Meritxell doesn't send him any letters.  The whole time he's there he gets one or two out a week, for her, and he makes sure she knows where he's keeping, and then he thinks maybe the landlady is stealing them or losing them, and then he thinks something's happened to Meritxell, that she can't use her hands to write back - only then she couldn't cast spells either, and she'd be drawing down the account, and she isn't.  That she's left him only without the inconvenience of having to tell him so.  Only then she could have drawn down the account, too.  The bank says nobody's touched it, confirms that she can any time she wants.

He wonders if she's dead.  Then she wouldn't be drawing it down at all.

By the time he wonders this, if that were the explanation little Gemma would have already surely starved without her.  Meritxell doesn't have any family in the village who even might think about taking her.  He can't think of a good way to tell the bank that if someone presents themselves in care of his Gemma they should get enough money to do it till he's home again.  It's not like the bank has the least idea how to tell Gemma from any other toddler her age.  He can leave whenever he wants, but if Meritxell didn't answer his letters because she was dead then Gemma's already -

He writes to his aunt, who is ancient and dreadful but probably not dead.  His aunt doesn't answer, probably because Lluc couldn't think of a good way to cover postage back without letting her take the money to use on something else instead.  He tries Meritxell's nearest neighbor, the one who makes the awful beer, and he doesn't get a reply from her, either, though that might be because the convention ends before even a prompt reply would have turned around.

He gets teleported home in a state of complete dread.

His letters are all right there in the mailbox he made her, unopened, seals still on, starting to stick out there's so many of them.  She's never even taken them inside.  Where is she -
"Meritxell!" he calls out in a voice more suited for a burning building than this shabby, still cottage.

Meritxell doesn't answer, but Gemma does.  Gemma, rosy-cheeked and completely fine, clearly still living here and well taken care of, comes around from where she was harassing the ducks, and runs right up to him and holds up her arms.

"There you are!" he says, pasting on a smile for his daughter.  The letters aren't opened but it's not like she burned them, there'll be some explanation, there'll be -

- a little cairn of stones under the olive tree -


Meritxell's inside.  She's got her spindle - she hates spinning, she'd rather read a book for the fiftieth time than -

Meritxell's not pregnant any more.  Obviously.  She wasn't supposed to be.

"Where's Mar," says Lluc, and she looks at him and he knows the answer without her having to say it.  Mar's under the olive tree.  He doesn't know if it happened the minute she was born or if she lingered a few days but Mar's under the olive tree.  He doesn't know if it was a girl like they were expecting or if Meritxell was wrong and Mar was a Marcel after all but Mar's under the olive tree.

Lluc, still with Gemma clinging to his neck, goes back out.  The teleporter is waiting politely; even a great and powerful archmage who can kidnap all the Llucs one might possibly want can't do it a hundred times in a day, so they might as well wait a little, the way they gave him an hour to say goodbye and to pack, the time they took him away.

"You tell Arch-healer Naima," he says, "that I know she raised some delegates' families on account of how inconvenienced we were.  You tell her my baby's dead and I wasn't here and I -"  He can't really cry, he hasn't had the knack of it since he was eleven or so, but he can choke.  "You tell her my baby's in the ground and I can dig her up and bring her wherever's most convenient for the Arch-healer if she hasn't got the time to make a house call.  You got that?"

He gets a sigh and a nod and a vanishment, and he carries Gemma back inside in one arm, and all his letters in a mess of a bundle in the other arm.


The unopened letters make sense.  She couldn't tell him; she couldn't not tell him; she did neither thing as emphatically as possible, while she was healing (they still haven't got a priest out here, and she never got Infernal Healing in her spellbook to begin with) and digging and doing everyone's laundry and nursing Gemma with the tremendous gouts of milk that ought to have been Mar's and Scrivening off fresh copies of Pharasma and Erastil's books and feeding the ducks and obsessively Prestidigitating every surface in the house.  The fireplace looks like nothing's ever burned in it before.  The floor squeaks indignantly under shoes.  She's made a whole sweater's worth of terrible slubby yarn and stripped all the lanolin out of it because she's allergic.  He doesn't find any evidence that she's eaten a single thing besides barley with duck eggs and and olives since Mar was born, as to make much else she'd have needed to shop, though perhaps she was making it taste like a thousand different dishes.

Lluc puts all the letters in order by their dates and sets them on Meritxell's bookshelf between the romance novels and the natural history.  She can read them later, when they know for sure.

The Arch-healer sends a letter.  On thus and such a date, in the middle of the night for archmage reasons of some kind, she means to drop by and have a try at it.  It says she got an Augury from a Pharasmin because raising a stillbirth won't always work.  Lluc has some vestige of an instinct that this is really a lot of importance to assign a random peasant baby, but - shouldn't it be, though.  Shouldn't Mar be the most important baby in the entire world?  So he writes back in case they're expecting a response that that'll be fine.  Most days Meritxell doesn't need to prepare anything new anyway, if Mar comes back ravenous and wants her right then.  He can have the grave dug up that night.

Gemma tries to help dig but he doesn't let her.

He's up all night.  Meritxell goes to bed early just in case she can have a full eight hours after all, and he's on call if Gemma's got a nightmare or wants a drink of water in the night.  (They don't have a priest.  Meritxell had to haul all the way to and from the well, even nine months pregnant, even when she wasn't healed yet after delivering, every day he was gone.  He's gotten perhaps a little overaggressive about bringing in water before they need it now he's back.)

It's pitch dark, with a new moon and wispy autumn clouds, but the Arch-healer arrives with her own light, and Lluc hauls the little coffin which may have been a cut-down packing crate out of the dirt and pries it open, holding his breath against the smell of death.

The Arch-healer has probably held lots of dead babies.  She takes Mar in her gloved hands, her face eerie with the shadows her light throws on her face, and lays a hand on the baby.

Mar comes back howling and gasping for air and Lluc had probably originally intended to thank the Archmage or something but instead he just scoops her up against his chest and brings her in to Meritxell to feed.


The wedding's in the winter.  Meritxell turns the snow a thousand colors by way of decoration and his horrible old aunt comes and they swap their vows each holding one of the girls, who are bundled up into shapeless lumps in their layers of uneven slubby wool.