My Meritxell, they say I can go home at the end of the month, teleported back to you just like how I was taken away.  They say they'll find some other fool from the same place to go instead of me and I reckon that if they keep trying at it long enough sooner or later they'll have all people who want gold more than home.

I haven't got any answer to my last letter yet so I do not know how you and the babies are faring.  Perhaps you have not even got the letter yet since it will not be teleported.  Perhaps it was lost.  Perhaps it arrived and then Gemma has got hold of it and chewed it to pieces.  I had a nightmare she'd taken ill, say it isn't so.

I have gotten to be almost used to voting on things.  It never matters, because it's never so narrow that my going the other way would have changed anything.  When I am home it will all go on as before, and I cannot imagine that all the other fellows who would sooner be home agree with me enough that we might matter all together.  It will all come out the same after a good shake.  But there is something sort of nice about putting a cross or a circle or a line across a ballot and seeing it counted.  I try to think what you might suggest because you're cunning enough and I know you well enough that I can imagine you saying clever things and try to piece together what they would have meant, in my head.  I am not so good at it.

Since the announcement that we could go home I have had the terrible fear that they will send me back to you and then turn straight around and kidnap you away instead for Erastus.  Like in a fable it would turn out they never meant it as a kindness at all, only a trick.  You would have to bring Mar along, for I can't feed her, so I would get only an hour to kiss her sweet head.  And Gemma I could look after, I think, but surely she would miss you more than she could ever miss me.  And too everyone in the village would have to go to the Lady's castle to ask her wizard for laundry, and be turned away if the necromancer did not think that this was as interesting a way to pass his time as is flensing dead horses and raising their skeletons with neither stomachs nor sense remaining to them.  It would probably not be you they sortitioned, I think, only I do not know how they decide.

I'd ask you to come to Westcrown if only that could make any sense.  But it is too long a trip going without the archmages insisting, not safe for the babies at all nor probably for you.  You would not like living in the stable where I've been keeping at all, so we would have to find a house, and there are not enough of those to go around and it would eat up well half of the money I think.  The city is chock full of wizards and there would be little work for you, which I do not know if you should enjoy at all or not, though the stipend would keep us all right in bread and in tiny little dresses each time Gemma outgrows one.  Too, it is close and ugly and smelly here and I do not think you have enough lavender sachets.

If only there were not all these problems then perhaps it would make sense to ask you here, and stay on.  If it were only impossible for them to take you in my place I would come home to you on the first of Erastus with kisses and presents and savings enough to have a real wedding.  But I don't know the way to if-only-land, Meritxell.

What should I do?  Tell me you miss me, I don't know if I can bear it if you've decided to be through with me while I've been away, if you've decided to take the gold the bank will give you and forget about your Lluc.  I miss you like air.  I can bear it for you if that's the clever thing that you'd tell me to do, if you mean it like I am a sailor on a long voyage who you'll want back in your arms and in your bed and getting another sweet baby by you as soon as the voyage is over.  I can come home to be with you again if you can tell about maths that mean there's no danger the archmage would whisk you away in picking a new sortition from our region, and the gold is enough to get on with already, and there is no reason to stay.  I'm all jumbled up and you're so much smarter than me.

- Lluc