Lili comes closer

Lili crept into bed as gently as her enormous belly allowed. She had come up to take the afternoon nap that had become a necessity for her if she was not to fall asleep in her plate at supper later, but she had not been expecting to find Egelric in the bed. She had not even known he was home.

She froze and even held her breath as he stirred slightly, but in the end he only rolled over onto his side and continued his snoring, though softly now.

She was grateful to find him here. He had stopped searching at night, but he still slept little. He tried to sleep, but often he would lie only a short while in bed, awake and torturing himself with thoughts of everything he had ever done to hurt his daughter. Then he would get up again, claiming that it was better to work or eat or trim his beard or do anything besides lying here and thinking.

She longed to touch him now. He had seemed so very alone this past week.

But he had always seemed a solitary man to her, even when surrounded by his friends. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him. She was a girl who liked to learn and know and get to the heart of things, and she had an idea that a lifetime would not be enough to get to know this inscrutable being. It had seemed to her that this was the sort of man she ought to marry, but she had come to fear that a lifetime would not be enough to get to the heart of him. And that was all she wanted now.

She longed to touch him, but she did not dare. She did not want him to wake, because one couldn’t know when he would be able to sleep again. But there was also her great guilt holding her back. She knew that his daughter had run away because of her.

Even his dismay at learning she blamed herself had been a further reproach to her. He told her it was all his fault—if Iylaine was so jealous of him now, it was only because she had never had as much of him as she had needed while she was growing up. It was not Lili, he said, who was coming between them now. It was twelve years of unsatisfied longing for her father, who had been so often absent, and so often hard and sarcastic when he was home.

But that did not change the fact that Iylaine had run away because she could not bear to be around Lili. Egelric might claim that he did not blame her, but she knew that he would never forget that Iylaine would not have run away if Lili had not tricked him into marrying her last winter.

Perhaps, if Lili had never come, he would even have married the woman Gunnilda. She had been told that Gunnilda had always been a sort of mother to Iylaine. Perhaps the girl reproached her this as well.

She dared not touch him, and so it was the slight rustle she made when adjusting her pillow that woke him.

“Lili?” he asked as plaintively as a frightened child, and he turned his profile to her.

“I’m here.”

“Are you coming or going?”

“Coming.”

“Come closer.”

Lili crept a little closer to him, though it was an awkward business pushing her belly along in front of her.

“Closer.”

She squirmed close enough that she could lay a hand on his side.

“Closer,” he repeated.

At any other time she would have laughed. It was beginning to sound like a game, and one could never tell when he was joking. But his voice was more than grave, and she knew his heart was broken. She pushed her belly along until it came up against his back.

“Closer.”

Now she could not help but laugh. “I can’t get closer with the baby in the way.”

“Try.”

She could not move her belly any closer, but she could curl herself around it by clinging to his shoulder and curling herself around him. She pressed her cheek against the back of his neck for a moment, and then pulled her head away far enough that she could breathe the odor of his hair. It was warm, as though the sun had been shining on it, though she knew it was only the warmth of his own head.

Now he said nothing, and so after a while she dared ask, “Close enough?”

He reached up to take hold of her wrist and brought her arm down across his chest. “It will have to do,” he sighed.