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came at their appointed time, I knew despair.
    Again I sought my mother. She folded her lips tight and shook her head at my foolishness. “Well, what can you do but try again? If Eda favors you, then you may still get a lusty babe that will come early, or perhaps your lady may carry hers past term. But you had best be about it, and not be too fussy. What sort of a simpleton did I give birth to, a woman who cannot coax a man to settle between her legs?”
    Her words stung, but it was advice I heeded. Before the next moon turned, I felt morning sickness. Being rid of Copper was no problem: at a hint that I might carry his child, his master whisked him off to Bearns Duchy for the winter, and I was glad to be shed of him. I did not at first tell my mistress what I had done. When the nights grew cold, and her worries pressed her, she still sometimes called me to her bed, not to take pleasure of me, but to lean her head on my shoulder and natter on about her secret love and how sorely she missed him.
    Sometimes she spoke longingly of her lost freedom to take out the Spotted Stud on a long gallop and return in a leisurely fashion. Even then, she believed that I was ignorant of who her lover was. Such a fool she thought me! And so, not unknowingly of how it pricked me, she taunted me with hints of him, of the smoothness of the skin on his back, or the softness of his mouth when he kissed her. She spoke, too, of a hundred different plans for eluding her draconian chaperone, to slip away to be with her lover. Her plans were wild and foolish, yet when she hammered at me to agree to help her, what could I do but promise to aid her? Time after time she tried to set them in motion, and time after time I managed to delay her. She was growing both impatient and angry with me, and daily I feared she would attempt an escape that would end in disaster for us all. Her longing for him cut me deeper than she knew. And so, on the night that she first divined that I, too, was with child, I suddenly discerned a way to perhaps break her bond with the Chalcedean stableman and put an end to her plans for escape.
    We were in bed together, cuddled close for warmth. Outside the shuttered windows of her bedchamber, a snowstorm was blowing fiercely. The wind whistled past the shutters and the flames of the hearth fire danced to their tune. Occasionally a blast struck with enough fury to send a ripple through the tapestries that lined the cold stone walls of the room. “Hold me, Felicity! The night is so chill,” she whispered to me, and I was glad to comply. But she turned her face away from mine, exclaiming, “Your breath is foul with vomit! Are you ill?”
    I shook my head and decided that night I would share my secret. “Only as ill as you are, my lady. The babe that grows inside me roils my belly.”
    “You?” She sat up in astonishment, letting the cold air of the room rush into our shared bed. “You with child?” She laughed aloud, but it was not a joyous sound. Her incredulous manner mocked me. “By whom?” she demanded, her mouth full of cold smiles. “What boy or gaffer did you waylay in a dark stairwell?”
    I am not a beauty, nor even pretty. It is kind to say that I am plain. I am crook-toothed and thin-shanked and pock-faced. I know that the kitchen lads call me ‘Pig Eyes.’ I cannot explain then why her mockery cut me so deep, save that she had never before spoken me so. Sometimes I look back and wonder, did she feel I had betrayed her? Had she secretly wished that my heart would always be hers and hers alone? Why else whet her tongue against me?
    But I had been schooled to my place in her world for every day of my life. So even at that moment, no angry retort passed my lips. My plan to save her, and myself, sprang full-formed to my mind at that moment. So I only smiled, showing my crooked teeth and said, “Perhaps the Stablemaster is not as keen of sight as others, for he did not seem to find me uncomely when he took me to warm