“Do you think the folk have ushered him away?”
She nodded.
“Then you must know that he wouldn’t have left if it hadn’t been the only path he saw to take,” Graeme said. “Especially knowing of your condition.”
Sidra froze. How did Graeme know she was sick with the blight? There was no possible way he could know, and she looked at him with dark, glittering eyes.
“How do you know about me?” she rasped. “I haven’t told anyone. Not even Torin.”
“Well, quite simply. You see, my wife did the same thing,” Graeme said, and his voice had grown so wistful that Sidra found herself gaping at him. “When she was carrying Torin. Once, blood pudding had been her favorite. And then she suddenly couldn’t stand to have anything to do with it. I couldn’t eat pudding for years, even after Torin was born. Because Emma couldn’t bear the smell of it.”
“I . . .” Sidra’s voice broke. She began to sift through her symptoms.
Her exhaustion. Her headaches. Her irritation. Her waves of nausea.
She had been so preoccupied with trying to solve the blight—which she had blamed for all of her symptoms—that she hadn’t kept proper track of her moon flow. Now, she realized, she was late.
Sidra laid her hand on her belly. She thought of how often she and Torin had come together lately. Ever since he had been home in the evenings, sleeping beside her. They had talked about growing their family. Both she and Torin wanted another child, a child they would have together, and they had decided to stop taking their contraceptives and begin trying. And yet Sidra hadn’t thought it would happen so soon. She certainly hadn’t anticipated reveling in this news without Torin, but now that it had bloomed in her thoughts, Sidra knew it was true.
She let the wonder wash over her until she moved and felt the uncomfortable stiffness in her left foot, a keen reminder that the blight beneath her skin was expanding, climbing up her bones. Soon it would completely devour her, and what then? Could she even survive it, let alone her child?
“Sidra,” Graeme said, “if Torin has truly been spirit-taken, then you must prepare for him to be gone for a while.”
“What?” she panted, her mind far away.
“He might be gone for weeks. Months. I don’t want to say this, but it could even be years.”
Sidra blinked at Graeme. She struggled to fathom what he was saying, but then it cleft her heart like an axe.
“No, surely they wouldn’t hold him that long,” she said. “The earth . . . the spirits wouldn’t do that to me.”
Graeme was silent for a moment. But then he said, “There was a poem I read in Joan’s journal. She mentioned a ballad about time moving much more slowly in the spirits’ realm. One day in their world might be one hundred in ours.”
Sidra opened her mouth to protest, but the words faded. She knew Graeme was right.
She envisioned Torin in her mind’s eye, returning to the mortal world and looking just as he had the night he left. Young and handsome and corded with strength. Walking into their house only to find it empty, cobwebbed. Discovering her headstone in the graveyard, beside Donella’s. Realizing that Maisie was grown and gray-haired and that this other child—this son or daughter that he had never known about—had also lived a full life. Realizing he had missed it all.
“What are you saying to me, Graeme?” Sidra whispered, her fingers curling into the loam. She took a fistful of earth and held it, trying to steady herself.
“I gave up my right to rule long ago,” he said, squeezing her shoulder again. “You know that ever since Emma departed, I have been unable to leave my croft. But even before that, I never had a desire to rule, and Alastair knew it. So did Adaira. When she passed the lairdship to Torin, she was following the correct line of succession. And with Torin now incapable of being present, the east falls to you, Sidra.”
“I don’t want to rule,” she said, reflexively. The same fear she had felt when Torin had told her they needed to move into the castle—the fear of irrevocable change and the unknown—began to beat against her ribs again. “I can’t do it.”
“You must, Sidra. You need to keep the east together. You must rise and lead this clan.”
“I can’t.”
“Why do you say that?”
She bit the corner of her lip until the pain shot through her mouth. “Because I’m carrying enough as it is! I can’t bear anything else. It will crush me, Graeme.”