Nod.

 "You doing OK?"

"Yeah, everything's - good. I wasn't expecting it to work out so fast. That's great."

"Yeah.

"It's kind of - I know it's weird. The - we have this weird not-relationship where I like you and am possibly carrying a child with half your DNA, which we are going to murder, and we spent all this time being, like, more OK with each other, and now we might not need it as much as we thought we did, but it's still, like, a thing, and - I don't really know how people are supposed to feel about situations like this, and am honestly not super sure that there have ever really been super comparable situations... maybe ever? So it's - weird."

"...yeah. I kind of ...figured you didn't want to hang out. More than we had to. Since that's, uh, what you've been doing."

"Well I was kind of - I mean I had to think about stuff, and - 

" - I maaaay have accidentally let the private thoughts thing down when we were having sex and accidentally let everyone hear us and now be secluding myself in my room because I don't wanna wonder if people are staring."

This is... not false. It is not the whole truth but it is nothing but the truth, so she should get, like, half a point.

"Oh. Uh, they're not, for what it's worth, they've pretty much left me alone."

"Oh. That's cool. Good for them. Maybe I will someday return from my exile."

"I guess you probably shouldn't be building houses anyway, to be safe."

"It's - probably not a big deal right now? I'm not really sure. If I were home I would get a bunch of books and figure out what I should be doing, but we're, uh, not."

"Yeah."

It takes; she skips another period and starts experiencing low-grade nausea and random aches and the occasional pressing need to vomit. She tries building houses and then stops because the nausea kind of makes her want to do things that are not building houses. She informs Alex multiple times that she read somewhere that like a third of women died in childbirth in ancient Rome, and also that this number is twice what was seen outside of massive urban centers and that it reflects several live births per woman, so probably even in really terrible environments the risk of death per birth wasn't more than like two percent. She hides in her room a lot, and hides more when she thinks people can probably tell what's happening to her by looking. She tells stories, out loud, constantly, like she's trying to cram a whole lifetime of bedtime stories into this tiny tiny person who can't in the least understand them right now. 

She stares out of her window and watches the days pass.

We should test whether magic is working as it should in this timeline. We should be certain that there aren't any weird irregularities before we go attempting to trap gods in newborn babies.

...Shouldn't you have tested this before there was a tiny person inside me?

I'm not actually worried about it, you just seem like you could use something plausibly useful to do.

Fine. How do we test it.

He walks her through various tests to determine whether objects have their normal mystical properties in this time period. They seem to. Eventually he teaches her the focusing patterns and incantations needed to get simple results just by applying her own reserves of magical energy. They're fairly minuscule, and Wishbone doesn't want to get anywhere close to her limits anyway, because drawing heavily on your own life force during pregnancy is pretty hazardous, but eventually he confirms that everything seems to be working as it should. He tells her that she should be able to practice floating her paper Stratego pieces as long as she doesn't do it for more than a few minutes a day right now.

He gives Alex a list of ingredients that should be collected well in advance of the ritual itself.

They will get to work on that.

Then there's nothing to do but cautiously float Stratego pieces and wait for Excruciating Pain 2: The Remix.

You guys got anything in the way of anesthetic?

Yeah, there's songs. My understanding is that it's not wise to knock you out? Since then you can't push?

Yeah, can't really expect newborns to crawl out on their own. Also you're apparently gonna need me awake for the ritual, Wishbone says the mother has to cast it, and it has to be completed the same day. I suspect that certain gods are still wandering around because none of the women who've tried this have ended up having the stamina. Yours truly, on the other hand, is known to be excessively gifted in this department, so I think we'll probably be OK. Unless I die, in which case, uh, remember me well and take good care of Ender Kirk Teller.

He's a boy?

Nah. I mean, he could be. But I couldn't think of any equally badass-and-fitting-yet-embarrassingly-obviously-chosen-by-a-seventeen-year-old-nerd names for girls, and technically not only are these names not gendered yet in this timeline, the language they come from literally hasn't developed yet. - or, languages, I think Kirk is technically the German word for church. Anyway. Not giving a girl a worse name just because I can't think of a cool one, and also names can change gender over time, and also I can do what I want.

All right. Ender Kirk Teller. 

Yeah.

I think a piece of me kind of wants to die. It - wouldn't be better, for anyone, not even for Ender, so I'm not gonna listen to it, but - it's there.