I could only gape at the woman. I knew. I knew what she meant. I knew every bit of the implication. But it had my mind completely shattered.
Larth’s wife stopped her efforts to remove my shirt herself and stared hard at me. “There wasn’t anyone else, you know,” she said. “Not before, not after. You’re the only one who could be the father of this baby.”
I didn’t dispute the claim. I couldn’t. I knew it was true. Maybe it was my imagination and the intensity of the moment, or even the intensity of the last few days, but I knew that the baby girl crying and wearing herself out as she lay on my legs was my daughter.
I let out a sob and cupped my hands around her tiny body, hoping she would live, hoping everything would be alright. I wept for everything that all of us had lost and for the struggle we’d gone through to get where we were.
“Don’t you go crying over your sins,” Larth’s wife scolded me, completely misunderstanding my emotion. “Do you think we can look after her? Me and my husband and my daughter? We’ve got troubles of our own. You created this life, now be a man and take responsibility for it.”
I nodded, not caring that Larth’s wife thought my feelings were exactly the opposite of what they were. I picked my baby girl up and tucked her under my shirt so that she lay against my skin, against my pounding heart. I held her there with so much care and sudden affection, lowering my lips to kiss her fussy head.
Larth’s wife rocked back, her expression changing to confusion. I didn’t care if she stopped to realize what I was really feeling. That moment belonged to me and my baby and to no one else.
Well, maybe Appius and Mara as well.
“She’s so small,” Appius said, kneeling by my side and touching the baby’s head. “I can’t believe she’s alive.”
“She seems pretty strong for a baby who’s just had so much trouble being born,” Mara said, tilting her head as she stood next to the chair and stared down at the baby in my arms.
“Agnes was a strong woman,” Larth’s wife said from the bedside, where she was staring down at Agnes’s lifeless, mangled form now. “She was so happy when she discovered she was with child. She kept saying that her pretty man would come back, and that you would marry and have a family together.” She sniffled and wiped her cheek, then glanced to me. “She was right about you coming back.”
“But I don’t understand how,” the other woman said with a strange, bereft look. “General Rufus blocked the mountain pass. He ruined the bridges and spread rocks on the road. I saw the long bridge myself. There’s no way across.”
“We just barely made it across,” Mara explained to her. “There are six of us. The other three are downstairs. We can tell you the entire story.”
The young woman suddenly looked excited. “If they made it across, so can I,” she told Larth’s wife. “I can get back to him. I can go back to Loren.”
A wave of grief for everything we’d all been through buffeted me, but it was like the innocence surrounding my baby girl blocked it from hurting me.
“You can’t go back,” Mara said with more compassion than I’d ever heard in her voice. She stepped closer to the woman. “The long bridge was only half there when we reached it. We crossed it, but only barely. It crumbled and fell when Appius was crossing, and Conrad only barely saved his life before the whole thing fell into the ravine. The kingdom is lost to us now.”
“No, no!” The woman turned and threw herself against Larth’s wife, weeping bitterly.
Larth’s wife embraced her, weeping herself. “My daughter’s husband and two of her children are still in Corvus,” she explained. “Flora and the baby came to visit me right before General Rufus and his men laid waste to the mountain pass.”
She didn’t need to say anything else. My heart bled for Flora. It was very possible she’d never see her husband and children again.
“We need to dispose of Agnes’s body and clean up,” Mara said a few moments later, as the intensity of the situation began to steady. “Conrad, you need to tend to the baby. Appius, you should rest too. Go downstairs and see if Lucius and the twins have eaten their fill yet. Tell them to take care of Agnes. I need something to eat myself, and so do you, Conrad.”
I nodded and started to stand, my daughter still snuggled against me. As soon as I was on my feet, I sucked in a hard breath and stared at Mara.
“What is she going to eat?” I asked. “Agnes is dead. Babies need milk. She’s too small to eat anything else.”
“I can feed her,” Flora moaned through her tears.
“But not now,” Larth’s wife said, frowning at me. “We’ve been through too much.”
I could have laughed at that and told her a dozen stories from the last month alone that would have the hair standing on the back of her head. But I knew my baby could wait.
I let Mara push me downstairs, along with Appius, to the inn’s common room. A few more people than just Lucius, Leander, and Darius were there. They all turned our way and looked in astonishment as I entered the room with the baby under my shirt, her head visible to all.
“Is that…is that a baby?” Darius asked, his face scrunched in mock horror.
“She’s my baby,” I told him with a ferocity I hadn’t expected.
Darius’s teasing expression immediately turned to one of shock. “She is?”
“Wait, you have ababy?” Leander stood and came over to take a look.