He looks at me with a bemused expression. “No, it’s our child.”
I freeze.
“Neela is pregnant?”
He grins and nods. “She’s nearly two months along now.”
My mind starts racing. It makes sense, they discovered their matehood around the same time as Teo and me. The only difference was they performed theGrutaliah Bondyrmating ceremony almost instantly. I spent nearly four months under the mountain with them…
“Congratulations. I wish health for the mother, the child, and you,” I say, repeating well wishes from the camps.
He smiles when Ulla looks over at me.
“How many moons do human women bear their younglings for?” she asks.
I think of Arlet, especially when she first came into my hut after she had lost her baby.
“Nine turns of the moon. Sometimes it can be less, but the baby doesn’t always survive.”
Ulla frowns. “Enduares only carry for six.”
I stop cleaning. “Six?” Typically, in the forests, large animals carry their young for more time. For some reason I had imagined that it would be the same with the Enduares. Six months is much less time, particularly for certain ailments like morning sickness or backaches.
It also means that a mother could meet her babe much sooner. That causes a small pinprick of excitement to burst in my chest.
Teo continues to scrub a pot, a strange sight for a king, but I can tell by the rigid set of his shoulders that he is trying not to listen in too closely. He’s a predictable man. He wants children like fish want water, and I…
I want a family.
I think of what I said to the human slaves: that having a child in Enduvida was adding, not subtracting.
Except, we still have much to do. We need to kill Rholker. I won’t have a child until Rholker is gone.
But, perhaps, some things can’t be prevented.
My eyes widen when I think of what Teo and I did the night before. I might not know the arts of pleasure, but I know that if a man comes inside a woman without protection, a baby tends to follow.
I look up at the man who can both slice through a giant and wash my hair with the same hands.
“I wonder what that means for the human women carrying Enduar children,” I say.
Teo freezes.
“Arethere any women carrying Enduar children?” he asks, causing Ulla and Luiz to pause awkwardly.
Normally, I would freeze too, but,oh gods. The sound of his voice is so beautiful. The tentative hope there is enough to split my heart clear in half. His emotions flow freely through our bond, causing little sparks of light to flutter against my heart.
I stand there, doing the calculations to figure out the last time I bled. My heart plummets when I realize there were a few days after I arrived in the cage. It makes sense—having sex twice after taking something to prevent pregnancy wasn’t exactly a recipe for making a baby.
I take a deep breath. “No, there aren’t.”
Teo’s face relaxes. Not relieved, but… disappointed. He pushes the emotion to the side quickly, but I can’t unsee it.
All I can think of is watching him hold Sama in the tunnels months ago, and feeling like he was made for that. It would be easy to give into that and run back to our rooms right now. But babies are helpless, as Nandi found out when Rholker tore her child from her arms and beheaded her.
If he could, Rholker would kill mine and Teo’s child—that is for sure.
It’s… not the time.
