“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered.
“You didn’t. I woke up and you weren’t here. I was waiting for you.” She spoke quietly but not in a whisper.
“Sorry,” I said. She waited. “It was Chade Skilling to me.”
I felt but did not hear her sigh. “All is well?” she asked me quietly.
“Nothing wrong,” I assured her. “Just a sleepless old man looking for some company.”
“Mm.” She made a soft sound of agreement. “I can understand that well. I do not sleep as well as I did when I was young.”
“As true for me. We’re all getting older.”
She sighed and melted into me. I put my arms around her and closed my eyes.
She cleared her throat softly. “As long as you’re not asleep … if you’re not too tired.” She moved suggestively against me, and as always my breath caught in my throat. I smiled into the darkness. This was my Molly, as I knew her of old. Lately she had been so pensive and quiet that I had feared I had somehow hurt her feelings. But when I had asked her, she had shaken her head, looking down and smiling to herself. “I’m not ready to tell you yet,” she had teased me. Earlier in the day, I had walked into the room where she processed her honey and made the candles she created for our personal use. I had caught her standing motionless, the long taper she had been dipping dangling forgotten from her fingers as she stared off into the distance.
She cleared her throat, and I realized I was the one who was woolgathering now. I kissed the side of her throat, and she made a sound almost like a purr.
I gathered her closer. “I am not too tired. And I hope never to be that old.”
For a time, in that room, we were as young as we had ever been, save that with the experience of years of each other, there was no awkwardness, no hesitation. I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they saw each other across a room. More than once I had met Molly’s glance at a crowded family gathering, and known from the bend of her smile and her fingers touching her mouth exactly what she had in mind for us once we were alone. My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market.
Simple and good was our lovemaking, and very thorough. Afterward, her hair was netted across my chest, her breasts pressed warm against my side. I drifted, warm and content. She spoke softly by my ear, the breath of her words tickling.
“My love?”
“Um?”
“We’re going to have a baby.”
My eyes flew open. Not with the joy I had once hoped to feel, but with the shock of dismay. I took three slow breaths, trying to find words, trying to find thoughts. I felt as if I had stepped from the warm lapping of water at a river’s edge into the cold deep current. Tumbled and drowning. I said nothing.
“Are you awake?” she persisted.
“I am. Are you? Are you talking in your sleep, my dear?” I wondered if she had slipped off into a dream, and was perhaps recalling another man and another time when she had whispered such momentous words and they had been true.
“I’m awake.” And sounding slightly irritated with me, she added, “Did you hear what I told you?”
“I did.” I steeled myself. “Molly. You know that can’t be so. You yourself told me that your days of bearing were past now. It has been years since—”
“And I was wrong!” There was no mistaking the annoyance in her voice now. She seized my wrist and set my hand to her belly. “You must have seen that I’m getting larger. I’ve felt the baby move, Fitz. I didn’t want to say anything until I was absolutely certain. And now I am. I know it’s peculiar, I know it must seem impossible for me to be pregnant so many years after my courses have stopped flowing. But I know I am not mistaken. I’ve felt the quickening. I carry your child, Fitz. Before this winter is out, we will have a baby.”
“Oh, Molly,” I said. My voice shook and, as I gathered her closer, my hands were shaking. I held her, kissed her brow and her eyes.