Here was his own street. Here was his own block. Here was his block of flats, a dingy building in a bad part of town. He and Vanai had stayed here ever since coming to Eoforwic from Gromheort and her village of Oyngestun in the east.

He went up the stairs into the cramped, dark lobby. He paused there, at the brass bank of post boxes, to see if anyone had sent him a letter. His family back in Gromheort knew where he lived. He didn’t think Vanai had any living family, not any more.

She has me, he thought, and hurried up the stairs to his flat. The narrow stairway had a familiar reek: stale cabbage and stale piss. Sometimes it disgusted him. But he’d lived here long enough that sometimes, as tonight, it just felt homey.

Back when he and Vanai first moved in, before she’d crafted the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian, she’d stayed holed up in the flat all the time, like a trapped animal. They’d worked out a coded knock, to let her know it was safe to unbar the door and let him in. He still used it, more from habit than from any other reason.

He knocked and waited. When Vanai didn’t come to the door, he knocked again, louder this time. She fell asleep a lot more easily than she had before she got pregnant.

When she still didn’t come, he knocked once more, louder still. He frowned and took from his belt pouch the long brass key that could work the latch from the outside. If the door was barred, of course, working the latch wouldn’t matter one way or the other. He turned the key and pushed at the door, not expecting to be able to get in. But it swung open.

“Van-?” he began, but checked himself. He tried again, calling, “Thelberge? Are you there, sweetheart?”

No answer. The flat was quiet and dark, no lamps lit, as if nobody’d been inside since well before the sun went down. Fighting back alarm, Ealstan hurried into the bedchamber. Vanai wasn’t lying there sound asleep. She wasn’t sitting on the pot, which she also needed to do more than she had before quickening.