The Kwisling [The Isbjørn book 2]

Twenty-eight

The pregnancy was not a panacea. Some of the more obdurate council members, Niche the worst of them, still regarded Daire with suspicion.

Time slipped by.

For all of them, times possessed emotional potency. For each suffering from reality, time offered a healing capacity. Daire was able to look at Sri again, Luce learned that it was easier to look away when the two soon to be parents cooed by the fire.

He was a fifth wheel, though there were just four bodies present. Sri and Daire were utterly in love, nothing could change that, even if they were struggling to be in the same room together. John slowly fell in love with the prospect of his unborn son (for which he was certain would in fact be a boy).

Time did not really march on. Between short sunsets and long days, it tip-toed. One day they just turned around and a week was gone. It ought to have been loud, an ordeal of loud feet through the square, each day a celebration for survival. There was no parade, aside from John moving through the palace with Sri like he had something to prove-- because he did.

"Do you know how long just a week takes when it is going away?” Milady offered. He had been sharing with her his curious perspective on how time moved without a clock to manage its many seconds.

He finished securing his pack to his horse and dared a look over his shoulder at her. "How long?"

“Just a blink of the eye.” She seemed to demonstrate with the dip of her eyelids. “Just a bit ago you were stepping from your mother's womb with your first breath in your lungs."

Luce kept it to himself, that unlike Isbjørn cubs, human babies did not immediatly crawl from birth.

"And today you are an old man.”

“Old?” Luce asked with surprise. His eyes had floated back to the saddle as he secured the seat. “What are you talking about?” 

“You are old.” From her perceptive, Luce's 25 years were enough to capture an Isbjørn lifetime. But this time, this was not what she meant.

“I’m not old," he countered. "I could easily live another forty years."

She shook her head. Milady had seen the way he lived. “You are inches away from death every time you leave those palace walls." She shifted her position on the stack of hay, feeling the straw poke into the fleshy parts of her rear. "How much older can you be at your age? The way you challenge your life by treading past hostile Isbjørn. The poor way you conduct yourself at the scrap yard."

It was clear then that she was not talking about his actual years but the age of his worn spirit. “Well, maybe I'm old,” Luce conceded, his tone subdued. “Maybe unpleasant conditions make a life seem long. But if that's the case, who actually wants to live a long time?"

“I do,” she told him.

“Why?”

“What else is there?"

There was no time for the question to settle as from behind them, was an abrupt knock on ancient wood from the sudden arrival of John. Luce turned around with bitter intent, delivering a silence packed delivered in acute apathy.

Milady noticed the shift and perked, ready to move if the situation became hostile. It was unusual, she thought, to see Luce go from a cool neutral to malicious in one moment, but he had been unusually wired since they first met in the stable.

Meanwhile, Luce was snarling, his mind already hearing the voice John would use to tell him something or the other. He smiled, no he smirked, from the other side of the room and said 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice Luce was unprepared for.