Page 51

“I suppose they are.”

“Who gave them to me?”

“I do not know,” I admitted, and that bothered me.

It continued to bother me when Jean arrived with bread and a pot of porridge, and again when Issa appeared shortly afterward with her own daughter and a fur-lined cloak she insisted was for me.

“I cannot accept that,” I said immediately.

Issa blinked at me. “Why no’?”

“Because ‘tis far too fine.”

When she smiled, she looked like her brother.

“‘Tis warm and Islay will grow cold as we approach the solstice. What is the problem?”

The problem was that I had nothing to offer her in return, but saying so would only make the situation more humiliating.

You have nothing to offer anyone.

I had learned long ago that nothing was truly free. A meal meant someone could remind you later that they had fed you. A roof meant someone could decide what you owed for the privilege of sleeping beneath it. And protection could become a noose the moment the person providing it decided to pull.

John had certainly understood that.

Issa apparently mistook my silence for agreement, because she dropped the cloak across my lap with a victorious grin.

“There. ‘Tis yours now.”

“That is not⁠—”

“Stay in bed, or my Mate will be angry at us both!” She waggled her fingers of one hand as she patted her daughter’s arse with the other and backed toward the door.

“I’ll be over later with fresh bread.”

‘Twas astonishing how quickly Maardok’s family had accepted my children. Not tolerated them or politely welcomed them because Maardok expected it, but accepted them with a casual certainty I…I wasn’t certain how I should feel.

Vrogul came by later that morning and somehow ended up on the floor with Ewan, examining a wooden soldier. The chief told the fascinated lad it had belonged to a set their father had carved Maardok, who apparently had been destined to be a war leader from a young age.

I sat near the fire with Edan at my breast, trying not to gawp. Or worry.

Because Vrogul was a chieftain and he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his brother’s cottage listening to a five-year-old human boy making up stories about great battles the soldier had seen, apparently against a dragon.

Men of rank in my world did not do such things. They certainly did not ask questions afterward, but Vrogul wanted to know why the dragon had attacked in the first place, which unfortunately encouraged Ewan to begin the entire tale again from the beginning.

Issa came and went throughout the morning as well, sometimes with her daughter and sometimes without her, dropping into the chair beside mine to ask how often Edan was eating or complain cheerfully about how little sleep she’d gotten when her own babe was his age.

There was no ceremony to any of it, nor any awkwardness over the fact that my son had green skin. She kissed the top of Edan’s head as naturally as she kissed her own daughter and seemed to consider his sudden existence surprising only because her brother had somehow acquired an entire family while away on a mission.

Not because of who we were.

Matthias was much the same. He checked my healing with such matter-of-fact kindness that I almost forgot to be embarrassed, then ordered me to continue resting and went outside to see what Maardok was building.

All of them treated Ewan as if Maardok’s declaration yesterday had settled something.

My sons.

I don’t think I would ever forget those words, or the tightness in my chest which followed.