We lay there together for a long time. We did not speak. The quietness was a simple thing, a consonance, a comfort. Eventually we cleaned ourselves up and found fresh bedding. Eventually, we fell asleep. I held him like I’d held him every night before that one, except that night we lay together naked, and that night the last shreds of mystery between us were torn away. I kissed the nape of his neck as I drifted to sleep. I told him I loved him. He told me he loved me back. The words when I said them felt no different than they had the night before, but their meaning was clearer.

Chapter 30

CHAPTER 30

Sorcha and I lived with Nisa and Dirva for two years more. When Nisa had weaned Nuri and Sorcha’s milk had dried up, it felt like time to find space for ourselves. Nuri walked and ran and climbed out of their bed and into ours. He spoke and laughed and threw tantrums. His things—toys, clothes already too small the third time he wore them, picture books—outnumbered my own. The fact was that Semadran homes are not built to house red elvish families, and we had run out of space. When Nuri was three and weaned, Dirva gave up his post at the Office of Foreign Relations. The borough allowed him into the schoolhouse to teach literacy and magical theory to Semadran youngsters. He taught with Nuri at his feet while Nisa returned to the prototype labs. Nuri spent probably three quarters of his childhood in that schoolhouse. So, when Nuri was three and weaned and underfoot in the schoolhouse, there was nothing left for Sorcha in Dirva’s home.

Nisa found us a bachelor’s apartment two blocks south of their house. The woman who rented it to us was one of the engineers from Nisa’s workshop. We would not have found a place on our own. Shayat was right: there were rumors about me. Nisa never believed those rumors, even though they were true, and apologized over and over again because the apartment she found us had only one room.

We went the two blocks north every night and had dinner with Nuri and Nisa and Dirva, and for a time I still worked during the day for that man who wanted the Empire to push east, east, endlessly east into the Droma grasslands. The nights were just mine and Sorcha’s. I had wondered—worried—what would happen between us when motherhood left his body. I had worried I would prove fickle and heartless. I didn’t.