Alfred didn't tell it straight away. He sat with it a while longer, the way a man lingers at the top of a cold stair he's been putting off. He started talking, and his voice dropped into something younger and farther away, and the room around them thinned out until it was gone.
Nineteen years, gone in a breath.
It had been this ship. A smaller room near the stern, back when the paint was newer and Alfred's knees still did as they were told.
Rain hammered the hull in the dark, the Morgain seat an hour out and closing, and Magnus du Morgain stood in the low lamplight with a bundle held to his chest that undid everything Alfred had thought he understood about the night.
"You want to run that by me again," Alfred said. "Slowly. I've flown you drunk. I've flown you bleeding. I've flown you halfway to places that don't have names on any chart. I have never once flown you carrying a baby, and here you are telling me where we're headed with it."
