"I have something to tell you."
She said it from the door of the chamber.
She had come in three minutes ago. She had crossed the chamber and gone to the window and looked out, and she had been at the window for the three minutes, and Aldric had been at the breakfast table at the small inner desk where he had been writing out the morning's first round of orders to the steward, and he had set the pen down at the sound of her step but had not, in the three minutes, turned his head.
He had been waiting for her to speak.
He had not, in the year past, been able to read the signal she was giving across a room as quickly as Tauriel could read his, but he had been able to read it. The small set of her shoulders that morning had been the set of a thing being carried. He had asked her at first light whether she was unwell. She had said no. She had been quiet through the meal. She had eaten the small piece of bread on her plate the way she had been eating bread for the last fortnight, which was slower than she had eaten bread the year past. He had not, until now, asked.
He turned from the desk.
She was at the window. She was, by her posture, neither standing as a Lady stood nor sitting as a wife sat; she was standing as a thing did when the thing had been carried as far as the thing could carry it without setting it down, and the setting-down was now.
She did not turn from the window.
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"I have something to tell you."
A long beat.
"Tell me."
"I am with child."
He sat at the desk.
He did not, in the beat that followed, do any of the four things his body wanted to do.
The first thing his body wanted to do was stand up. He did not stand up. The second was to ask three questions in rapid order: when, how do you know, what does this mean for the half-elven flag in the panel that has been waiting in the corner of my vision for three years. He did not ask any of them. The third was to make a quick internal pass at the threat-list — childbirth-risk in a country with three trained midwives and one bone-setter and the closest Elven healer in Imladris three weeks' ride away in good weather — which his mind began to run before he was aware of having permitted it to run, and which he stopped, by hand, the way he had stopped, three years ago in his study, the small instinctive movement of his hand toward his sword when Gorlim had started to speak about a bone-handled knife.
The fourth thing his body wanted to do was speak.
He did not, immediately, speak.
He sat at the desk.
The chamber was quiet. The morning light through the eastern window made the long pale stripe on the floor that came at this hour. The stripe lay across the corner of the rug Halbarad had brought from somewhere in the spring of the second year and never explained. It had been moving across that rug for ten years. The rug had a small place where the wool had worn flatter in the stripe's path, which Aldric had not, before today, noticed.
He looked at the worn place on the rug.
He thought: I will say something now. The thing I say will not be the right thing. The right thing does not exist. There is no right thing. I will say the thing that is in my mouth.
He looked up.
"Tauriel."
"Aldric."
"Come here."
She did not come at once.
She turned from the window. She turned slowly. He had time, in the turning, to register what he had been registering for some weeks without understanding what he was registering — the small private settling she had been doing across her body, the changed centre of her weight, the small care she had been taking on the stair at the eighth hour of the day, the fortnight of slower bread.
She crossed the chamber.
She stopped a pace from the desk.
He did not stand up.
He held out his hand.
She set her hand in his.
He turned her hand over in his — the way he had turned the apple in his hand in the orchard, the year of the farming revolution, when he had picked the first apple off the tree he had planted in the year of the founding and had not, then, found the words for what holding the apple in his palm had been — and he held her hand a long moment, and the long moment was the moment in which the news passed from the room into his chest. The passing took time. He did not hurry it.
"How long."
"Six weeks, by Elven count. The count is more difficult. I will know more by spring."
"Are you well."
"I am well. I have been well since the third week. The first two were as the first two are. They have passed."
"Tauriel."
"Aldric."
"I am — I am sorry."
She tilted her head a quarter-turn.
"For what."
"That I sat at the desk for that long."
"Aldric — I have been carrying it for ten days. You had four breaths."
"I had four breaths."
"You did not stand up."
"I did not stand up."
"You did not run."
"I did not run."
"That was — Aldric, that was the right four breaths. I had thought I would have to wait through twenty. I had thought, in the worst small thought, that you would, on hearing it, begin to plan it. I had thought I would have to be sitting at the window listening to you list the midwives and the healers and the safety-arrangements and the system in the corner of your eye that I do not see but I know is there. I had thought that. You did not do that. You sat at the desk and you looked at the rug. You said come here. That was — that was the four breaths I needed. Thank you."
He looked at her.
He had been about to apologise for the fifth breath, in which his hand had started, in the muscle-memory of seven years of lord-work, to reach toward the corner of his vision where the panel sat. He had stopped the hand. She had not, by any movement, registered the stopping. She had read the four breaths and not the fifth.
He let the fifth go.
The panel sat where it had sat for three years. There was, at this moment, a small soft sliding in it that he could feel without looking at it, the small recognition the system made when a condition had been triggered that the system had been waiting on. He did not look at it. He left it sliding, and he closed the small mental door he had learned in the third year to close on it, and he gave the inside of the room to the woman in front of him.
He stood up from the desk.
He did not, on standing, let go of her hand.
He pulled her gently around to the side of the desk where his chair had been, and he sat in the chair, and he drew her down so that she was sitting against him on the arm of the chair the way she had been sitting on the arm of the chair in the upper room for two years now, and she set her head a small fraction against his shoulder, in the small Elven gesture she made very rarely, and he held her hand on his knee with both his.
He did not say anything for a long beat.
When he did, he said it badly.
He said: "I have been — I have known, in the form a man knows a thing he has been told about a country he has not lived in, that this might happen. I have known it for years. I have, I think, been preparing for it for years, in the small inward way one prepares for a thing one is not, at one's own desk, certain one has the right to hope for. I had not — Tauriel, I am sorry to find the words this way, I have not had time to make them straight before they had to come out — I had not, until you said the sentence, known the difference between knowing and being told. I am being told now. The difference is large. The difference is — the difference is the rug."
She did not, at first, answer.
After a long beat she said: "The rug."
"The worn place in the stripe of light on the rug. I have been looking at it for ten years and I have not, until today, noticed it. There is a place in my life that I have been walking past for ten years and that the years have been wearing flat without my noticing, and you have just said a thing that has made me notice it. I am — Tauriel, I am not promising you a small list of things tonight. I am sitting here and I am telling you that the rug has a worn place and I am sorry I have not noticed it before and I am — glad. I am glad."
She did, then, an old Elven thing she had not done with him before in seven years.
She closed her eyes.
She closed her eyes the way Halbarad had closed his eyes at the feast — the deliberate close, not asleep — and she sat against his shoulder with her eyes closed, and the small soft drift of her hair across the line of his neck did the thing her hair did when she was, by her own count, quiet inside.
After a long while she opened her eyes.
She said: "The third flag."
"The third flag will wait until you tell me to take it up. The flag is not the matter today. The flag is — the flag will be the matter on a morning when you ask me whether the flag should be the matter. We do not, today, address the flag."
"All right."
"All right."
She did not move from the arm of the chair for some further minutes. He did not move from under her. The morning's first round of orders sat half-written at the desk. The steward had been told, at the first hour, that the lord would be at the desk by the second; the second had been and gone, and the steward, by Aldric's reading of the small absence at the door, had been told by someone — Tauriel, very likely, in the corridor, on the way in — that the second hour of the morning was the Lady's hour, and the steward had taken the order without question.
The hour ran out around them.
When they at last got up — she before him, the small steady rise of a woman who had been sitting in a particular way for a while and was now careful about how she rose — he stood up after her and stayed for a beat with his hand on the back of the chair.
He looked at the rug.
He looked at the worn place.
He picked up the pen and the half-written orders, and went to the desk, and sat back down.
The morning's first round of orders would be late by an hour. The orders were not, today, the matter that mattered.
He wrote on, with his hand steady, and the panel in the corner of his vision sat with its small soft sliding undone, and the worn place on the rug carried, for the rest of the morning, the light that was at this hour the light it carried.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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