As the ley-line caravan glided to a stop on the eastern outskirts of Eoforwic, Vanai squeezed Ealstan's hand in excitement. 'Oh, I can hardly wait!' she exclaimed.
He was grinning, too. They both got to their feet and descended from the caravan car. They both popped open umbrellas; it was drizzling. The misty rain hid all but the nearest houses. There weren't so many, anyhow; the city faded away into meadows and orchards and farmland- exactly the sort of landscape Vanai wanted now.
Along with her umbrella, she clutched a wickerwork basket. Ealstan had one just like it. Vanai jumped in the air from sheer high spirits. 'Mushrooms!' she squealed, as if it were a magic word. And so, for her, it was.
'Aye.' Ealstan nodded. They walked away from the caravan stop. Their shoes got muddy. Neither of them cared. They both had on old pairs. They weren't the only ones who'd got off at this stop, either. Half a carload of eager Forthwegians scattered to pursue their kingdom's favorite fall sport.
'You don't know what this means to me,' Vanai said once the other mushroom hunters were out of earshot.
'Maybe a little,' Ealstan said. 'I remember how excited you were after you found the sorcery last year, just to be able to go to a park and look for mushrooms there. This has to be even better.'
'It is.' Vanai gave him a quick kiss. He did try to understand in his head. Maybe he even succeeded there. But how could he understand in his belly what being cooped up inside that flat for most of a year had been like? How could he understand the fear she'd felt every time somebody walked along the hall past the door? A pause, a knock, could have meant the end for her. It hadn't happened, but it could have. She'd know that in her belly.
Her husband's thoughts were traveling a different ley line. 'There in the park, that was where you got your Forthwegian name,' Ealstan said. 'It was the first one that popped into my head when we ran into Ethelhelm and his friends.'
'Thelberge.' Vanai tasted it, then shrugged. 'It took me by surprise then. I'm used to it by now, or pretty much so, anyway. Everybody who calls me anything calls me Thelberge these days- except you, every once in a while.'
'I like you as Vanai,' he said seriously. 'I always have, you know.' Despite the chilly drizzle, that warmed her. Ealstan shifted his basket to the hand that also held the umbrella so he could put his free arm around her. He went on, 'You've had a better year than Ethelhelm did, and that's the truth.'
'I know.' Her shiver had nothing to do with the weather, either. 'I wonder what's become of him since he ran away from everything. He had nerve, there in the street in Eoforwic when his spell wore off. He started singing and playing and bluffed his way through.'
'If he'd had more nerve earlier, it might not have come to that.' Ealstan had never had much bend to him. As far as he was concerned, things were right or they were wrong, and that was that. 'But he wanted to stay rich even though the Algarvians were running the kingdom, and he ended up paying the price.'
'You can't blame him too much,' Vanai said. 'Most people just want to get along as best they can. He did better than almost anybody else with Kaunian blood in Forthweg… for a while, anyhow.'
'Aye. For a while.' Ealstan sounded grim.
Part of that, Vanai knew, was what he reckoned friendship betrayed. She said, 'Maybe we haven't heard the last of him yet.'
'Maybe,' Ealstan said. 'If he has any sense, though, he'll go on lying low. The Algarvians would be on him like a blaze if he started making waves. And Pybba would know about him, too, if he were trying to give the redheads a hard time. Pybba hasn't heard a thing.'
'Would he tell you if he had?' Vanai asked.
Before Ealstan answered, he stooped to pick some meadow mushrooms and toss them into his basket. Then he said, 'Would he tell me? I don't know. But there would likely be some sign of it in his books, and there isn't. You poke through a fellow's books, you can find all sorts of things if you know how to look.'
'You could, maybe,' Vanai said. He spoke with great assurance. His father had trained him well. At nineteen, he was a match for any bookkeeper in Eoforwic.
And how did your grandfather train you? Vanai asked herself. If there were need for a junior historian of the Kaunian Empire, you might fill the bill. Since the Algarvians have made it illegal to write Kaunian- and a capital offense to be Kaunian- you're not good for much right now.
She walked on for another couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly that Ealstan kept going on for a bit before realizing she wasn't following. He turned back in surprise. 'What's wrong?'
'Nothing.' She'd been feeling flutters in her belly the past few days, maybe even the past week. She'd put them down to gas and a sour stomach; her digestion wasn't all it might have been. But this wasn't gas. She knew what it was, knew what it had to be. 'Nothing's wrong. The baby just kicked me.'
Ealstan looked as astonished as he had when she'd first told him she was pregnant. Then he hurried back to her and set his own hand on her belly. Vanai looked around, ready to be embarrassed, but she couldn't see anyone else, which meant no one else could see him do such an intimate thing. He said, 'Do you suppose he'll do it again?'
'How should I know?' Vanai said, startled into laughter. 'It's not anything I can make him do.'
'No, I guess not.' Ealstan sounded as if that hadn't occurred to him till she pointed it out.
But then, with his palm still pressed against her tunic, the baby did stir again within her. 'There!' she said. 'Did you feel that?'
'Aye.' Now wonder filled his face. 'What does it feel like to you?'
Vanai thought about that. 'It doesn't feel like anything else,' she said at last. 'It feels as if somebody tiny is moving around inside me, and he's not very careful where he puts his feet.' She laughed and set her hand on top of his. 'That really is what's going on.'
Ealstan nodded. 'Now it does seem you're going to have a baby. It didn't feel quite real before, somehow.'
'It did to me!' Vanai exclaimed. For a moment, she was angry at him for being so dense. She'd gone through four months of sleepiness, of nausea, of tender breasts. She'd gone through four months without the usual monthly reminder that she wasn't pregnant. But all of that, she reminded herself, had been her concern, not Ealstan's. All he could note from firsthand experience was, this past week or so, a very slight bulge in her lower abdomen and, now, a flutter under his hand.
He must have been thinking along with her there, for he said, 'I can't have the baby, you know. All I can do is watch.'
She cocked her head to one side and smiled at him. 'Oh, you had a little more to do with it than that.' Ealstan coughed and spluttered, as she'd hoped he would. She went on, 'The baby isn't going anywhere for months, even if he thinks he is. We'll only be out here hunting mushrooms for a few hours. Can we do that now?'
'All right.' Ealstan looked astonished again. The baby was uppermost- overwhelmingly uppermost- in his thoughts. He had to be amazed it wasn't so overwhelmingly uppermost in hers. But she'd had those months to get used to the idea, while he'd admitted a minute before that it hadn't seemed real to him till now.
'Come on.' She pointed ahead. 'Are those oaks there? I think they are. Maybe we'll find some oyster mushrooms growing on their trunks.'
'Maybe we will.' Ealstan slipped his arm around her waist- she still had a waist. 'We did back there in that grove between Gromheort and Oyngestun.' He grinned at her. 'We found all sorts of interesting things in that oak grove.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' Vanai said. They both laughed. They'd first met in that grove of oaks. They'd first traded mushrooms there, too. And, a couple of years later, they'd first made love in the shade of those trees. Vanai smiled at Ealstan. 'A good thing it wasn't drizzling that one day, or everything that's happened since would have been different.'
'That's so.' Ealstan wasn't smiling anymore; he frowned as he worked through the implications of what she'd said. 'Strange to think how something you can't control, like the weather, can change your whole life.'
'Tell it to the Algarvians,' Vanai said savagely. 'In summer, they go forward in Unkerlant. In winter, they go back.' Before Ealstan could answer, she made her own commentary to that: 'Except this year, powers below eat them, they couldn't go forward in summer. They tried, but they couldn't.'
'No.' Ealstan's voice held the same fierce, gloating joy as hers. 'Nothing came easy for them this year. And now there's fighting down in Sibiu, too. I don't think that's going so well for the redheads, either, or they'd say more
