“Because your people are insane about the birth of children,” she snarled. “What may happen! What may not happen! When it must happen, and within what order of events! Circumstances over which they had no control whatsoever dictate how they will be treated for the rest of their lives!” She finished buckling the vest and glared at him. “You should know this. Better than anyone.”

Tavi folded his arms and met her gaze. “And how did you expect things to be made better by keeping this from me?”

“I...” Kitai stopped speaking and slithered into her mail shirt, a task made awkward by the cramped space of the wagon. “I did not wish you to aim your further insanity at me.”

“Further insanity?” he demanded. “Don’t bother with the armor, Kitai. You won’t be using it.”

She lifted her chin as she began binding her hair back into a tail. “There? You see? Because I carry our child, you expect me to sit quietly in some stone box until it is time to give birth.”

“No,” Tavi said. “I expect you to keep our...” He tried not to choke over the word. “. . . child... safe.”

“Safe?” Kitai eyed him. “There is no such place, Aleran. Not anymore. Not until the vord are put down. There are only places where it will take longer to die.”

Tavi had no real answer to that. He leaned back on his heels and stared at her for a long moment.

“This is why you insisted on a courtship,” he said. “On us sleeping apart.”

Kitai’s cheeks flushed. “It... is another reason, Aleran.” She swallowed. “There were many reasons.”

Tavi leaned forward and offered her his hand.

She took it.

They held hands for a quiet moment.

“Our child,” Tavi said.

She nodded, her eyes wide and difficult to read.

“When did you know?”

“Toward the end of the voyage back from Canea,” she said.

“How long?”

She shrugged, and for one of the few times in Tavi’s memory, failed to look calm and confident. “Six months. If the father was Marat. But our people and yours... this has never before happened.” She swallowed, and Tavi thought that she looked, in that instant, fragile and beautiful, like a flower coated in ice. “I do not know what will happen. No one knows what will happen.”

Tavi sat in total silence for a long moment, trying to get his head around such a simple and enormous truth.

He was going to be a father.

He was going to be a father.

A little person was going to come into the world, and Tavi would be his father.

Kitai’s fingers stroked over his hand. “Please tell me what you are thinking.”

“I’m...” Tavi shook his head, at a loss. “I’m thinking that... that this changes things. This changes everything.”

“Yes,” Kitai said in a very small voice.