Chapter 3
Chapter Three
I n the morning, Chamomile woke alone again. He blinked sourly at the empty space beside him for a moment before sounds from elsewhere in the house reached his ears. He sat up, listening curiously, unable to pinpoint them. He dressed quickly and simply in a loose shirt and britches, and ventured out.
A plate of breakfast covered by a cloth napkin was at his table, opposite a second that had been eaten from. He pulled back the napkin to find eggs and buns stuffed with sausage and greens. Eggs and greens he had in his cupboards, but not sausage, and he hardly thought Lark had baked.
“You brought breakfast?” he called to the house, uncertain where Lark had gotten to.
“Fetched it from home,” came the reply from the hall. Taking a bite off his bun, Chamomile followed his voice and found Lark leaning in the doorway of the nursery, dressed but for his boots. Chamomile smiled in greeting, as if his heartbeat hadn’t just picked up.
“Your home? All the way from there?”
Lark shrugged. “I was restless,” he said, looking back into the nursery.
That was evident, even to Chamomile. Lark tapped his fingers on his elbow, bent and unbent his knee as he leaned. Something on his mind.
Chamomile tracked his gaze to the mobile, or perhaps the window with its short lace curtains. He tried to see the nursery through Lark’s eyes, suddenly aching to know what he thought of his mother’s mural, of his great-great-grandfather’s crib, or the broken rocker.
“My mother did the painting. The whole house,” he added, perhaps needlessly.
“She was gifted,” Lark said, succinctly. He drew a breath. “Have you considered…that is...”
He trailed off with a grimace, rubbing his face with one hand. The lines around his eyes appeared deeper than usual.
Chamomile swallowed his mouthful of breakfast and touched Lark’s arm, fingers gripping just above his elbow. Lark laid his hand over it without a thought, looking down only when his fingertips brushed the polished edge of the cuff.
Chamomile had slipped it on before leaving the bedroom. He grinned slowly, watching as comprehension dawned in Lark’s face, tinged with sweet wonder.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said, a little smug in the face of the other’s slack-jawed mien.
“Ah,” said Lark weakly. “So you have.”
Lark was almost a head taller than him; Chamomile’s eyes reached only just past his collar bones. It was only as Lark backed him into the doorframe and stooped to kiss him zealously, that Chamomile truly realized the difference. Funnily enough, for all the time they’d spent together in the last few days, not much of it had been spent standing. Chamomile had better things to think about than height differences in that moment though, and he dashed it all from his mind as he went up on his toes to return Lark’s kiss with matching enthusiasm.
When they parted he was left blinking, lightheaded, his mouth delightfully tender and throbbing. He licked his lips, prompting Lark to gently bite the lower one. His hands, which to his mind had been around Lark’s neck, were held over his head against the doorframe, one still clinging desperately to the remains of his breakfast.
Lark followed his gaze and chuckled, before helpfully taking the roll away and placing it on a nearby surface. He squeezed Chamomile’s wrists and brought them back down, cupping Chamomile’s smooth hands in his rougher ones. He ran one thumb around the curve of the cuff, pensive.
Chamomile waited, content to admire the brightness of Lark’s downcast eyes, his beautiful hands. He had his own share of calluses from his work, but Lark’s palms were padded with especially tough skin that scratched, ever so lightly, when it touched his own.
Feeling breath on his face, he looked up as Lark said, “Fifteen years ago, I started this.”
He paused, seeming to struggle for words. Again, Chamomile waited.
“I only worked on it occasionally. Usually after I’d--I’d seen you in town, and I couldn’t stop myself. The techniques called for aren’t my strong suit.”
As he spoke, Lark flushed to the roots of his red hair. He looked just past Chamomile, his gaze shy but also distant, perhaps in memory.
Chamomile took his hands back to cup Lark’s elbows and draw him closer, thumbs rubbing bolstering circles. He envisioned Lark alone in his workshop, the space dark but for a candle at his elbow, bent over something and working with painstaking care. He made soothing noises as he drew Lark’s head down to his shoulder; the warmth of Lark’s blush could be felt through his shirt.
“It took a few years to get it right,” Lark mumbled there. “Difficult to get the wood thin enough without snapping it. And then to carve it. Ha!” he huffed.
“You should have said something,” Chamomile said against his ear, gently chiding. Lark only shook his head, beginning to place a line of kisses up Chamomile’s neck.
Later, Chamomile prepared tea while Lark found his way around the kitchen, making sandwiches for their lunch.
“I’m a middling cook, I’m afraid,” Chamomile confessed, observing Lark’s puttering over his shoulder.
“We’re alike in that.” Lark answered easily. “I tend to undercook.”
“I burn.” Chamomile laughed. “Perhaps between the two of us we’ll manage.”
“One can only hope,” Lark said readily, with a face that did not suggest confidence.
Chamomile made to kiss his scruffy cheek, and hesitated with his lips a hair’s breadth from skin. Lark made an amused noise and closed the distance, one hand curving around Chamomile’s hip.
They set the table with tea stuffs, Lark’s sandwiches, and cut fruit. Chamomile ate quickly and chased a blueberry around his plate with a piece of crust. His eyes drifted to the kitchen’s longest wall, which bore one of his mother’s murals, this one depicting a small fenced-in garden, a little overgrown but fertile and healthy. Tomato plants were mixed in with cabbages and a dozen kinds of flowers, herbs growing next to weeds. It wasn’t quite the garden visible through the backdoor, but the painting’s influences were obvious.
He chewed his lip, anxiety bubbling in his belly.
“I don’t want to leave my home,” he blurted, and snapped his mouth shut again. He hadn’t meant to say it. Truly, he hadn’t quite realized he’d been thinking of it. Perhaps it was the mention of Lark’s trip home that made him conscious of the fact that there was, potentially, a choice.
Except there was no choice for him. He could hardly stomach to imagine living anywhere else.
Lark didn’t seem startled by his outburst. He finished his bite and swallowed.
“Do you mind if I add a building to the property?” he asked.
Chamomile turned his head curiously. “A building?”
“A workshop,” Lark explained. “If you’ll have me. I could always keep the one across town, if you’d rather I not…”
“I—I don’t mind.” Chamomile blinked repeatedly. “So easily? I...not that I’m complaining, mind you, but—I couldn’t…” He gestured weakly, meaning to indicate the house at large. “I couldn’t leave my home, I just couldn’t. I hate to ask it of you, either.”
Lark looked around them with a faint smile, prompting Chamomile to look as well. His great-grandfather’s plates on a high shelf along one wall, his grandmother’s reading chair in the living room by the fire. The legs of the tables bore the doodles of more than one unobserved little one, and a tile by the oven was cracked, done by his father.
“How many generations of Greenthroats have lived here?” Lark asked.
“Five.” Chamomile didn’t have to think about it. “My three-times-great grandmothers built it.”
“Five,” Lark said with an odd sigh, perhaps of yearning. “Do you know how many generations have lived in my house?”
Chamomile waited. They both knew he didn’t.
“One.” Lark smiled, wry. “Less than one, even. It’s a good little house. It’s done very well by me for a long time, but it’s not a home. Not like this place is.”
Lark put his hands on the table and stood, coming around to Chamomile’s chair. Chamomile pushed away from his setting and watched as Lark knelt before him, took his hands into his and rested his arms on Chamomile’s knees.
“I want—” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. Chamomile watched in bemusement as a blush rose in Lark’s cheeks and neck. “I can picture children in this house. Under this table, pulling on my shoes. You in the garden with our child on your back.”
“Red curls?” Chamomile said breathlessly. His eyes were fixed on Lark’s, flicking back and forth between each overbright hazel orb. His chest burned with a slow, banked heat.
A delighted sound escaped Lark. “And your lovely brown eyes,” he said warmly. He squeezed Chamomile’s hands in his. Brought them to his lips.
“Muddy footprints through the kitchen.” Chamomile continued his refrain dreamily, his attention split by the line of soft kisses Lark was leaving on the backs of his fingers. “Baby fussing in the other room…”
He wanted it. It had been so long since it was more than just himself.
Lark nipped one finger. Chamomile pushed his chair back and joined him on the floor.
They married in the magistrate’s office after the council meeting a week later. Chamomile had spots of paint on his face from watching the children, and Lark had wood curls in his pockets, for they seemed to breed there. The small room and the hallway outside it were crowded with well-wishers subtly elbowing for a view. Lark did not look at their audience; his ears were faintly red, quite apart from his happy redhead flush. Chamomile endeavored to capture his attention as fully as possible.
Chamomile wore the cuff, polished to a shine, with aster and white violets woven around its twisting length. Lark was adorned with a crown of forget-me-nots, holly, and ivy, and bore it with a solemnity that caused Chamomile to giggle. Herri Wolfsnick, the magistrate, ignored these interruptions with an aura of determined dignity.
In the weeks following, Lark began construction on the proposed workshop behind Chamomile’s home, striking a steady but moderate pace that made for many allowances. The workshop, Lark maintained, was of lesser importance than fulfilling Chamomile’s charm—this, he always said with a wink that never failed to make Chamomile titter. All the same, with the help of their neighbor Thom Whittlethorn and his wagon, the structure was completed before the end of summer, and Lark’s tools and materials transferred to their new home.
Lark sang as he worked, Chamomile soon learned—taproom ditties and mountain ballads that he recognized from his grandparents. As Chamomile plugged away at his own project, forking the path that ran from the kitchen to the garden, he could just hear Lark’s deep singing voice over the sounds of hammering and sawing. He enjoyed the musical accompaniment as he laid stones or worked in the garden, and occasionally joined in; his own musical abilities were questionable, but his enthusiasm never was.
The crooked leg on the nursery rocker was repaired, and it and the crib were sanded of any splinters. Chamomile aired the room and planted gloxinia and daisies in the window box. He scoured the shelves for literature on pregnancy and childrearing, and stacked his haul on the bedroom floor when the pile grew too high for the nightstand. In the past, Chamomile read tucked into bed before sleeping; now he and Lark passed books between themselves in the morning, reading by dawn light until growling stomachs finally drove them from the blankets.
Lark’s things appeared in the house in waves: a chest of clothes in the bedroom; a number of books in the living room, awaiting assignment; a few personal knick-knacks, either placed on the shelves or in their bedroom.
Chamomile was most interested in Lark’s odd few sentimental things. Himself a creature of sentiment, he found Lark’s lack of attachment to his belongings mystifying and endlessly fascinating; it followed that when Lark brought a heavy cedar trunk into the house, the first of its kind in that it was obviously special to him, Chamomile was vocally curious. Lark answered his every question as they unpacked its linen-wrapped contents, recounting memories of his alpha mother over her favorite cast iron skillet, and the handwritten recipe book tucked beneath it.
Chamomile paged through the book delicately, uncertain of its worn, stained pages, as Lark pointed out dishes that called to mind certain gatherings, such as one where parsley-roasted potatoes had wound up in his sister’s hair. Chamomile smiled fondly as Lark laughed through the retelling, his thoughts drifting to similar memories of his own.
“I know of at least three books like that one, somewhere in this house,” Chamomile said. The recipe book had passed into Lark’s hands, and he stroked the cover fondly. “I should bring them out, try harder in my cooking.”
“I will join you,” Lark said. He smiled, eyes crinkling. “If nothing else, our attempts should be memorable.”
Another item from the chest, a painted rooster on wheels with a frayed pull-string, caught Chamomile’s eye. He picked it out of the pile and turned it over.
“This looks like what you’ve been working on,” he observed.
Lark smiled shyly. “Mr. Peebles. I haven’t been able to decide whether to give it to our—our child, or to make a new one. I thought I’d start on one in the meantime.”
Chamomile watched him fidget with the pull-string, his eyes ducked bashfully, and grinned sweetly, leaning to kiss his cheek.
“Can I be the one to paint it?” he asked.
“Whatever you like,” said Lark.
Chamomile faced a daily influx of good wishes, gifts, and advice from Goldenbough’s childbearing population. Some anecdotes were helpful, others varying degrees of horrifying. He received cloth for diapers and tiny, hand-me-down outfits, worn soft from use. Maggie Brownbird gave him a recipe for a tea to aid conception, and Tomas Riverbook recommended an herb to chew to bring his heat on faster.
Chamomile greatly enjoyed the flavor of Maggie’s tea. The house frequently smelled of raspberries.
When his heat eventually came, it was as the last great storm of the season blew in, dark on the horizon. It left the house dimly lit; what light came in was gray and minimal, despite all the curtains being open. Chamomile, having nothing to draw him out of the house that day, succumbed to the rare urge to sleep in.
It was a morning made for lazing in bed, yet Chamomile was not feeling particularly leisurely. He twisted in the blankets, and more than once threw off the quilt, only to have to fetch it from the floor moments later. He was restless and aggrieved in his restlessness.
Later he would think it markedly odd that he did not recognize the signs of imposing heat, despite having waited impatiently for it to come. It was early for it, and perhaps that was why, though he had done everything in his power to hasten it. Too, he’d hoped the new addition of Lark’s alpha scent to his home would bring heat-fever on him. While it was true that heat wasn’t required for a pregnancy, per say, it made it so very easy. Less of a dart game, beholden to chance and timing. Chamomile worried, at his age, that he needed every advantage nature could provide.
When Lark ventured into the house, driven away from his work by a sudden onslaught of rain, Chamomile was a quivering, foul-tempered ball beneath the quilt. He called for him from the kitchen, and Chamomile only mumbled miserably into the sheets.
“Chamo...mile,” Lark said, faltering in the doorway. Chamomile could make out the sound of a deep inhalation through the rumble of encroaching thunder, and felt the first stirrings of understanding. Lark’s boots were noisily discarded, and soon after, he penetrated Chamomile’s blanket shell.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lark said, between long inhales. Chamomile refused to be drawn out, so Lark joined him beneath the quilt. Once they were together in that small, dark space, Chamomile felt his focus narrow rapidly. He came close on his knees to bury his nose in Lark’s throat. Lark always smelled wonderful, but now he was positively edible .
“Tell you what?” Chamomile said, muffled, though he was beginning to think he knew.
“You little fool,” Lark said fondly.
Chamomile’s mind was clearing even as the storm let up. By then they had lost all notion of time, knowing only that the day had passed as they were immersed in each other. Lark theorized it could even be close to dawn, and they would be deceived by the last of the dark clouds.
Chamomile was pleasantly sore and sticky, and exhausted in a wonderfully uncomplicated way. He dragged Lark to him, arranged him to his liking, and promptly fell asleep on him. Lark chuffed overhead as he closed his eyes, and settled to follow.
Having pored obsessively over his grandmother’s books, Chamomile knew a very long list of early signs to watch for. Still, he hesitated to even think the word when he began to have such strange, vivid dreams, and the tenderness around his pelvis could be any number of things, really. As for the dizziness he’d felt at supper—well, he’d just stood up too fast.
Although...it would explain why his heat was so very short and easy, if he had already been in the family way by the time it came. It was something he had wondered about, and was not unlikely to be true—they had, after all, been working very hard towards it. Yet it wasn’t until he nearly burst into tears over a particularly stubborn jar that he thought, maybe .
He froze at the kitchen counter, jar still clutched to his chest and hand poised over it in a grasping claw. His insides battered about. He was breathless and uncertain and, goodness, he felt such blasted hope his body fairly sang.
The scratching of Lark’s pen behind him dwindled.
“Love?” Lark said. “Is something the matter?”
Bemused, Chamomile looked to his jar of pickled asparagus for an idea of how to answer. It was the third he’d opened in as many days, and good heavens, how had he not noticed?
“Nothing,” he said, gone pitchy. He cleared his throat. “I’m daft as an ant, is all,” he mumbled.
He passed Lark the jar with a beseeching look and beamed with maniacal glee when it was returned to him, open.
Lark chewed a stalk he’d helped himself to and looked at Chamomile thoughtfully.
“How many of those did you put away? Five?” he asked, and Chamomile’s heart sank from its giddy heights at the prospect of only two more days of pickled goodness.
“Yep,” said Gergie Everglow, as Chamomile once more did their washing, and took the chance to air his suspicion. “Sounds about right. I wanted for peaches, myself. Peaches with goat cheese.”
“Oh dear,” said Chamomile. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
“She’s lying,” Lara called from in the house, through the open window. “Peaches and goat cheese sounds almost normal—she ate it with horseradish too! Poor Georgette was born with a bad sense of taste.”
Chamomile blanched as both women laughed.
And the next day, “You’ve got a look about you,” said Mavis Silverscales, as they stocked dried goods.
“A look?”
“Reminds me of Alric when he was carrying our first,” she said with a saucy wink. “It’s only been a month or so, hasn’t it? Eh?”
“Mavis, have mercy,” he said with a plea, and couldn’t help but say, “...closer to three, actually.”
“When did you realize, then? Third or fourth morning you spewed before breakfast? That was what decided it for my mate.”
Chamomile, in the middle of stammering and shielding himself with bags of black beans, paused. “Really? I haven’t…”
Mavis looked surprised. “Haven’t been ill? Have you been to see Golden yet?” she asked.
“I’ve been putting it off,” Chamomile admitted, gnawing his lip.
Mavis bumped him with a sack of lentils. “Stop that,” she said, “You’ll chew it off, one of these days.”
Chamomile sighed, ignoring her, but stopped bothering his lip all the same. “I suppose I really should have an exam...”
“But I’m not vomiting!” he said to Golden Longfeather a week later, as she administered said overdue exam. “Almost, once or twice, but not at all like the books said I would.”
“Lucky you,” said a vaguely green and rather pregnant Fazra Chickwillow from the next cot. She was bent miserably over a basin held between her knees.
Chamomile grimaced. “Sorry.”
Golden appeared amused, as she often did. “It’s early to be completely certain, but I’m fairly confident.”
“So it’s not—too soon to tell my husband?” Chamomile asked, hesitant. He didn’t rightly know which answer he wanted, still digesting the knowledge himself.
“By all means,” Golden said, giving his knee a smart pat. “Give him the news.”
That was just his problem: Chamomile didn’t know how . He scarcely believed it himself, most of the time. Almost three weeks since that third jar of pickles and long since he’d begun bartering his neighbors for theirs, and the knowledge still caught him wrong-footed whenever he was reminded of it.
Pregnant. Pregnant . He would finally have a child, the family he’d wanted for so long. It didn’t seem real.
He pondered special ways he might surprise Lark with the news. A baby blanket laid across their bed? Should he knit a pair of booties as they sat together by the fire? He could leave his books open to helpful passages and mention his dreams more often…But no, Lark had read the same books Chamomile had...
In the interim he doodled daisies on schoolwork he was meant to be grading for Charley Followbuck, and sang as he dusted the nursery with compulsive tenacity. When they went to bed, he found himself pressing his soft stomach against Lark’s firmer flesh, imagining he was swollen.
Another symptom he had not thought to expect: his appetite for his husband had grown to rather distracting levels. He knew what his body wanted—to make certain that his provider was there, to ensure that his alpha’s scent clung to him—but did it have to interrupt so many midday meals?
Chamomile heard the door and called out a greeting so Lark would come to him, and he did, good man that he was. He was bright with exertion and blood flow, his skin pink and glowing with the first flush before sweat broke, and he smelled absolutely divine . Chamomile had put down his mending and gone to him before he realized. Clair Feastgive’s busted seams would have to wait.
Lark anticipated him, his arms open for Chamomile to step into. Chamomile’s nose went straight for the corner of his jaw, nuzzling hair and ear for that heady scent, and his fingers plucked at Lark’s shirt ties with a mind of their own. Whatever it was Lark held in his hand tickled Chamomile’s nape, but he ignored it.
Lark turned his face up determinedly and caught his eyes.
“Chamomile,” he said, and laughed as Chamomile darted up to steal a kiss. “There is something I’ve been trying to say, and I haven’t known how.”
“Mm?” said Chamomile, giving up on the shirt. Far more efficient to unlace his pants anyway. “Say, my love?”
“Yes, and I still haven’t found the words.” Lark huffed. He thrust something under Chamomile’s chin, and Chamomile grudgingly stepped back far enough to see what it was.
It was…”Daisies?” he said, puzzled, as he took the bouquet from Lark, who appeared pleased.
“Chamomile,” he said again, “These past weeks, as you’ve worked for pickled—green beans and turnips, good night, I never knew so many things could be pickled—what was I saying? As you’ve ferreted off with half of my shirts and leap at me as if starved at every narrowest opportunity—” here Chamomile flushed, and Lark hastened to reassure him, ”That is hardly a complaint, my love. What I’m getting at is that I’ve developed a theory.”
“A theory?” Chamomile repeated dumbly, holding his bouquet of daisies.
“Yes,” said Lark, and covered Chamomile’s hands with his own. “I could be wrong, but…I think you might be...”
“Pregnant?” Chamomile said, in the same voice. Lark nodded, visibly holding his breath.
For weeks he had considered how to tell Lark his news, how he might hint at it, and here Lark had come to the correct conclusion all on his own. Heavens, he loved him.
Lark kissed him, curving over the flowers, fingers gently curling over his elbows.