Chapter 421: The Size of Small Things

Io came back the next morning.

She said it was to check on Adriana. She examined Adriana thoroughly, asked the right questions, wrote careful notes, and pronounced her recovering exactly as she should.

Then she asked whether she might hold Roderic.

She held him for an hour.

The morning after that, she came to check on Roderic. She examined him thoroughly, measured him with a ribbon, listened to his breathing, and pronounced him strong, loud, and in possession of an appetite that would be the despair of everyone in the household.

Then she held him for most of the afternoon.

By the fourth day, nobody pretended there was anything left to examine.

Io simply came through the Concordia gate after breakfast, kissed Adriana's cheek, accepted the baby from whoever happened to be holding him, and settled into the chair by the nursery window as though it had been built for her.

Evelyn watched this from the doorway with an expression I had learned to be careful of.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“That isn't nothing.”

“No,” Evelyn agreed. “It isn't.”

She did not explain.

She went to sit beside Io instead.

Roderic had opinions about almost everything.

He objected to being undressed. He objected to being dressed. He objected to the bath with a force that suggested the water had personally wronged him, and then objected even more loudly to being taken out of it.

He did not object to Aurelia.

My great-grandmother came every day at the same hour, a little after noon, and sat in the chair at the foot of Adriana's bed. She did not ask to hold him. She waited until someone offered, and when someone did, she took him as though he might break, and he went silent in her arms within moments.

“How do you do that?” Adriana asked on the third day, with real envy.

Aurelia considered.

“I have had a great deal of practice being patient,” she said. “He can tell I'm not in a hurry.”

“I'm not in a hurry.”

“You are his mother. You are always in a hurry, even when you're sitting still. It's not a fault.” Aurelia looked down at the baby. “It means you're listening for him.”

Adriana did not answer that.

But she stopped looking envious.

Carol and Garrick had appointed themselves his guards.

Nobody had asked them to. They simply arrived at the nursery door every morning, stood on either side of it with great seriousness, and asked everyone who entered to state their name and what they wanted.

“Liora,” Liora said. “I want to check his cord.”

Garrick considered.

“Why?”

“To make sure it's healing.”

Garrick looked at Carol.

Carol nodded.

“You can go in,” Garrick said.

They asked Thor the same questions.

Thor answered both with perfect solemnity and was permitted entry.

They asked Mary.

Mary told them her name, her title, and that she wished to deliver a document concerning the registration of the birth, and then waited while they deliberated.

“What's registration?” Carol asked.

“Writing his name in the record so that everyone knows he exists.”

Carol looked troubled.

“They don't know?”

“They will after I write it.”

Garrick stepped aside immediately.

“Then hurry,” he said.

Mary's ears twitched.

I suspected she would tell Melody about that for weeks.

Seraphina and Ignatius came through the gate with Io every day.

They did not stand guard. They had their own ideas about what a new baby needed, and most of them involved being as close to him as possible without touching, because Io had explained very carefully that babies were small and First Flame was not.

Ignatius sat on the floor beside the cradle for an entire morning watching Roderic sleep.

“He doesn't do anything,” he told me eventually.

“Not yet.”

“When will he?”

“Soon. He'll start watching things. Then reaching. Then rolling over.”

Ignatius thought about this.

“How long?”

I opened my mouth.

Then I closed it, because I did not know.

I knew how long it had taken Carol and Garrick. I knew how long it had taken Ignatius and Seraphina, which was not long at all. I had watched both pairs of children leap through stages that should have taken years in a matter of months, and Rysa still could not tell us why, only that it had grown faster since the four of them began spending so much time together.

Roderic was six days old.

He was still very small.

I did not know whether he would stay that way for very long.

“We'll see,” I said.

Ignatius nodded, as though this were a perfectly acceptable answer, and went back to watching.

Across the room, Io had stopped folding the blanket in her hands.

She was looking at her son.

Not the way she usually looked at him, with that quick, checking attention parents give to a child who might at any moment set something alight.

The way you look at something you are trying to memorize.

It was Adriana who finally said something.

She waited until the children had gone down to the garden with Julian and Helena, and Aurelia had gone wherever Aurelia went in the afternoons, and Io was alone in the chair by the window with Roderic asleep against her shoulder.

Evelyn was there. So was I, sitting on the end of the bed because Adriana had pointed at it.

“Io,” Adriana said.

“Hmm?”

“You've held my son for nineteen hours this week.”

Io looked up.

“Have I?”

“Evelyn counted.”

“I didn't count,” Evelyn said. “I estimated.”

“She estimated very precisely.”

Io looked down at the baby in her arms.

For a long moment, she did not say anything.

Then she said, very quietly, “I'm sorry. I should give him back.”

“That's not what I meant,” Adriana said.

“I know.” Io did not move. “I know it isn't.”

Evelyn got up from her chair and went to sit on the floor beside Io's, the way she sometimes sat beside patients who needed to say something difficult.

“When did it start?” she asked.

Io laughed softly.

“The night he was born. When Ignatius asked whether they'd been red.” She shifted the baby slightly against her shoulder. “I said yes. Very. And then I tried to remember. Actually remember. What they looked like that first morning.”

She stopped.

“And?” Evelyn asked.

“And I couldn't.”

The room was very quiet.

“I remember the delivery,” Io said. “I remember being frightened. I remember the fire around the cradle that first night, and Lexander holding the shield while the healers worked. I remember the prophecies. The people who came to look at them. The council meetings about what they might become.” Her voice tightened. “I remember all of that very clearly.”

“But not them,” Evelyn said.

“Not them.” Io looked down at Roderic. “Not what they smelled like. Not the sound Seraphina made when she was hungry. Not whether Ignatius yawned like this one does.”

As if on cue, Roderic yawned.

His whole face disappeared into it.

Io laughed, and it turned into something closer to crying halfway through.

“And now they're reaching latches,” she said. “And asking why bridges need supports. And Seraphina told me yesterday that she would prefer to choose her own clothes, thank you, and I said of course, and she walked out of the room, and I sat on her bed for an hour.”

Adriana's eyes were wet.

“Io.”

“They grew so fast,” Io whispered. “And I was so busy keeping them safe that I forgot to watch them be small.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

Evelyn put her hand on Io's knee.

Adriana reached over from the bed and took Io's free hand.

I sat very still and wished I knew how to help, and understood that the most useful thing I could do was not try.

After a while, Io wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

“It's foolish,” she said.

“It isn't,” Evelyn said.

“It is. I have two wonderful children. Healthy. Clever. Powerful enough to frighten half the councils in the north.” She managed a small laugh. “And I'm sitting here holding someone else's baby wishing I'd paid more attention to my own.”

Adriana squeezed her hand.

“You can hold mine whenever you like.”

“I know. Thank you.” Io looked down at Roderic. “But that isn't what I'm wishing for. Is it?”

She looked at Evelyn.

Evelyn did not answer.

She did not need to.

“I want another,” Io said quietly.

The words seemed to surprise her as she said them.

She looked at the baby. Then at the window, toward the garden, where Ignatius and Seraphina's voices were rising in some argument with Julian about the correct way to build a moat.

“Before they're grown,” she said. “Before they're so far away from small that they can't remember what it was like. I want them to have a little brother or sister they're old enough to know. Old enough to hold. To teach things to.” Her voice broke slightly. “I want to have a baby and not be so frightened that I forget to look at it.”

Evelyn nodded slowly.

“Have you told Lexander?”

Io laughed again, unsteadily.

“I haven't told myself until just now.”

She did not go back to Concordia that night.

She sent a message through the gate saying she would stay for supper, and then for the evening, and then, after the children had fallen asleep in a heap in our nursery with Carol and Garrick, for the night.

Lexander came through at midnight to find out why.

He found Io asleep in the chair by the window with Roderic in her arms. Adriana had tried twice to take him back and had given up both times, because Io's face, asleep, had looked more peaceful than any of us had seen it in months.

Lexander stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

“How long has she been like this?”

“Four days.”

He considered.

“Since the night he was born?”

“Yes.”

Lexander did not say anything else.

He took a blanket from the end of the bed, very carefully laid it over his wife and the baby in her arms, and sat down on the floor beside her chair.

He stayed there until morning.

He found me in the practice yard the next afternoon.

I was supposed to be defending the shield. Avarn had excused me from it because Thor had informed him that men with week-old sons were not to be struck in the head, and Avarn had accepted this with the expression of someone who disagreed on principle but recognized superior force.

So I was sitting on the low wall watching Thor and Avarn spar, which was considerably more alarming than being part of it.

Lexander sat down beside me.

He watched for a while.

“She told me,” he said.

I looked at him.

“This morning. At breakfast.” He rubbed his face. “Well. Before breakfast. I'd brought her tea, and she took it, and then she put it down and said, 'Lexander, I want to have another baby,' and then picked the tea back up as though she'd asked me to pass the bread.”

“What did you say?”

He laughed.

“Nothing useful. I think I said, 'Now?' and she said, 'Not this minute,' and I said, 'Good, because I'm holding tea.'”

I tried very hard not to laugh.

I failed.

Lexander did not seem to mind.

“Then we talked,” he said. “Properly. For a long time.”

Across the yard, Thor's practice hammer struck Avarn's wooden blade with a crack that echoed off the walls.

Lexander waited until the sound faded.

“How did you know?” he asked. “With Adriana. That it was the right time.”

I thought about that honestly.

“I didn't,” I said. “We talked about it. For a long while. Evelyn wanted to wait so Adriana could have her first child be first. Adriana didn't know if she could. None of us knew whether the world would be safe.”

“And it wasn't.”

“It still isn't.” I looked toward the north, where nothing was visible but the castle wall. “Othellos is building false shrines on top of a sleeping goddess. Surtr's sitting on the far side of a ford. There are people in cages we haven't reached.”

Lexander nodded slowly.

“That's what I said to Io,” he said. “Almost exactly that.”

“What did she say?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“She said that if we waited for the world to be safe, Seraphina and Ignatius would be grown and gone before it happened. And that the world was never safe when they were born either. And that she'd spent so long being afraid for them that she'd forgotten to be glad of them.” He looked down at his hands. “She said she wanted a chance to be glad first.”

I did not say anything.

There was nothing I could have said that would have improved on that.

“You have concerns,” I said eventually.

Lexander laughed.

“Several.”

“Tell me.”

He ticked them off on his fingers, the way he did in council when he wanted to make certain nothing was forgotten.

“She works too much. She's on three councils, she runs the Concordia infirmary, she trains the healers, she attends every assembly because she's afraid someone will make a decision about the children while she's not in the room.” He paused. “And she has done all of that since before they were born. She's never stopped. Not once.”

“And you're afraid she won't stop this time either.”

“I'm afraid she'll try to do all of it and carry a child too, and that she'll be so exhausted she misses this one the same way she thinks she missed the first two.”

That was a good concern.

I said so.

Lexander nodded.

“Second. We don't know what would happen.” He watched Thor sidestep one of Avarn's cuts. “Rysa says the children's growth sped up when the four of them started spending so much time together. Carol and Garrick, Seraphina and Ignatius. Something in them answers each other.”

“First Flame,” I said.

“And whatever Carol and Garrick carry. And now Roderic, whose great-great-grandmother is a goddess and whose mother can turn her refusal into a wall.” Lexander shook his head. “What happens if Io has another child, and that child meets all of them? Does it grow up in six months? Does it grow up in six weeks?”

I had no answer.

“Io said she wouldn't mind,” Lexander continued. “If it grew quickly. As long as she was there for it. She said the point wasn't how long it stayed small. It was whether she was looking when it was.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I think she's right. I'm still frightened.”

“That's a good sign,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Helena told me,” I said. “The night Roderic was born. If you're frightened, it means you understand what's happening.”

Lexander almost smiled.

“Helena says that to everyone.”

“She's usually right.”

“She is,” he admitted. “It's very irritating.”

“And the third concern?” I asked.

Lexander did not answer at once.

Across the yard, Thor finally caught Avarn's blade with her hammer, twisted it from his grip, and caught it in her free hand. Avarn bowed slightly. Thor tossed the sword back to him and grinned.

“The third concern,” Lexander said slowly, “is that I want it too.”

I looked at him.

“I didn't know until she said it,” he continued. “I'd stopped letting myself think about it. We had two children everyone wanted to turn into prophecies, and a city to run, and a war that kept getting closer.” He shook his head. “I thought wanting another child was something I had to set aside. Like a book I'd return to someday, if there was ever a quiet evening.”

“And then?”

“And then she put down the tea.” Lexander laughed softly. “And I realized I'd been waiting for her to say it for two years.”

They decided together.

He told me that much before Thor called him over to settle an argument about whether Avarn's last cut would have struck her shoulder or merely her cloak.

Io would give up one of her councils.

Not because Lexander asked. Because she had already decided, on the walk back from the nursery that morning, which one she would give up and to whom. Lysandra had been attending as an observer for months and had begun to ask better questions than most of the members.

She would train two more senior healers to share the infirmary, which she had been meaning to do for a year and had kept putting off because there was always some emergency that seemed to require her personally.

She would tell Lisbeth.

That decision had apparently required more discussion than the others combined.

“My mother,” Lexander said, with the resigned expression of a man discussing a natural disaster, “is going to be impossible.”

“Impossible how?”

“She has opinions about pregnancy. Diet. Sleep. Footwear. The correct temperature of bathwater. Which way the cradle should face.” He paused. “She had opinions about all of those things last time, and Io was so busy she agreed with all of them just to make Mother leave the room.”

“And this time?”

Lexander smiled slightly.

“This time,” he said, “Io says she intends to argue with her about the cradle. For fun.”

They told the children that evening.

I was not there. But I heard about it the next morning from three separate people, none of whom had been there either, which meant Concordia's palace had learned within the hour.

Seraphina had asked whether the baby would be a girl.

Io had said they didn't know yet. That they didn't even have a baby yet. That they only wanted one, and hoped.

Seraphina had considered this and announced that she would prefer a sister, because Ignatius was quite enough brother for anyone.

Ignatius had objected.

Then he had asked, very seriously, whether the baby would be small.

“Yes,” Io had told him. “Very small.”

“Like Roderic?”

“Like Roderic.”

Ignatius had thought about that for a long time.

Then he had asked whether he could watch it sleep.

Io came back to Greykeep two days later.

She did not come to hold Roderic.

She came to sit with Adriana and Evelyn in the nursery, the three of them on the floor among a scattering of wooden animals, while the four older children built a castle out of blocks and argued about whether it needed a moat.

Roderic slept in his cradle.

Io looked at him once when she came in.

Then she looked away, toward her own children, and kept looking at them for the rest of the afternoon.

Ignatius was explaining to Garrick that a moat should have fish in it.

Seraphina was explaining to Carol that a moat was a waste of good space that could have been a garden.

Carol was explaining to both of them that the castle needed a lamp in the window so people would know where to come.

Io listened to all of it.

When Seraphina turned and asked her mother to settle the question of the moat, Io did not say she was busy. She did not reach for the notes she had brought from the infirmary.

She got up off the floor and went to look at the castle.

“Show me,” she said.

Seraphina showed her.

Io knelt beside her daughter and listened to a very long explanation about the advantages of gardens over moats, and nodded at the right places, and asked questions that made Seraphina sit up straighter.

At one point, Seraphina pushed her hair back from her face, and Io went very still.

“What?” Seraphina asked.

“Nothing.” Io's voice was soft. “You did that when you were a baby. Pushed your hand against your forehead. Every time you woke up.”

Seraphina looked at her mother with deep suspicion.

“I did not.”

“You did.” Io smiled. “I'd forgotten. I just remembered.”

Seraphina considered this.

Then she leaned against her mother's shoulder, very briefly, the way children do when they are too old to be held and not quite old enough to stop wanting it.

“Can we have a moat and a garden?” she asked.

“I think,” Io said, “that you can have whatever you like in this castle.”

Across the room, Evelyn caught my eye and smiled.

Adriana, sitting beside the cradle with one hand resting on its edge, was watching too.

So was Aurelia, who had arrived at some point without anyone noticing and was sitting in her usual chair at the foot of the bed.

She was not looking at Roderic.

She was looking at Io.

And her expression was the same one she had worn the morning she first held her great-great-grandson: the look of someone who had once been too busy keeping children safe to watch them be small, and who understood exactly what it had cost.

Mary delivered the registration that evening.

She brought it to the nursery herself, because Carol and Garrick had informed her that it was urgent, and Mary took urgency seriously regardless of its source.

The document was very short.

A name. A date. The names of his parents. The seal of the royal archive.

Roderic Aurelius Grey.

Carol read it carefully, sounding out each word, then handed it to Garrick, who studied it with his whole face scrunched up in concentration.

“Now everyone knows,” Carol said.

“Everyone who reads the record,” Mary corrected.

Garrick handed the paper back.

“That's enough,” he decided.

Then the two of them went to stand on either side of the cradle, where Roderic was waking up and preparing to express an opinion about it.

Ignatius was already there.

Watching.

“He's moving his hands,” Ignatius reported.

We all went to look.

Roderic was indeed moving his hands. Opening and closing his fists. Turning his head slowly, the way he had turned it toward the lamp the morning he was born.

He was looking at Ignatius.

Ignatius did not move.

“He sees me,” he whispered.

“He does,” Io said.

She had come to kneel beside her son. She did not look at the baby. She looked at Ignatius, at the wonder spreading across his face, at the way he held his breath so as not to frighten something so small.

She was memorizing him.

I could see it.

So could Lexander, standing in the doorway, who had come through the gate to bring his family home and had stopped at the threshold the moment he saw them.

He did not come in.

He only stood there and watched his wife watch their son, and his face was the face of a man who had been waiting two years for something and had just realized it had already begun.