“It’s not boredom. Just - it looks uncomfortable, doing that many of them. And you seem worried about the deadline, sometimes.”

“I have to wait thirty years if I miss it. And I wouldn’t have Vercari anymore, would I?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“If I didn’t dedicate her? Wouldn’t you whisk her away to your little westlands village with my claim expired?”

“No,” exclaimed Lissy. “I mean, wouldn’t you still want her - don’t you like her?”

“Yes, but -”

“But nothing, I wouldn’t take her from you even if she weren’t going to - belong to the stars too. You aren’t the stars.”

“So in this scenario you and Vercari would go on living here and she’d be a westlands kind of witch, complete with rattle and pointless animal and charming illusions, and I’d be…?”

“Her mother.”

“…All right. But I want to make the deadline regardless.”

“Of course. Go check.”

I went up to the balcony with my telescope and searched the sky. It had been a while since I’d divined anything, too busy with preparations of straw things and dedication ritual details.

I slipped into meditative focus, and swung the telescope around to focus on different constellations until the answer came to me.

I went back down and took Lissy’s hands in mine and showed her how to weave the simplest kind of straw thing.

She beamed at me.

With Lissy’s help the straw things were all made by the time Vercari was four months old. There was suddenly a lot more time, then, although Vercari could fill it pretty effectively, wanting to be fed or walked around or changed.

Sometimes, of course, the baby slept.

“Orawne?”

“Yes?”

“When did you know that if you were ever going to have a lover it would be a woman?”

“I don’t think it even crossed my mind till I was, oh, nineteen, to list characteristics for such an improbable person, I just didn’t meet enough people… once it occurred to me to ask myself the question, it was obvious. Why?”

Lissy beat the eggs in her mixing bowl harder.

“Lissy?”

“Mm?”

“You were married for reasons other than the desire for a homemade baby, weren’t you? I’d hope?”

“Oh. Yes. I liked him, before he - before. Yes.”

“I suppose if you hadn’t, the expiration of the handfasting would be a mercy…”

“I don’t think I’m quite - look - with your kind of witches no one cares, right? Since the moon won’t have you it doesn’t matter?”

“Right.”

“So you might have heard of - is there anyone who likes both?”

“Sure. My teacher’s co-prentice, he did, she told me.”

“Okay.”

“Are you worrying about Vercari when she grows up, again? I guess it might matter if you find out how to give her back to the moon without undoing her star gift.”

“It really doesn’t matter to me if she has no apprentices or makes them or takes them or whatever she likes,” Millicent said.

“Good, because again, I can’t change who she’d want to bring up or not bring up her own apprentices with.”