Egelric worries and dreams

Egelric had already had his breakfast and seen to the horse’s, he had split and carried in the wood for the day and then some, and all of the other morning chores had been done. Still the sun had not yet risen. He was sleeping poorly these days.

He went to stand in the doorway of the bedroom. The fire burned fretfully. The leaping shadows made the furniture seem to dance in place, with only Sela lying immobile in the center of them. It would take more than moving shadows to make her seem to dance now.

She had become solid and slow since her belly had begun to grow round. One felt the weight of her limbs in the way she moved. Her hands that once had fluttered now more often came to rest together like a pair of nesting birds, and her head nodded on her long neck like a flower grown too heavy for its stem. She was no longer the sort of girl who would drop lightly on one’s head from a tree and laugh.

He loved her more than ever, to be sure – he loved the quiet woman who drowsed against his shoulder when they sat before the fire, and whose dark, eloquent eyes followed him around whenever he was busy about the house – but he was alarmed at times at the change in her. Elfleda had been alternately brisk and ill with her babies, the Duchess had been merely ill, and Gunnilda never stopped working but for the day or two after her babies came. Those were all the women he had known well enough to take as examples. But Sela was an elf – who could say?

His deepest fear was that the change was not due to the baby at all. She had already been growing heavy with the child when the elf had brought her back to him. He had taken her words away, as he had said. She still had a voice, but she could not speak. Egelric did not know what else he might have taken from her.

She could still laugh, and did, but it was a different sort of laugh. She had lost her breathless giggle entirely, and only laughed a slow, deep laugh that Alred had likened to warm honey. Egelric would have loved it more if he hadn’t worried about where the other had gone.

Alred was often with them. He came whenever he rode out to visit the work site – which was more often than seemed necessary – and had even come several times while Egelric was away. Lately he often spent the night, sleeping in the little room that Egelric still called Baby’s room, to himself.

At the thought, he turned out of the warm, firelit bedroom and opened the door to the cold and lonely little room beside it. For a time, while he had been planning and building the house, and when he had first come to live in it – when he had been happier than he had any right to be, he saw now – he had thought that Iylaine would come to live with them. He would have a true home again – his own home, wherein lived his own family.

His mistake had been as it always was, in allowing himself to believe he would be permitted to be happy, in allowing himself to dream. The elf could not have been crueler, short of refusing to return Sela or the child to him at all.

For years he had been promising Iylaine that they would soon have a house of their own and live together again, and now, unless the elf changed his mind or unless Egelric braved his wrath, they never would. She would be eleven in the spring. In a few years some other man would be offering her a house of her own. In five, six, or ten years – but he had lost her already.

He had expected her anger – one of her fits of fury. She had a temper to match his own, but he could roar louder than she could shriek, and such battles ended in a hug sooner or later. He had not expected her coldness. The fire had gone out that was her passion for him, and which she could stoke into an ardent adoration as easily as into a towering rage.

Now she would neither cling to him nor fight with him. She only turned her face away from him, coldly, and with a sort of disdain one did not think to see on so young a child.

It was no wonder, perhaps. He had not been able to give her a reason. He had tried to lead her to understand that there was something scandalous about the affair, since that was what the people whispered in any case. That seemed to be what Malcolm believed, and he did not doubt Malcolm had told her so. He hoped that then, at least, she might think he meant to honor her by keeping her away.

He was too much a coward to tell her the truth. If she knew that he had spoken to an elf – if she managed to meet him and learn that he was her cousin, whether or not it was true – then he would lose her utterly. As it was, he could still go to see her. She was only an hour away.

She was sufficiently disdainful of him to allow him to be seated at her side at dinner, as if he didn’t matter enough to bother her. He could sit beside her and look upon the flutter of her hands, the pride of her high head, the darting of her ice-​​bright eyes as they looked everywhere but upon him. Perhaps it was all he would ever have of her again. But he could not help himself sometimes, and he dreamed of forgiveness all the same.