Elsbeth had been right, and Thomas thought about her warning perhaps forty times over the following month, generally at some hour between two and five in the morning.
Nobody warns you because it is bad advertising.
The difficulty was not any single thing. Each individual component was survivable and most were even comic in retrospect. It was that they arrived simultaneously and continuously and did not stop, and that there was no point at which a person could say this portion is now complete.
Edmund fed every two hours and did not appear to enjoy it. He slept in stretches of forty minutes and woke as though personally affronted. He was sick down Victoria's only remaining clean shift at the precise moment Alaric arrived with a document requiring immediate attention, and Thomas had to conduct the resulting conversation in the doorway while holding a naked infant.
"Is this —" Alaric began.
"Yes."
"Should I—"
"No. Ask your question. He has no opinions about tenure law." Thomas adjusted his grip. "Go on. Genuinely. I'm functioning at about a third and it's the best I'll manage this week."
Alaric asked his question. Thomas answered it badly. The document was corrected later that week by Cecily, who did not mention it.
By the eleventh day Thomas had developed a specific and unwelcome understanding of what exhaustion actually does to a person — not the sleepiness, which he had expected, but the strange flattening of everything, the way that a thing which would ordinarily be a minor irritation became briefly and genuinely unbearable, and then, twenty minutes later, was nothing at all.
He shouted at Victoria on the fourteenth day. About a cup.
He was not able, afterward, to reconstruct the reasoning. There had been a cup, and it had been in the wrong place, and he had said something in a tone he had not used to another human being in perhaps twenty years, and Victoria had looked at him with an expression of pure blank astonishment.
Then she had started laughing, which was worse.
"I'm sorry—"
"Don't." She was holding the doorframe. "Thomas, I called you something on Tuesday that I have decided never to repeat and you did not even react, because you were asleep standing up at the time. We are both animals. We will be people again in a month."
"That's not an excuse."
"It is not an excuse, it is a forecast, and I would ask you to accept it in the spirit it is offered and go and lie down for two hours while I take him, because you are no use to either of us."
He slept for four.
It lifted, exactly as promised, in a manner nobody could have described in advance because there was no single day on which it happened.
Sometime in the fifth week Edmund began sleeping in stretches of two hours, and then three. Sometime in the sixth Thomas realised he had read an entire page of a document and retained it. Sometime around the seventh Victoria laughed at something that was actually funny rather than at the hysterical edge of exhaustion, and Thomas noticed the difference.
And sometime in the eighth week, at about four in the morning, Thomas was walking the length of the room with his son against his shoulder — for the several hundredth time, by a route he could have described to the inch — and Edmund stopped crying.
Not settled. Stopped. And made a small noise that was not a complaint, and put a hand out, and took hold of Thomas's collar, and held on to it.
Thomas stood absolutely still in the dark for a considerable time.
He had been told about this. Diccon had tried, twelve years earlier, and had given up, and had said only you'll see. Thomas had assumed at the time that it was the standard inarticulacy of a happy man.
It was not. There were simply no available words, and Thomas — who had spent his entire life in two worlds being the person who could explain things — stood in his kitchen at four in the morning and discovered that the single largest thing that had ever happened to him was not going to be expressible.
"Victoria," he said, at normal volume, which was reckless.
"What." From the other room, instantly awake, alarmed.
"Nothing's wrong. Come here."
She came, and saw, and leaned against the doorframe.
"He's grabbed you," she said.
"He's grabbed me."
"That's not affection, you understand. That's a reflex. Cecily explained it — they grip anything that touches the palm, it's entirely mechanical, it means nothing whatsoever."
"I know," Thomas said.
Neither of them moved for some time.