I’m asking what changes.”

She was quiet.

He did not want her to carry another child while carrying every task she had already refused to set down. He was frightened that she would exhaust herself trying to make this time different while arranging her days in exactly the same way.

Io looked at her hands.

One council, she told him. She had already decided which responsibility she would relinquish, and to whom.

Lysandra had been observing for months. She asked better questions than many of the people entitled to vote.

And the infirmary?

Two more senior healers would be trained to share its management.

She had meant to do it for a year.

“There was always something,” she said.

“There will always be something.”

“I know.”

This time, the words sounded less like the end of an argument than the beginning of a plan.

The children’s growth worried him too.

Rysa could measure the acceleration. She could not yet explain all of it. Something in the four older children answered one another. First Flame, the gifts Carol and Garrick carried, the time they spent together.

Now there was Roderic.

If another child joined them, what would happen?

Io could not tell him.

Neither of them tried to turn uncertainty into reassurance.

She said she would not mind if the child grew quickly, provided she was there to see it. The number of months mattered less than whether she looked up while they passed.

Lexander sat with that for a while.

He believed her.

He was still frightened.

Then he admitted the thing that had become clear almost as soon as she put down her tea.

“I want it too.”

Io looked at him.

He had put the thought aside so carefully that he had begun mistaking its absence from conversation for an absence of desire. Two children people wanted to turn into prophecies. A kingdom. A war. There had never seemed a responsible moment to say that he wanted more.

He had been waiting for a quiet evening that never came.

Now he realized how long he had been waiting for her to ask.

Io reached for his hand.

This time, neither of them was holding tea.

Lexander found Uriah in the practice yard that afternoon.

Thor had apparently declared men with week-old sons exempt from being struck in the head. Avarn had accepted the restriction, though not, from what Lexander gathered, its underlying principle.

Uriah sat on the low wall while the two of them sparred.

Lexander sat beside him.

He watched a hammer and wooden sword meet hard enough to make him grateful that the exemption existed.

“She told me,” he said.

He described the tea.

Uriah tried not to laugh and failed.

Lexander did not mind. He would have laughed too if the conversation had belonged to someone else.

Then he asked how Uriah had known it was the right time with Adriana.

He had not.

They had talked. Evelyn had wanted Adriana to have her first child before she had another. None of them had known whether the world would be safe.

It still was not.

Lexander nodded.

He spoke of his concerns, of Io’s work and the children’s growth. He repeated what she had said about wanting to be glad first.

Uriah listened.

That, Lexander discovered, was chiefly what he had needed.

He told Uriah they had decided together.

The council. The infirmary. The changes that would make the wish something more than a sentence spoken over cooling tea.

There was also Lisbeth to tell.

That subject had required considerable discussion.

“She has opinions,” Lexander said.

Uriah looked interested.

“About sleep. Food. Shoes. Bathwater. The direction a cradle ought to face.”

“And Io?”

“Last time, she was busy enough to agree simply to end the discussion.”

“And this time?”

Lexander smiled.

“This time she intends to argue about the cradle. For fun.”

Across the yard, Thor called him over to settle a disagreement about whether Avarn’s last cut would have reached her shoulder or merely her cloak.

Lexander rose.

He had no confidence that either combatant would welcome a ruling against them. For once, the prospect of being drawn into such an argument felt almost restful.

Before he crossed the yard, he looked back at Uriah.

“Thank you.”

Uriah nodded.

They told the children that evening.

Io made the distinction clear from the beginning. There was no baby yet. They wanted one, and hoped there would be one.

Seraphina asked whether it would be a girl.

“We don’t know.”

She considered that, then announced a preference for a sister. Ignatius was quite enough brother for anyone.

Ignatius objected immediately.

Lexander waited until the objection had been heard and Io had restored the conversation to its original purpose.

Then Ignatius asked whether the baby would be small.

“Very small,” Io said.

“Like Roderic?”

“Like Roderic.”

He thought about that for a long time.

“Can I watch it sleep?”

Io’s expression changed so quickly that Lexander nearly reached for her before realizing she was smiling.

“Yes,” she said.

The answer satisfied their son more completely than any account of future responsibilities could have done.

Lexander looked from him to Seraphina, already considering the possibilities a sister might offer, and back to Io.

They had made no announcement to a council. Signed nothing. Received no certainty about what would happen.

Yet the room felt different.

Two days later, Io returned to Greykeep and sat on the nursery floor.

Roderic slept in his cradle.

She looked at him when she entered. Then she turned toward her own children.

There was a castle under construction.

Ignatius wanted fish in its moat. Seraphina considered a moat a waste of space that might become a garden. Carol wanted a lamp in a window so people would know where to come.

Io listened.

Her infirmary notes were within reach. She knew where she had stopped reading them and what question remained unanswered on the next page.

When Seraphina asked her to settle the moat, Io left the notes where they were.

“Show me.”

Her daughter showed her everything.

The explanation was long and included disadvantages of moats Io had never previously considered. She asked questions. Seraphina straightened and answered them with increasing care.

Then the child pushed her hair back from her face.

Io went still.

She knew that movement.

Before words. Before walking. A small hand pressing against a forehead on waking.

The memory arrived whole enough to catch her breath.

“What?” Seraphina asked.

“You did that when you were a baby.”

Her daughter regarded her with profound suspicion.

“I did not.”

“You did.” Io smiled. “I’d forgotten. I just remembered.”

Seraphina thought about it.

Then she leaned briefly against her mother’s shoulder.

Could they have a moat and a garden?

Io looked at the unfinished walls and the space beyond them.

In this castle, she thought they could.

Mary brought the registration that evening.

Roderic Aurelius Grey now had his name in the royal record. Carol examined the document before giving it to Garrick, who studied it with fierce concentration and decided that everyone who read it knowing about his brother would be enough.

Then Roderic began to wake.

Ignatius was already beside the cradle.

“He’s moving his hands.”

Io went to kneel beside her son.

The baby opened and closed his fists. His head turned slowly.

Toward Ignatius.

Her son became perfectly still.

“He sees me,” he whispered.

“He does.”

Io watched Ignatius’s face. The wonder in it. The careful breath he held, as though too much movement might disturb this first recognition.

She would remember this.

At the doorway, Lexander stopped.

He had come to bring his family home. He could see their things gathered, the notes Io had not picked up, Seraphina nearby, and his wife kneeling beside their son.

No one had noticed him yet.

He stayed where he was.

There would be time to cross the room, collect coats, remind the children about walking through the gate. For now, Io was looking at Ignatius, and Lexander could see that she was fully there with him.

He watched them for another moment.

Home could wait.