Elsbeth's labor began on a warm evening in early summer, exactly when Aldith had predicted, and it was Diccon's frantic, breathless arrival at the tally-bench — nearly knocking over a full inkwell in his haste — that first announced it to the rest of the valley.
"She says it's time," he said, white-faced and trembling in a way Thomas hadn't seen from him since the boy had first stood nervously in the undercroft doorway asking how to propose marriage. "Aldith's with her now. She told me to make myself useful somewhere else, which I don't — I don't know how to be useful anywhere else right now, Thomas. I don't know how to do anything except stand outside that door and worry."
"Then come stand outside it with me," Thomas said, understanding, from his own long year of quiet dread, exactly how little comfort there was in being told to simply wait somewhere calmer. "I don't imagine either of us will manage to be properly useful tonight. I imagine we'll just be there, which is sometimes the whole of what a person actually needs."
They kept vigil together outside the small house Diccon and Elsbeth had built the previous spring, close enough to the schoolhouse that Aldith could reach it quickly, and it was a long night — longer than either of them expected, the sounds from within shifting, over the slow hours, from Elsbeth's determined effort into something that made Diccon go pale and silent every time it carried out to where they sat.
"Is it supposed to take this long?" he asked, somewhere past midnight, his voice raw with a fear he was no longer trying to hide.
"I don't know, Diccon. I've never done this before either." Thomas put a hand on his shoulder, steady despite his own uncertainty. "I know Aldith's the best hand in this whole March for exactly this work, and I know she's been preparing for tonight since long before either of us understood what preparing for it properly meant. That's not nothing to hold onto, even in the hardest hours."
Wat joined them an hour before dawn, unable to sleep himself, and sat with them in a silence that carried its own particular weight — the blacksmith's own old grief, Thomas suspected, sitting quietly alongside Diccon's fear, two different griefs about the same fragile, precious business of bringing new life safely into the world.
The child's first cry came just as the sky was beginning to gray toward morning, thin and furious and entirely, wonderfully alive, and Diccon was on his feet and through the door before either Thomas or Wat could properly react, leaving the two of them sitting together in the fading dark, listening to the muffled sounds of a small, exhausted household's first joyful chaos.
Aldith emerged twenty minutes later, exhausted but glowing with the particular satisfaction of a job done well and hard-won. "A girl," she announced. "Healthy, loud, and already furious at the whole indignity of being born, which I take as an excellent sign of a strong temperament to come." She looked at Wat, something knowing in her tired expression. "Elsbeth's asking for you both, once you're ready. And Wat — she wants to know if you'll stand as the child's godfather. Diccon asked me to pass along the request, since he's currently too overwhelmed to manage it himself."
Wat's weathered face, in the growing morning light, went through several visible stages of surprise before settling into something Thomas had rarely seen from him — an open, unguarded emotion he made no attempt to hide this time. "I'd be honored," he said, his voice rough. "More honored than I know how to properly say."
They found Elsbeth propped up in bed, exhausted and radiant, the tiny, furious bundle of new life cradled carefully against her chest, and Diccon kneeling beside them both with an expression of such complete, overwhelmed devotion that Thomas felt something in his own chest tighten with a joy that had nothing at all to do with the falling number, or the memory's growing wrongness, or any of the private griefs he'd carried through the long night's vigil.
"We're naming her Joan," Elsbeth said quietly, watching Thomas's face for his reaction. "If that's — if you don't think it's too much, too soon. She never got to meet either of us properly, but Diccon's told me so much about her, and I thought—"
"I think it's exactly right," Thomas said, his voice unsteady. "I think she'd have been glad of it, and considerably more embarrassed by the fuss than she'd ever have admitted."
The valley celebrated properly that evening, once Elsbeth had rested and the whole exhausted, joyful household had recovered enough to receive visitors, and Thomas found himself, standing at the edge of yet another gathering of ordinary, hard-won happiness, thinking that whatever the falling number and the shifting memories eventually cost him, he had at least lived long enough to watch a new Joan draw her first furious breath in a valley that had, against every danger it had ever faced, somehow kept finding room to welcome new life into its careful, stubborn peace.