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“And answers such as that are your technique for deflecting me, isn’t it?”
Damn. Caught me out there too. I looked out at the serene vista, our gazes parallel. “Okay, jokes aside. Yes, I worry that we don’t communicate well—a sentence that still sounds absurd to me, given that I’m saying it to an alien being while I’m looking out at a landscape full of impossibilities. But, even without thegeas,or whatever it is that keeps you from being able to tell me everything, this whole deal like last night, when I’m not supposed to tell you about something important…it seems fraught to me. I still don’t understand all the rules—I don’t even know if you sleep at night. I’ve promised to marry you someday and we still know so little about each other.”
“Someday will be sooner than you think, perhaps.”
“Because of what Fafnir said?”
“One of the reasons, yes. He has a point. Until we’re married, you are fair game to be ‘protected’ by another. We might have him in custody, but this cabal he spoke of will simply try yet again. You are a valuable prize.”
“I don’t like being a prize.”
“You didn’t like the abduction attempt either.”
Fair enough.
“Tell me why you fretted about the babe.”
He was relentless and I didn’t really want to talk about it. “Let’s stick to the agenda—when you say ‘sooner than I think’ for the wedding, when would that be?”
“The winter solstice would be the most auspicious timing.”
“That’s soon?” And here I’d been braced for “next week” or “tomorrow.” I flipped to my timeline and frowned at it, wishing yet again I’d thought of making one sooner and had kept better track. “The night we rescued you from QB’s castle was All Hallow’s Eve, which would be October 31 in my world. Solstice, depending on the year, would be around December 21, give or take. So that would more than a full moon cycle away.”
Rogue cocked his head, assimilating the various images. “What you call the moon cycle makes no sense. The moon is the moon. It does not change.”
Fascinating, really, and as had recently occurred to me. “It never appears as a crescent or a half? As if part of it is in shadow?”
“No,” he said in a reflective tone, giving it due consideration. “What could cast a shadow on the moon?”
I snorted to myself. Oh, only a planet, which we didn’t seem to be on. “Okay, we’ve got a reasonable rotation of day and night that we agree on—how many nights from now?”
“Ah—three.”
Keeping my lips close together, I blew out a long, steadying breath through the small opening, concentrating on keeping it even and smooth. I’d suspected this about time. It shouldn’t rock me, to know that what should have been seven weeks had passed in something like one for me, even allowing for lost time when I’d battled the cat. If I figured it had been the equivalent of early September when I’d conceived, then I might be four months along. Utterly terrifying to contemplate.
“Tell me, Gwynn.” Rogue spoke softly, tracing my toes with apparent fascination. “I only get pieces of this worry about the babe before you tuck it away again.”
“I don’t know if I can explain it, even to myself.”
“Try.”
I supposed I owed him that. “Let me start with a story. In my world there are these things called movies—images and sound that tell a tale. I watched this one about animals in another part of the world from where I lived, called elephants. Do you have those?”
He shook his head slightly but stayed silent, forcing me to go on.
“Elephants are what biologists call sentient—they’re capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, for example. They’re smart and can form emotional attachments, even paint pictures. I’d seen them in captive situations, but this showed them wild. A group of them, a herd, traveled through desert, seeking water. It took them a very long time and some died along the way. There were baby elephants too.” My voice thickened and I sucked it back, trying to maintain. “Then there was this dust storm and—they couldn’t see where they were going, but they made it out. Except for this one baby elephant that got confused. All turned around. And when the dust storm cleared, it was still walking, but in the wrong direction. Back into the desert.”
I wiped an escaping tear away, glad Rogue was facing away from me. He stroked my foot. “And it died?”
“I don’t even know. Maybe the people filming it—recording the pictures—rescued it. But the thing is, the image of that baby elephant trotting off hopefully into the desert, thinking it would find its mother…it gives me an almost physical pain to contemplate it. And that’s an animal, totally unconnected to me, irrelevant to my life, and its death would be part of nature. As a biologist, I know and understand these things. But—” I broke off, not really willing to take the next step.
“But this babe you carry will be relevant and connected and not an animal. You see the child as this baby elephant—torn from you, lost and dying.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see, not trusting my voice. All those women had been right. The pregnancy hormones were a killer. Rogue waited me out.
“So, the other part is that, were I in my own world, I’d have a lot of metrics to track the baby’s development. I’d have pictures and various tests. I would be able to take vitamins and predict when it would be born. Here, I have none of that.”
“The babe will grow on its own, yes? Without you having this knowledge?”
