Rulers of the Darkness

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 about it in the news sheets."

"Here's hoping you're right," Vanai said. "The thinner they spread themselves, the better." She stooped and plucked up a couple of horse mushrooms, slightly more flavorful cousins to ordinary meadow mushrooms. As she put them in her basket, she sighed. "I don't think there are as many interesting kinds around Eoforwic as there were back where we came from."

"I think you're right." Ealstan started to add something else, but broke off and looked at her with an expression she'd come to recognize. Sure enough, he said, "Your sorcery's slipped again."

Vanai's mouth twisted. "It shouldn't have. I renewed it not long before we walked to the caravan stop."

"Well, it has," her husband said. "Is it my imagination, or has the spell been fading faster since you got pregnant?"

"I don't know," Vanai said. "Maybe. It's a good thing nobody's close by, that's all." Now she hurried for the shelter of the oaks- not that they gave much shelter, with most of the leaves off the branches. She took out her two precious lengths of yarn, twirled them together, and made the spell anew. "Is it all right?" she asked.

"Aye." Ealstan nodded. Now he looked thoughtful. "I wonder why it isn't holding so long these days. Maybe because you've got more life energy in you now, and so the spell has more to cover."

"It could be. It sounds logical," Vanai said. "But I hope you're wrong. I hope I just didn't cast the spell quite right. I could have lost the disguise on the caravan car, not out here where no one but you saw me." Her shiver, again, had nothing to do with the chilly, nasty weather. "That would have been very bad."

***