The fear arrived in the fifth month and did not announce itself as fear.
It came disguised as diligence. Thomas began, without deciding to, reorganising things — the succession document, the works schedules, the school's second-cohort placements — with a thoroughness that struck everyone around him as admirable and struck Aldith, within about two weeks, as something else entirely.
She came to find him in the undercroft on an afternoon when he had no business being there, going through ten-year-old distribution records that nobody had needed since Maud rebuilt the loop.
"Stop," she said, from the doorway.
"I'm nearly through the—"
"Thomas. Stop." Aldith came in and sat down on the bench beside him, moving with the deliberate care of a woman who was, though she would not have admitted it, becoming old. "You are frightened, and you are doing what you always do when you are frightened, which is find a document to be usefully busy with. I have watched you do it for fifteen years. What is it?"
Thomas put down the records.
"I don't know how to be a father," he said.
"Nobody does. That's not the answer and you know it isn't. Try again."
He was quiet for a while.
"I never had a childhood here," he said finally. "I arrived in a body that was already thirty. I have never once been small in this world, or safe in it, or looked after. Everything I know about being a child, I know from a place that no longer exists and possibly never did." He turned his hands over. "My mother taught me how to be a person. That's the whole of my qualification. And the version of her that taught me is — I don't know what she is. Thinned. Rewritten. Gone. And I keep trying to remember how she managed it and I find I can't recall specific things anymore. I can't remember what she actually did."
Aldith absorbed that without any visible reaction, which was one of the several reasons people told her things.
"You are frightened," she said, "that you have nothing to pass on. That the well you'd draw from is dry."
"Yes."
"That's a real fear and I'm not going to tell you it's foolish." She folded her hands. "I am going to tell you it's wrong, and I'd like you to hear the difference. May I say something that will be uncomfortable?"
"You generally do."
"I have watched you raise four people." Aldith held up her fingers and counted them off with complete matter-of-factness. "Diccon, who came to you at eleven and is now a man half this town relies on. Cecily, who arrived at nineteen convinced she was insufficient and now runs an institution. Maud, who was sixteen and feral and whom you handed to competent people and then defended for four years while she was insufferable. And me, though I'll thank you not to mention that outside this room — I was thirty-one and good at my work and entirely uninterested in writing anything down, and you taught me otherwise, and the whole eastern March is alive because you did."
Thomas found he could not immediately speak.
"That's not the same as—"
"It is just the same and you are being obtuse." Aldith's voice did not rise. "You do not pass on a childhood, Thomas. You pass on attention. Whether you notice a person, and take them seriously, and tell them the truth when it costs you something. You have done that consistently, for fifteen years, for every single person who has ever landed in front of you needing it. You did not learn that from your mother's technique. You learned it from being loved, and you were, and it took."
"And if I've forgotten what it looked like?"
"Then you'll do it wrong in different ways than she did, and your children will complain about you to each other when they're forty, which is the normal outcome and not a tragedy." Aldith stood, with some effort. "Now put those records back where you found them. They have not been relevant since before Maud could read, and if Margery — if the child grows up to find you were reorganising an obsolete ledger while waiting to be born, they will draw conclusions about your character that neither of us wants."
Thomas put the records back.
He told Victoria about the conversation that night, and she listened all the way through without interrupting, which was rare.
"Aldith's right," she said. "She's also left something out, and I'd rather you had it from me."
"Go on."
"You are not doing this alone. You have spent fifteen years being the person who has to know what to do, and you have arranged your entire life around the assumption that when something is difficult, it is difficult at you specifically." She took his hand. "This one isn't yours to get right. It's ours to get wrong together. I have never done this either. I am also frightened, and I have been frightened for months, and I have been waiting for you to say something so that I could stop pretending I wasn't."
Thomas looked at her.
"You've been frightened for months."
"Obviously I have. I'm thirty-six and I have run a town through a siege and a plague and I have absolutely no idea what to do with an infant." Victoria's composure finally slipped. "I keep waiting for someone to notice that neither of us is qualified and take it away from us, and then I remember there is nobody to do that, and it is going to be handed to us regardless, and we shall simply have to manage."
They sat together for a long time.
"We'll manage," Thomas said.
"We'll manage badly."
"We'll manage badly," he agreed, "and then slightly less badly, and then it'll be sixteen and telling us we've ruined its life, and we'll have a whole different set of things to be frightened about."
Victoria laughed — properly, for the first time in weeks — and leaned into his shoulder, and neither of them was any less frightened, and both of them slept considerably better than they had in a month.