And the pommel, a sphere of crystalline moon-opal gripped in antlers. Light swirled in it—

“Rudi!”

Mathilda’s voice was sharp as she called him back to the world of common day. He snapped the weapon home with a click of guard against chape.

“It’s so creepy when you . . . go away like that.”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Don’t say it’s always bad, acushla,” he said. “Here, put your hand on mine, and we’ll see together what I glimpsed.”

She did, where his left—his sword-hand, since the wound that nearly killed him leached a hair-fine edge of the strength and speed from his right—rested on the hilt. Then she gasped.

Rudi went on one knee in this very spot, sinewy wedge-shaped torso brown and bare above his kilt. But older, a little, with scars she didn’t recognize, and his hair longer and worn Mackenzie-style, tied back with a spare bowstring into a queue. He smiled as he extended his arms, and a two-year-old toddled towards him, a girl in a yellow shift, chubby feet bare, white-silk hair falling around her shoulders, huge turquoise eyes sparkling above a gap-toothed elfin grin. Rudi seized her beneath the arms and tossed her high, catching her and tossing her again.

Mathilda watched, laughing, an infant in her arms . . .

They took their hands from the Sword and looked at each other, wondering.

“Is . . . that what will be?” she asked.

“No. It’s what might very well be, though, which is close enough for government work, which is appropriate, eh? Making it so is up to us.”

“Two children,” she said wonderingly; he could hear happiness bubbling up beneath it. “In a few years from now, at least, and maybe more later. Oh, thank you, Holy Mary, mother of God. My children! Our children!”

“A daughter and a son,” Rudi added, nodding; then his mouth quirked. “Crown Princess Órlaith, and little Prince John.”

Mathilda looked at him sharply; the order of succession hadn’t been settled yet, whether it should be the eldest or the eldest son. The conservative nobility of the Association mostly wanted the latter, of course; and he knew she was ambivalent herself. Then her eyes went wider.

“You know their names. The Sword knows their names?”

“Well, we could choose others now, just to spite it, so. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they? So we might as well . . . though it’s most surely a matter of the snake biting its own tail . . .”

“Órlaith,” Mathilda said. “That means . . . Golden Princess, doesn’t it?”

“So it does, in the ancient tongue. Her hair will be like white gold as a child, and palest yellow when she’s grown, with eyes like the sunlit sea; she’ll be tall and graceful as a willow-wand, stronger than sword steel.”

He frowned seriously. “And she’ll be mad for strawberries and cream in season, and love cats, and play the mandolin—”