Chapter 247 Baby Ready

Chapter 247 Baby Ready
LENA

At five months the pregnancy had become impossible to arrange clothing around with any comfort, which I discovered was its own form of information about the body’s priorities.

Arya had insisted on going through her own things from the period after Elara was born, which she described as still in acceptable condition and which Sage described as being kept for sentimental reasons and needing to be given a purpose. There was an afternoon in the library with both of them and a pile of fabric and Elara investigating everything at floor level with the systematic thoroughness of a researcher in the field, and I sat in the middle of it and felt the household settling around me in a way I’d stopped trying to describe accurately and had simply started accepting as what it was.

Caspian’s response to the visible pregnancy had been characteristic. He had done research — extensively, with the methodology he applied to everything he considered important — and then he had done nothing with the research in an obvious way, and instead I found things appearing in our rooms with a practical quality that suggested someone had thought carefully about function without wanting to make an event of the thinking. The particular chair. The arrangement of the room’s furniture shifted in a way that took weight off certain things. Not once mentioned.

I mentioned it eventually because I’d decided we were done being careful about mentioning things.

“You moved the desk chair,” I said.

“The other one was at the wrong height,” he said, without looking up from what he was doing.

“You also reorganized the kitchen shelving.”

“The lower shelves are more accessible.”

I looked at him. He continued what he was doing with perfect composure, but I had learned, over months of close attention, the precise quality of his composure when it was covering something warm.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked up then. The composure adjusted itself slightly into the expression he had when he was receiving warmth directly rather than deflecting it.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

Sage’s response to the visible pregnancy was entirely different and involved significantly more vocal content. She arrived at breakfast one morning, looked at me, and said “Right, we’re doing this properly then,” and disappeared for an hour, returning with what appeared to be a complete organizational plan for the household’s adaptation to the coming months. I reviewed it and found it was both comprehensive and sensible, which was Sage operating at her natural capacity.

“You didn’t have to—” I started.

“I know I didn’t have to,” she said, in the tone she had for unnecessary statements. “Arya didn’t have anyone doing this when she was pregnant and it was a problem. I’m not doing that again.”

I looked at the plan.

“The third item,” I said. “The one about Bardon.”

“He’s going to want comprehensive monitoring data and I’d rather he have a schedule than follow her around the house asking if he can run a reading.” She looked at me. “Is that all right?”

“It’s extremely practical,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “That’s the plan.”

The thing I hadn’t fully anticipated was the baby’s awareness of the household around it. Not its own awareness, exactly — not yet, not in any way that would be visible for months. But the land connection had been developing since the first weeks, and the monitoring Bardon was running with what Arya described as contained excitement showed it doing things that didn’t have precedent in any record either of them had access to.

“The land connection in a practitioner’s child,” Bardon told me one afternoon, carefully, with the precision he brought to things he was not entirely sure how to say to a non-practitioner, “typically develops along predictable lines. There’s a baseline sequence. A developmental arc.” He paused. “Your baby’s arc doesn’t match the baseline.”

“Is that alarming?” I said.

“No,” he said, too quickly, which meant he’d been expecting the question. “It’s—” He considered his words. “The connection is more responsive than the baseline accounts for. It’s attending to the estate’s ward network in a way that’s more sophisticated than we’d expect at this stage. Not a problem. An observation.”

I thought about Elara putting her hands flat against my middle with that careful deliberateness and looking at Caspian with the silver eyes and the expression of someone whose expertise was being confirmed.

“She knew before the monitoring,” I said.

“Children with established land connections often recognize the signature of a developing one,” Bardon said. “It’s within the literature. Though the sensitivity Elara’s demonstrating is—” He paused again.

“Also ahead of the baseline,” I said.

“Comprehensively,” he said.

I had been sitting with the question of what this child would be. Not in a worried way — worry wasn’t the right word for it. More like genuine curiosity about a thing that had no precedent in my experience or my family’s experience or any experience I could directly reference. Caspian was eight hundred years old with functions I understood theoretically and experienced from the outside. The child was going to be something else again — half of him and half of me, which meant half of someone with a land connection that had surprised every practitioner who’d assessed it and half of someone who had no bloodline function at all and had spent nine years in other people’s households learning to attend to what was there.

I thought about what Caspian had said once about Elara — that she had come into the world already knowing something. That the function was present before the understanding.

I thought about what kind of knowing this child might arrive with.

Caspian was in the habit of sitting with his hand against my middle in the evenings, not constantly but with a quality of specific attention when he did it, as if he was having a conversation I wasn’t directly party to. I didn’t ask about it. He would tell me when he had words for it.

He told me on a Thursday evening when we were in the sitting room and the household had gone quiet.

“It reaches,” he said. “When I’m near. The land connection. It has a quality of orientation — the same quality Elara has when she’s locating something in the foundational layer.”

I looked at him.

“I don’t have a function,” he said. “I’ve never had direct access to the foundational layer. I can be near people who do and I can feel the secondary effects. But this—” He paused. “It reaches toward me specifically. Not just toward proximity. Toward me.”

I thought about that. “It knows you,” I said.

“It seems to,” he said. He looked at me with the expression that had stopped being managed somewhere around the time the secondary parallel thread appeared in Bardon’s monitoring. “I find that I have very strong feelings about it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Strong in the direction of—” He stopped, and then he said the thing directly, which was his way when the thing mattered enough. “I find that I would like to be the kind of person this child knows. Not because of what I am. Because of what I’m in the process of becoming.”

I held his gaze. “You already are,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“I know you think so,” he said. “I’m still arriving at it.”

“I know,” I said. “I can see you arriving.”

He put his arm around me and I leaned into him and felt the baby’s land connection doing its reaching quality, oriented toward him the way Elara had been oriented toward Lena the first time she’d been held by someone she’d decided mattered.