Chapter 5 ENOUGH

CHAPTER FIVE

RAVENNA

I sit with the pregnancy for a full day before I let myself feel anything about it beyond the raw fact of it.

I am going to be a mother out here with no pack, no healer, no walls that will hold against anything more serious than rain.

Just Darius, me and whatever we can build with our hands and figure out as we go.

I turn it over in my mind all morning and do not arrive at anything resembling a plan.

Just the fact of it, sitting in my chest, heavy and real and not going anywhere.

A FEW DAYS LATER

The door opens and Darius walks in.

I wrinkle my nose before I have thought about it.

He is covered in dried blood and something worse, his clothes stained dark, smelling like the bottom of the forest after three days of rain.

"Get in the bathroom," I say. "Right now. And clean yourself up before I actually vomit all over you."

He laughs, low and easy, already pulling at his shirt. "Love you too, baby."

I wave him off and go outside.

Before it'd always been a long stretch to the river to fetch water in several wooden containers Darius made for their use but now he'd found a way.

He'd built a wooden pipeline from iron

fittings and carved channels—he'd found in the forest— running from the river, something he spent four days constructing without explaining what he was doing until it worked.

I can hear water running without making the long trip myself.

Outside the air is cold and sharp and I breathe through it carefully.

The deer he brought back is laid out near the storage shelter, large, clean-killed.

In front of the hut the small garden plot is coming up from seeds he found somewhere I still have not fully questioned, planted in careful rows and staked with thin branches.

Different vegetables at different stages, all of it tended.

I crouched to check the animal properly, and the smell hit me. I straighten fast and retch by the side of the hut with one hand braced against the wall.

My sickness has gotten worse in the last few days.

Worse in the mornings, worse around strong smells, worse when I move too fast or too slow or sometimes for no reason I can identify at all.

"Get inside." Darius's voice comes from the doorway, clean now, his hair damp. "Don't stand near the meat when you're like that. You'll make yourself worse."

"I'm watching the garden and the meat," I say, straightening up and wiping my mouth. "Those birds have been at the far row twice this week."

"I'll store the meat whilst watching the garden. Get inside."

"How can you do two things at the same time?"

"Ravenna?" He snapped.

I gave him a look. He gives me one back. And then I turned and went inside.

He puts the meat into storage and comes and sits outside with me a little while later, the garden visible from where we settle.

The afternoon is quiet around us. Cold but dry, which counts as good weather now.

He looks at me sideways. "How are you feeling?"

I shake my head slowly. "Tell me it gets better?"

The look on his face is not reassuring. He looks genuinely frightened for a second before he gets it under control, and seeing it frightens me more than if he had just said something honest.

He takes my hand and holds it and says, "I don't know if it does. But I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

I nod and look at the garden.

After a while I say, "We need to start thinking about what the baby needs."

"We don't even know the gender yet." He protests.

"At this point," I look at him, "I don't think we can afford to care about gender. My idea is we make clothes for both and if the baby comes out as a boy he just wears the girl clothes until we can make more."

Darius stares at me. Then he bursts out laughing, his head going back, and the sound of it fills the clearing. "That is terrifying."

"It's actually interesting," I say, grinning despite myself.

"It's terrifying still," he repeats.

We spend the next while doing exactly what I suggested... making a list of what the baby would need. Clothes in both sizes. Something for a bed, softer than dried leaves.

Swaddling material, which means finding something soft enough, which means either trading for cloth somehow or finding a way to process the softer animal hides.

A way to boil water reliably for cleaning. Herbs for pain if the birth is hard. Someone who knows what they are doing when the time comes, which is the item on the list neither of us looks at directly for very long.

I stop after a while because looking at the list is not making it shorter.

What we have is each other, shelter that holds,. routine that works, a man who laughed when I told him and meant it, who is already adjusting everything around us quietly so I do not have to carry his fear on top of my own.

I notice what he does not say. He does not tell me it will be fine. He does make promises about the future and the continual reminder he's not going to leave her.

But he does not make promises about the future he cannot keep. He adjusts and does things for her.

He brings her more food, scouts the territory wider, starts thinking about winter in a new way, and makes the garden wider with different kinds of plantation.

Anytime she tries to help, he tells her, "Raven, just sit back and do the little work of watching the garden so the birds do not get at the plants."

I do not love being managed. But I am tired enough and sick enough most mornings that I do not fight it.

I told him one morning on his way out, "You know Darius, I'm always frightened every time you go out and don't come back immediately. I always sit by the door, count time in my head, tell myself it is fine and then count time again till he returns."

Darius sighs and cups my face, "I'll always come back to you no matter what."

One evening I have my head on his shoulder and the fire is low, "Do you have any idea what's happening out there? In the world now?"

He shifts slightly. "Why are you asking that?"

I lift my head and look at him. "Because before we were exiled, Austin was already building towards war."

Darius sighs, "You know that's not our problem anymore."

I shot him a pointed look. "Don't talk that way. Our friends and families are still back there. Same, Dorian is there. Your mother and Marcus too." I hold his eyes. "Don't you miss them?"

Something moves across his face. He cups my cheek with his hand, his thumb against my jaw. "I miss all of them," he answers. "Every day."

His voice is quiet and completely honest. "But what can I do about it, Raven? Hope is a dangerous thing out here. It ruins your instincts and clouds your judgement. I can't start hoping we get out of this when we both know how impossible that is unless some rogue family stumbles across us which you know won't happen or will likely happen if the moon goddess smiles upon us."

He exhales. "What I can hope for is surviving the winter. To hope for you not getting sick and losing the baby."

He looks at me. "Right now you and this baby are my only hope. That's all I have room for."

My throat tightens. I swallow it down, lean into him and kiss him, his cheek first and then the corner of his mouth and then his lips properly.

When I pull back he says, "I know you miss your father. And Theodore. And everyone." He draws the blanket up around my shoulders. "But your main priority right now is that pup you're carrying. Everything else can wait."

He kisses my forehead. "Get some sleep, baby."

I close my eyes, the fire crackles and the forest settles into its nighttime sounds.

I feel myself going under.

A noise wakes me in the grey before dawn.

I lie still. My hand finds my stomach automatically as I listen.

The forest is quiet. Wrong kind of quiet. Not the empty quiet of deep morning. The held-breath quiet of something waiting.

I reach for Darius's arm.

He is already awake. Already completely still beside me, his eyes fixed on the tree line through the open door, every muscle locked.

He says, very quietly, without moving a single inch, "Don't make a sound. I think we have intruders.”