Mary laughed. “My aunt Astrid’s daughters Hinluin and Fimalen are five, and they were like that for a while, only with them it was noodles. Nothing would do but noodles. And nothing on the noodles but butter. I love them but they drove me and my sister crazy while we were living in Stardell Hall.”

“You have to be crazy to be a parent,” Lady Roehis said confidently. “But it’s a rewarding insanity, in its way.”

Everyone chuckled, but Ingolf thought after an instant that it was a rather odd way to talk about it, though it was funny. But strange, as if having kids were a hobby you could choose not to have. As far as he knew it was just something you did, like growing up. Unless you couldn’t, which would be like being born with a clubfoot, a terrible and pitiful calamity.

He searched for something to say, not wanting to leave the whole burden to Mary; he’d left home at nineteen, and at that age you ignored younger kids just as hard as you could, being falsely convinced you were a man now. His life afterwards hadn’t been very domestic. But he did like flowers.

“Ah, these are lovely gardens, Lady Helissent.”

Helissent nodded towards her mother-in-law. “Lady Roehis did those, starting from nothing. This was bare pasture when she arrived in the second Change Year, and thin pasture at that! I wouldn’t have believed it possible until I saw it, and you’re right, it’s lovely. I’m from Barony Skagit originally, myself—my elder brother, Sir Adhémar de Sego, is a knight there, and holds Sego Manor as vassal of House Delby as my father did while he lived. Flowers are easy in Skagit. I was used to things being green naturally.”

“Including the people,” Maugis said with a smile. “Skagit’s on Puget Sound, my lord Vogeler. Where they think it’s a drought if the moss on their north side dies.”

“As opposed to places where the rabbits starve to death if they don’t run between blades of grass,” she said tartly, and they both laughed.

Mary’s hand stole into his beneath the table and squeezed. It’s true, when you’re in love you see it everywhere, he thought.

“My father picked this land when this county was shared out among the conquerors, and his comrades in arms thought he was crazy,” Maugis said. “My lady wife is quite right; there was no settlement here; we have photographs. Nothing for miles but a few farmhouses, and thirty miles north to the nearest rail spur. But he saw the possibilities, and so did my lady mother.”