41. Let Them Come
LET THEM COME
It's been twelve weeks. Rythar is pleased with the swell of my belly, which means he keeps a hand on it whenever I let him.
There's more traffic when I walk the fortress now, warriors finding reasons to be in whatever corridor I'm in, curious about a thing none of them has seen.
Drenz has opinions about how often a pregnant female ought to rest. It's all very sweet, in its way.
Rythar and I are watching from the main terrace of the fortress as the Concord Council delivers a pregnancy monitoring pod. Sounds ominous, but Xythean medicine is usually luxurious by my standards. I’m just not sure how they’ll handle pregnancy. I keep thinking about Dr. Patel.
She'd know what to do with a human pregnancy better than anyone on Xytheos, right?
“I'd trade a lot to have Dr. Patel’s hands on me instead of a Xythean machine I've never seen,” I whisper nervously to Rythar.
He doesn't take it as the insult I half expect. He just knows I’m worried. "You think we can't care for you," he says.
"I think no one here has ever done this before. I’m the one with the most training in it, and I’m the one carrying the baby. That's a reason to worry," I point out.
"You are the first." Drenz says it from the doorway, where he's been pretending not to hover, in the careful way he says most things to me.
"But you are not a mystery to the Stone.
It remade your body to carry this. It would not rebuild you for this and leave no way to tend you.
" His confidence in the Stone is unshaken. Mine is not. I try to keep that to myself, but Rythar sees what’s in my look.
"The Stone knows," Rythar says, watching the courtyard. "Its records go far back in time. Back when there were more humans."
“I guess we’ll find out,” I say, eyeing the enormous pod they’re setting up next to the fortress.
The pod is plain white on the outside. I wonder if it will be anything like the “bridal spa” pod I went through before the Claiming Ceremony. That day feels like a long time ago.
The warriors finish and step back. Rythar holds out his hand.
I take it and let him walk me down off the terrace, across the courtyard, to the white pod’s door. Last time I stepped into a Xythean pod, it measured me for a mate.
Look at how that worked out.
Rythar ducks through ahead of me, too big for the doorway, and turns to make sure I clear it. He doesn't let go of my hand until I'm all the way inside and the door closes behind us.
The door seals, and the biome goes away. Most of the jungle scent is gone from the air, but the citrus stays. The quiet is total. The air sits at the perfect temperature. It’s a peaceful place.
“Sit here,” Rythar says, motioning to a padded bench.
I do, and he kneels and takes off my jungle slippers. He smiles at me, showing more white teeth than he usually does. “I think you will like this.”
He stands and looks around as he kicks off his own shoes.
My feet sink into the soft floor. It’s strange to see Rythar in this minimalist luxury style, bare feet on carpet rather than stone.
There's a low, wide berth in the center. I sit on the edge and it shifts under me. My left hip has been aching off and on lately. The berth finds it, rises against the joint, and the ache just stops. Then my lower back, and every ache I’ve ever had falls away.
“You like it?” Rythar asks. He sits on a large, plush chair, easing back. It’s the only thing in here that’s sized for a Xythean male. Everything else is sized for me.
“It’s nice. Especially since you made the healing pool so cold,” I say. “That was so mean.”
“Hot water is not recommended for pregnant women,” he says. “I will keep telling you every time you complain about this.”
I sigh. He’s probably right. It wasn’t an issue on New Terra. Pregnancy was entirely managed in a medical ward. There were no baths. And we never expected to have bathtubs on whatever world we landed on.
A panel glows at my side. I reach for it and warmth heats my spine. Something works the knots below my shoulder blades loose, one at a time. The light dims to late afternoon gold. My favorite type of light.
I pick my head up and look at Rythar. "This is too much."
Rythar smiles. "It's correct."
He waits while the pod works through me. By the time it finishes I'm boneless.
Then the light above me shifts. I start to get up—
"Be still," Rythar says gently. "Don’t you want to see her?"
A band of soft light slides down the length of me. It reaches my belly and stops.
And she's there—
Above us, turning slowly in the air, a hologram lit from nowhere, is our daughter. Small. Curled in on herself. The curve of a spine. The bud of a nose. Ten fingers. Her heart is a fast bright stutter of light, and the pod gives me the rate. She’s perfect.
Rythar doesn't say anything. He's looking up at her with his mouth open. I've never seen that look on him before. His hand finds mine on the berth and grips too hard.
After a long moment he speaks, his voice barely a whisper. "She's small," he says.
"Yeah," I say. My voice isn't steady. "For now. On New Terra I'd have grown this baby and given her away. For duty. Here you tell me we keep her. For love. The two of us. Mother and father." I say the words like they're foreign, because they nearly are.
"Yes," he says. He watches the image of our baby as though he’s figuring out how to kill anything that threatens her.
I squeeze his hand. "I don’t know how to do this on Xytheos. And our child will want other children around. As friends."
He squeezes my hand back. "Then that's a thing we work toward.”
Maybe we will. Maybe someday I'll sit in a room with all of my friends and our children. It's a good thought to fall asleep on. The warmth climbs through me, slow and total, until I can't hold my eyes open.
Rythar's voice drifts through the sleep that’s overtaking me. "You still have a temporary translator. I can make it permanent while you rest here. Only if you wish it."
I know what he's really asking. The translator patch was always the temporary thing. The one I could peel off and hand back when I left.
"You want to put something permanent in my head," I murmur, eyes already closed. "While I'm growing your baby. Bit late to be asking me for commitment."
"I am thorough," he says.
"Mm. Do it. I'm already making a person who's half yours. A translator implant isn't the thing that scares me off."
"You are certain."
"Rythar. Yes." The warmth and the sleepiness of pregnancy have me. I feel the cool press of the tech behind my ear and a brief sting. Then it fades, and the last thing in my head is the heart of the green, and what he does when he takes me back to it. I sleep, dreaming of what's to come.
Maya is alive. I feel her sometimes, far off and dim, a light behind glass.
Most nights I reach for Dana before I sleep.
All I can sense is her presence, but I like knowing she’s there.
But Sophia has gotten through to her. They’re trying to find out who brought us to Xytheos.
I spent my whole life thinking I had to carry every one of them myself.
I don't. I just have to carry my part, and trust the next pair of hands to carry hers.
Rythar comes to me in the heart. The new border—the stretch that used to be Reach's End—always needs him, but he comes to me anyway, still smelling of the deep green, still in his armor, hands reaching for me before he's all the way through the door.
He kneels and sets one of his hands carefully against my belly, a smile tugging at his mouth. I cover his hand with mine.
"She's bigger today," he says.
"You can't know that," I laugh.
"I can." He says it the way he says the sun will rise. I gave up arguing with that voice a long time ago.
I move behind him and wrap my arms around his shoulders and rest my chin in his hair. He lets me hold him longer than he used to.
This is the rhythm I dream for us, the months before our daughter comes.
The fortress when the world needs a warlord.
The heart when it's time to disappear. I can't travel the jungle alone, not the way he does—not yet.
But he takes me to the nexus in the grey before sunrise, when Jarrett's eyes are turned elsewhere, and pours the green into me a little at a time, and a little at a time my body learns to hold it.
Not too much. He has opinions about how a pregnant woman should rest. But the flowers bloom for me now.
He says that's only the start. Soon I won't be only flesh and bone.
Over the place our daughter will sleep, he grows a canopy of vines, and at night they bloom—small, white, slow, opening and closing on no schedule I can find, like the jungle is breathing over her cradle. He says the flowers will know her when she comes.
A daughter. Rare, they call it here. Precious.
On this planet, precious means being owned.
Assigned to a lord the way I was assigned, her future sealed before she's old enough to argue.
That's the part I won't allow. I was handed over and had to fight my way back to choosing.
She'll start where I had to fight to get to.
I'll teach her to flip off the void with both hands, the way my grandmother would have.
By the time anyone comes to decide her life, she'll already have decided it. Let them come.
I wake up. Rythar is still in the chair, pulled close enough to reach me, my hand in both of his. He presses his lips to the inside of my wrist, then leans forward and sets his mouth against my belly, whispering lightly, like he's telling her something he doesn't want me to hear.
"What did you dream?" he asks, cheek against my skin.
"We were in the heart. You and me. Her." I put my hand in his hair. "We were ready."
He lifts his head. His eyes are curious. "Were we?"
"No," I smile. “But we’re going to try.”
His mouth curves. He pulls me up from the berth and holds me against his chest. Outside the pod, the jungle is waiting. I feel it through his skin—the green, the heat, the low hum of everything he is. It's always louder when we touch.
"The threat of war didn't end," I say. "It just paused."
Rythar’s arms tighten around me. "That's just another day on Xytheos."