10. Practical Concerns #2
“The claiming,” I said. “The theology is clear on what consummates it. What the act involves. What Skip intends.”
“Yes,” Caen said.
“And fertility is Yravel’s second principle,” I said. “Sacred. Honored. The act that can create life is the most sacred act available to a living person—those were your words, approximately.”
“Approximately,” Caen agreed.
“So.”
I looked at my cup.
“When Skip finishes deep…”
I stopped. Selected my vocabulary carefully.
“When the claiming seals. In the way that it seals. Should I expect…”
“You are asking,” Caen said, “whether the claiming will automatically result in a child.”
“I am asking whether Yravel’s theology has opinions about contraception,” I said. “Because in my world, there was medicine. A small pill, taken daily. I had been taking it for sixteen years. I have not been taking it since I arrived here. The arithmetic has not yet become urgent.”
I let the implication settle between us, then forced myself to say the part I had been circling.
“It is about to become urgent if I proceed with the claiming. Is there something in this world that functions similarly to what I had at home?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
She rose from her chair. She crossed to her worktable. From a small dark cabinet, she retrieved a narrow glass vial, sealed with wax and filled with a deep green liquid. She held it up to the candlelight for a moment, then set it on the table between us.
“Veilshade,” she said.
“The herb itself has been used in this world for centuries. The concentrated form is considerably more reliable.”
She touched the vial.
“It does not prevent conception entirely. It significantly reduces the probability. Think of it as persuading the conditions rather than eliminating them.”
“How significantly?”
“Enough that you need not spend your claiming night conducting anxious arithmetic.”
I looked at the vial.
“And the theology?” I asked. “If fertility is Yravel’s second principle, and the act that can create life is the most sacred act available to a living person, then where does prevention fit? Does deliberately reducing the chance of conception undermine the sacredness of the act?”
“It does not violate the teaching,” Caen said, with absolute authority.
“The teaching holds that the act itself is sacred. The penetration. The completion. The full physical claiming of a man and a woman who have bonded.”
She touched her pendant briefly.
“Yravel does not mandate that every act produce a child. She mandates that the act be honored—that nothing interrupt it, that nothing diminish it, that the bodies involved meet each other without reservation. Veilshade does not interrupt anything. It adjusts the odds of what follows. The sacred thing has already happened by the time veilshade becomes relevant.”
I sat with this.
“There is also,” Caen added, “the question of what Yravel actually wants for the women in her world. A child conceived before a woman is ready is not a flame burning fully.”
She looked at me steadily.
“The teaching does not ask that of anyone.”
I looked at the vial.
“I want children,” I said.
It came out with more certainty than I had expected, which told me it had been true for longer than I had been admitting to myself.
“Eventually.” I looked at the candle. “Just not right now.”
I paused.
“But I do want him to finish inside me. Very much.”
My face warmed, but I kept going, because apparently this was the kind of conversation I was having with a mage.
“The idea of it affects me. Strongly.”
“Good,” Caen said. “Then you understand more of the theology than you think.”
She leaned back slightly, studying me.
“The wanting is not separate from the sacredness. It is part of it. Yravel does not ask a woman to endure the act as duty. She asks her to want, to choose, to reach for life with her whole self.”
Her eyes met mine.
“The more you want him, the more fully you honor the principle.”
She picked up her cup.
“What you are feeling right now,” she said, “is theology.”
“I find this theology,” I said, “makes a compelling case for immediate practical application.”
Caen grinned and reached for the vial.
She tipped the veilshade into my deeproot. For an instant, the liquid blackened where the drops struck, spreading through the cup. Then the darkness thinned, unwound, and vanished into the rest of it. A moment later, the cup looked exactly as it had before.
“Take it daily,” she said.
“In your tea, water, or your deeproot. Three drops. It has no taste. Begin today.”
She looked at me with the level attention she brought to everything that mattered.
“You will know when you are ready to stop taking it. That decision requires nothing from me.”
I picked up the cup. I drank. It tasted exactly like deeproot. Nothing more.
I was skeptical about whether any of this would actually work. Then again, I had watched wounds close under Caen’s hands. At some point, skepticism had to account for the available evidence.
“Your expression,” Caen said, “suggests that your belief is still catching up to your observations.”
“That is accurate.”
“Your skepticism is noted,” she said. “And respected.”
“I have updated my priors since arriving in this world,” I said. “Wounds close under your hands. The claiming bond carries emotion in real time. The ring glows gold. Your pendant reads emotional states.”
I set down the cup.
“At a certain point, the weight of the evidence becomes difficult to argue with.”
“Yes,” she said. “It does.”
She picked up her own cup. We sat for a moment in the warm, companionable silence of two women who had just resolved a practical problem.
***
I looked out the window.
The sun was still high. There was time. Enough time to continue the conversation and address at least one of my remaining fourteen hundred and ninety-eight questions.
“Earlier,” I said, “when I mentioned Earth, I could tell that you recognized the name.”
Caen’s hand stilled around her cup. It was a small thing. Barely anything. But I noticed.
“How do you know about Earth?” I asked.
She drew in a slow breath.
“Because you are not the first woman to come from Earth to Mytharo.”
For a moment, the room lost all sound. The fire still worked in the hearth. The ambient activity of the garrison outside was present. But inside my head, everything went very quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”
“You are not the first and you will not be the last,” Caen said.
I stared at her.
“I need you to understand that I am going to require significantly more than that.”
Caen set down her cup with care, as if she had known this question would come and had been deciding for days how much truth to place in my hands.
“The mages of Sanctumspire have known of your world for a very long time,” she said.
“Longer than I have been alive. The records go back centuries. There are many accounts of women crossing from Earth, and rarer accounts of others crossing in the other direction. Some carried knowledge. Some carried stories. Some misremembered what they had seen. But the pattern is real.”
I sat back.
“You knew,” I said.
Caen did not look away.
“When I arrived. When you read me and verified where I came from. You knew about Earth.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you chose not to tell me?”
“Yes.”
The answer was clean. No flinching. No defensive embroidery. I found that irritating.
“Why?”
She heard the question for what it was.
“Because you had arrived in an unknown world alone, without resources, context, or protection,” she said. “You needed to understand where you were before you could usefully understand what your arrival meant.”
“That is a very reasonable justification for deciding what information another person is ready to receive.”
“Yes,” Caen said. “It is.”
“I am not certain I find it entirely satisfying.”
“I did not expect you to.” Her mouth curved slightly. “I expected you to find it accurate and to be annoyed by it anyway.”
I felt the annoyance settle behind my ribs, sharp and orderly.
“If I had told you in those first hours,” she continued, “I would have given you weight without foundation. It would not have helped you. It would only have made you afraid. You were not ready.”
That landed too accurately for comfort.
I looked back toward the window. Sunlight. The mountains beyond the walls. Druvenfall waiting above all of it.
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. I was annoyed. I was also not an idiot.
Caen had withheld information, and I had every right to object to that. But she was answering me now, and I needed the answers more than I needed the satisfaction of making her defend the order in which she had provided them.
I made a silent compact with myself. Less abrasion. More listening.
“Can you tell me who these people from Earth were?”
Caen’s expression shifted into something more careful.
“There have been many,” Caen said. “I do not know all their names. Only the accounts I studied during my years at Sanctumspire, and even those were incomplete. Fragments, mostly. Warnings preserved more carefully than histories. But every one of them was a woman.”
She folded her hands around her cup.
“One woman helped the High General of Newardia understand what Morvanna had become. Several were involved in the war against Zhor. Another helped break the Elven Sovarith Imperium’s rule over the humans of Traxzis. Her name was Hannah, or something close to it.”
Caen’s mouth tightened slightly.
“Hannah from Earth helped overthrow an empire?”
“Yes.”
I stared at her.
“Of course she did.”
Caen’s brow lifted.
“Sorry. Continue.”
“There are others. Some became scholars. Some healers. Some queens, though not all by marriage. Some disappeared from the records after only a few lines, which does not mean they were unimportant. History is often written by people who fail to notice the important details.”
That, I thought, was the first truly universal principle I had heard since arriving.
“What did they have in common?” I asked.
For the first time since I had met her, Caen looked nervous.