"...probably. Maybe more than that, if we keep wanting them once we're older than twenty, which we might what with not getting any grandkids."

"Maybe yours will think swiping babies from creches is a great idea and they should take it up."

"I suppose they might! At least a couple of them! But it may just be that every single Amentan wants kids more than any human, even humans raised with families, and it wouldn't do to pressure them."

Nod.

"You are very tolerant of our bizarre obsession."

"People are allowed to have bizarre obsessions."

"And a good thing!"

Kalatha is still small and snuggly and is very snuggled.

Shasali has her calling her Mama.

And why shouldn't she. (It does make him feel mildly strange about teaching her variants on Dada for him, but only mildly. He has cut down the showers to one a day.)

Kalatha will obligingly call him Dada and doesn't have any reason to think it's strange that instead of kissing Mama he kisses Kib.

Sometimes a family is a displaced aristocrat and a suspected murderer and their respective boyfriends and the baby they found naked on a hilltop.

(He checks baby numbers with the goatherds and farmers, again.)

Maybe up, down in one place, could be noise.

One night Kib starts screaming in his sleep.

- alarmed boyfriend shakes him awake.

"Hi."

"Are you okay? What happened?"

"Bad dream. I'm all right." He shakes his head.

"Bad dream - people don't usually scream themselves hoarse over bad dreams -"

"A really, really bad dream. I have weirdly vivid dreams and this one was bad."

Hug. "Sounded it. Should I have woken you up - you probably woke the neighbors -"

"Well, I don't want to wake the neighbors. Hopefully it doesn't just pick up where it left off in Recurring Dream Character Dying Of The Pox."

" - do your dreams often do that, pick up where they left off? Is the pox a real thing?"

"They don't and it used to be, there's a vaccine now."

"Huh. Okay."

"Usually it's just Dream Character's childhood all out of order."