“Still.”

“The baby will have both kinds,” Millicent smiled.

“…That’s why you were willing to share, is it? And to do all the laundry to get it done amicably. You want your apprentice to be two kinds of witch.”

“Your apprentice too. And splitting the childcare doesn’t hurt. I get up in the evening and you get up in the morning when she’s crying, I do the cooking and the laundry but you’re still giving her baths -”

“I have to dunk her in herb water anyway. It just makes sense.”

“Are you saying you’ll stop giving her baths when she’s six months old?”

“Well, no.”

“There you go.”

Vercari was, as babies go, fairly ordinary. She developed brown hair, when she grew any at all - Millicent commented that it looked like mine, though mine was half gone gray from some combination of age and potion exposure - and her eyes stayed blue even past the point where they’d have darkened if they were going to. Like Millicent’s. One could almost imagine that she was in fact our baby, despite the fact that this was on several levels impossible.

Millicent looked over the text of my dedication ritual once I’d written it out with all the names and star signs and so on filled in.

“This says that you’re giving her to the stars and taking her from the moon. What’s that supposed to mean?”

I looked up. “What does it sound like?”

“I don’t know, I don’t touch astronomical mumbo-jumbo. What does it mean?”

Well, it wasn’t like Millicent would be able to use any of my spells even if I told her, since no one had dedicated her as an appropriately astronomical mumbo-jumboed apprentice when she was little. “If Vercari was a boy I’d be taking him from the sun instead, does that help?”

“…No?”

“…My kind of witch can’t have children. Can yours? What are you doing getting them from mundanes, if you could just have the homemade kind?”

“My kind of witch can,” said Millicent softly. “I can’t.”

“Oh.”

“But Vercari won’t be able to?”

“No. Unless you have a way of giving her back to the moon after she’s taken what she needs from the stars.”

“Well, I can see if there’s something to be done, anyway.”

“So, wait - Millicent - were you homemade or taken?”

“Homemade, if that’s what you call it. There’s entire witch villages in the westlands.”

“And you’re out here with a half-share in my taken baby because the moon wouldn’t have you to begin with.”

“If that’s how you want to put it.” She didn’t sound like she wanted to discuss it.

I let it drop.

“Aside from the rattle to - train her reflexes - what is it you’re going to be doing with her?” I asked, while I was feeding Vercari milky potion and Millicent was rolling out biscuit dough.

“Well, the rattle will be it for about a year, but then simple illusions are next. Then since she’s a firstborn she can have a familiar, probably I’ll find her a kitten or a fox pup; I don’t have a familiar because I have an older brother.”