“We should be husband and wife outwardly, if I am going to live with you. It will be easier for me, at least, if the townsfolk don't think I'm living in sin, and for the human child. Perhaps even the lindworm son, if I can figure out how to modify the spell I used to give you a human form to give him one as well.”
“If you think it's necessary, then I have no objection.” He shrugged.
Wilhelmina's mind began to race. “It should be soon. With twins, and since this isn't my first child, what people might initially dismiss as nothing will very soon be obviously something. Ooh, tongues will be wagging.” She chuckled, imagining peoples' expressions.
It wasn't exactly a romantic proposal; certainly nothing at all like her first, but this was to be...for all practical purposes, a marriage of convenience and nothing more. She hadn't imagined he would come up with the idea of living together himself, and hadn't planned on pressing him. If she had to leave Brig after the children were born due to the scandal and take the human child to raise somewhere else, then that was what she what she would have done. It was a relief to know that would not be necessary. Moving to the isolated cottage was tame comparing to uprooting again with an infant in tow.
“We should see the priest today, and get all of that sorted out as soon as possible. The sooner it’s over, the sooner we don’t have to think about it,” she said. She cleaned her knife and put away the herbs she had chopped into the sealed jars she had gotten out earlier for the purpose.
“Very well,” he said. “If you think it is necessary to be done sooner rather than later, I will not argue. But first—”
He knelt down, took her by the hips, and turned her very gently away from the table. Frowning, she let him, and then smiled when he put an ear to her belly as if listening. “You won’t be able to hear or feel anything yet, not for some time. It’s only been a few days since I swallowed the petals.”
“You can hardly blame me for being eager.”
“All in good time. I daresay we’ll get our fill of hearing from them before all of this is over. And that’s before they’re born. I’ve tended enough twin pregnancies over the years to have a pretty good idea of what I’m in for.”
“You say that as if that means something unpleasant.”
“It very often does.” She couldn’t help a small grimace.
“Then I will see you through it.”
She almost laughed at the confidence in his voice. We’ll see, she thought. That confidence may yet be tested.
The priest was surprised but willing to perform a private wedding ceremony in a few weeks, and in the meantime Herr Lindworm redoubled his efforts on the cottage. Wilhelmina went up to visit him once or twice and the progress he was making was nothing short of remarkable. His extraordinary size and strength even as a human certainly came in handy.
The day of the wedding was gray and cloudy, and so misty the peaks surrounding the town could not be seen. Wilhelmina dressed in her best dress and did her hair with care, deciding for once to do it in one long braid down her back rather than two pinned to her head. She twined fresh summer flowers into the braid, bright colors that stood out and drew attention to how much rich brown there still was in her hair in amongst the strands of gray. She did notice as she brushed it out that her hair was darker near the roots again, as if the pregnancy were giving her some little measure of her youth back. She’d need it.
The priest had asked three of the church fathers to stand as witnesses, but other than their small party of six the church was deserted. Signore Lynd did not compliment her on her appearance as might be expected of a doting groom, but he did smile and kiss her forehead. The kiss felt almost brotherly compared to their shocking, spontaneous first kiss, but it apparently satisfied the priest because he started the ceremony forthwith.
A few vows later, they were husband and wife.
Herr Lindworm had decided to take the full name of Markus Lynd—they thought that sounded plausible for someone who looked like a Viking of old, and he said that according to the stories passed down to him by his father their ancestors had come from Scandinavia.
Wilhelmina remained living in her flat afterwards, while Signore Lynd stayed in the mountains and continued to work on the cottage, coming back to town once or twice a week at most. She had difficulty remembering to answer when someone called her by her new name rather than her old, but she supposed eventually it would become natural. She couldn’t help recalling ruefully how easily she’d once slid into being Frau Beck.
The first signs of her condition were subtle. For the most part she felt no different, though she noticed through glimpses in the mirror that she appeared to soften. Just a little here, a little there. A bit of weight under the chin, and some of the finest wrinkles on her face smoothed out. As she had expected, she also grew curvier, filling out as all expectant mothers do as their body prepares to nurture a child.
And then, as if that had been the calm before the storm, the dam broke and the idyllic period of waiting for something to happen was over. She was sick, for so long the days and nights blurred together. In her few lucid moments she tried to remind herself that she had seen this kind of blind sickness in mothers whose pregnancies eventually bore twins—and once triplets. Her clearest memories of that miserable month were of being fed broth and teas of her own blending, laid by in those first few nervous weeks when some inner sense told her this was not going to be an easy test. Even smelling food being cooked next door would send her clutching for a basin.
The hand that fed her and wiped her brow, over and over and over again, was large and infinitely gentle.
And then, abruptly, the period of sickness was over. It was on that same day, or perhaps the day after, that in reflexively brushing her hands down her front she first felt the swell of her womb just beginning to push outward from beneath her navel. She sucked in her breath, trying to flatten her belly, to make certain she wasn’t imaging things. It stayed ever so slightly round no matter how she tucked or twisted.
She sat down hard in a chair, hands pressed on the bump. If the period of constantly being sick to her stomach could perhaps be passed off as something else, now there was no pretending this was not her strange new reality. She had swallowed two edelweiss petals three months ago, and was now inescapably, unavoidably pregnant. This was no magic she knew, but it was clearly just as potent.
“My mother should have named me Maria,” she grumbled under her breath. “It would have been far more suitable to the way my life has turned out than Wilhelmina.”
She forced herself to stand, and continue about her day. She even managed not to touch the front of her dress for the rest of the day.
Not long afterwards, the cottage was finally ready for a human inhabitant. There was still much to be done, but it was livable, with a snug roof, sturdy door, and thick panes of glass in the windows. The fireplace alone was twice the size of the one in Wilhelmina’s old flat.
They hired a few older boys from town to help carry loads of Wilhelmina’s things from old house to new, including Hans, the boy whose foot she had fixed early in the spring. His younger cousin Karl had gone up to live with the sheep full-time for the summer and autumn. Hans would be there too but for his injury, which was healed enough that he could do most things but the doctor thought it best if he not test it against the mountain heights quite yet. He was happy to earn extra coins hauling crates of dried herbs outside town for a few days.
It was almost evening by the time the furniture was arranged just so on the last day. Wilhelmina settled into a chair by the fire, hands on the subtle curve of her belly, and—Herr Lindworm? Signore Lynd? Markus? she wasn’t certain how she thought of him now—sat across from her and stretched out his long legs onto the hearth. She was about to follow his example when she felt a slight tickle inside.
She remembered this feeling from her pregnancy with Karl, and she had been about this far along when she first felt him stir. She sat up straighter and closed her eyes.
; “What is it?” asked Herr Lindworm.
“Maybe nothing.” She didn’t feel it again, and she relaxed and opened her eyes, only to experience another flutter that was not her own. She smiled, and glanced down. “The…the children are moving.”
In a flash he was kneeling beside her chair, reaching to replace her hands with his. “I think it’s still too early to feel anything from the outside yet,” she warned him, but she allowed him to caress her belly nonetheless. The warmth in his big hands, one of which alone nearly covered the small bulge, was soothing. It set her belly to fluttering in a way that made her unsure where the children’s reactions to his presence ended and her own nerves began. Then, as he had done when she had first told him she carried his child, he put an ear to her stomach between his two hands and listened intently.
“No, you are right, I hear nothing, and feel nothing,” he admitted, sounding so crestfallen that without thinking she reached forward and ran a gentle hand through a lock of his long hair. He went rigid, and looked up at her sharply. She withdrew her hand and curled it against her chest.
“You have never done that before when I was in this form,” he said. She realized with a start that he was right. She stroked him sometimes when he was a lindworm in deliberately affectionate gestures, but she avoided touching him as a human aside from perfunctory things like taps on a shoulder to get his attention. Touching him as a human man felt too intimate. Too indicative of something they didn’t have.
“I won’t, if you don’t like it,” she whispered, half-hoping he would say that yes, it did bother him.
“No,” he said. “It feels…pleasant. You may, if you like. Sometimes. I am still getting used to this business of having hair.”
Tentatively, she reached forward again, this time with both hands, and ran them into his hair at the temples. She was somewhat gratified to find a few threads of gray there, hidden amidst the blond. Her own hair now sported several inches of darker brown and it grew out more every day, defying the gray in an almost magical way, but his age was much more difficult to determine at a glance. He sucked in his breath a little through his nose, and his eyes half-closed in pleasure.
She ran her fingernails over his scalp a few more times before withdrawing again. His eyes popped open, and they stared at one another for a breathless moment. Then he pulled back his hands, which during this entire interlude had been spanning her madly fluttering belly, and slid back into his own seat.
Wilhelmina struggled with a lingering sense of disappointment, though what she had been wanting him to do she couldn’t quite pinpoint. She went to bed soon after, and he disappeared outside where a crack of out-rushing air and the thump of heavy footsteps proclaimed he had changed and headed off into the trees, probably to go hunting.
It seemed she grew a little every day after that, just subtle enough that she felt if she looked down she might catch her midsection expanding like a slowly inflating balloon, but could never quite manage it. There were several mornings where she regretted not using her tape measure on herself right before going to bed because she would swear she had gained a quarter inch of girth overnight. Just hauling herself to standing each morning required an increasing effort of will, though otherwise she felt quite well once she got going. The illness of the first few months had vanished as if it had never been, and any weight she’d lost in the process was gained back by the time she had moved into the mountain cottage.
She had wondered at the outset if, once her unnatural pregnancy became an inescapable fact whenever she glanced down, she might feel some internal shudder of horror at knowing that one of the babies inside her was a lizard and not a normal human infant. In fact, the opposite seemed to occur. As the sensation of movement within gained strength, she found herself more inclined to curl up around her belly, arms and legs wrapping protectively. She even hissed, lizard-like at Signore Lynd one night when he startled her after she had fallen asleep in her chair in this position and he went to wake her.
He jerked back. She flushed red and went to apologize, but then he laughed, a big, deep booming sound that had her smiling in an instant and even caused the babies to stir.
“It is good to know there is some lindworm fierceness in there after all,” he said. “I take it as an excellent sign my son is alive and well.” Then he swept her up in his arms and deposited her on the bed as if she weighed nothing at all. He kissed her forehead, and then placed his hands on her belly. A kick was his reward, and he grinned with delight before slipping outside.
Chapter 15
Autumn 1920-Winter 1921. Brig, Switzerland
Wilhelmina had worried long and hard about what to do about getting someone to attend the birth. She didn’t remember giving birth to Karl, though she knew it was only due to Frau Heller’s expertise that either of them had survived the double trauma of Allen’s death and the early onset of labor. The idea of giving birth alone in any circumstance was terrifying, but giving birth to these children exponentially moreso. Signore Lynd would be willing, if he were around when her time came and not miles away hunting, but she wasn’t sure she could talk him through anything that needed to be done beyond “catch.”
But who could be trusted to attend such a birth, guaranteed as it was to be frightening even to an experienced midwife?
Unless that midwife were also a hedgewitch, and knew the whole story. Frau Heller was no longer alive, but Wilhelmina knew a few others—those same women to whom she had written initially. One, in particular, came to mind, though getting her to agree might be difficult. Wilhelmina was on decent enough terms with the hedgewitch herself. The hedgewitch’s lord husband, on the other hand, might prove recalcitrant. Wilhelmina had not precisely endeared herself to him.
Still, it would cost nothing but a few pennies for postage to ask. Wilhelmina was not proud of the eventual pleading tone of her letter, but it certainly expressed the depth of her desperation.
She wrapped up, as the first snowfall was due any time, and set off for the walk to town to mail the letter. It would be the first time in several weeks she had ventured down the mountain, having stocked up on necessities at the time of their move. The cottage itself was by its very nature designed to be self-sufficient, and she had taken the opportunity before it was even livable to plant a garden with edibles that would produce before winter. Canning, jarring, preserving, and growing two infants were the chief occupiers of her time at the moment.
As a result, most of the townsfolk hadn’t seen her since it had been possible for an outsider to think she might just have put on some weight, albeit more in the front than anywhere else. Now, she was inescapably with child. Her belly went before her like a prow, and no amount of wrapping or concealment could hide it any longer. The walk to town took twice as long as it once had, since she went slowly to make certain she would not lose her balance on the steep path.
Wilhelmina proudly ignored the stares as she made her way through the familiar streets. Her gaze became slightly more fixed when she saw some people crossing themselves when they thought she wasn’t looking, but she didn’t glance at them or respond. She should have realized that despite all the advantages to the townspeople thinking she was older than she was, in this case it meant they would think there was something unnatural going on.
Weighing her energy level, she decided a slight detour was in order. The last thing she or her husband or children needed were people saying there was something supernatural about her pregnancy, and holding their family in suspicion ever after. Therefore she made her way to the church and asked loudly at the door to see the priest about arranging a christening.
Within a few minutes the priest ushered her inside and bade her sit in a comfortable chair. He guided her down with his own hands. “I see now why you wanted a wedding on such short notice, my child,” he said gently, patting her hand. “I am glad to see that Signore Lynd chose to do the honorable thing. I hope you are not too lonely, out there on the mountain, as his wife.”
“Not too lon
ely, thank you, Father. And soon I will have quite enough company.” She stroked her bulging belly to make the point.
“Yes, of course. And you will want the child christened, as is proper. When do you expect the happy event, or are you unsure?”
“February or March.”
His eyebrows rose. He peered at her over rounded spectacles. “Forgive my impertinence, but you seem to be…”
“Further along? Yes, I do seem to have grown quite stout of late.” She glanced down and laughed, as if just noticing that even though she claimed to be only five months, her size indicated she might be further. She managed a small laugh. “But I am quite sure of the date of conception. Perhaps I…have been merely, well, overindulging of late. I have given in to my cravings rather more than I should.” She let her cheeks flush a little at this supposed confidence.
He didn’t need to know that for at least a month her most consistent longing had been for nearly-raw meat, and that her several-ton lizard husband was only too happy to share his kills.
“Ah.” The priest flushed himself, embarrassed at indulging his own curiosity a bit too far. “Perhaps it isn’t surprising, given that your husband is...”
“Well-proportioned,” she finished for him, giving him a grin that just bordered on mischievous.
“Yes. Indeed. And you certainly appear to be in…good health. Well, you know better than anyone how to look after yourself in this delicate state. I hear nothing but good reports from the mothers you’ve helped. I shall make a note in my records that you will want a christening in March, or perhaps April, though don’t hesitate to send me a message if it does turn out to be sooner.” His hastily-suppressed look said he thought it likely.
“Thank you, Father.” She rose to go, making a point to do so on her own lest he worry too much about her getting back to the cottage, and departed on her original errand to the post office.
The Dragon & the Alpine Star Page 14
