The third came in a hard winter, three weeks early, and the two days surrounding her arrival were the worst Thomas experienced as a father.
Cecily did not soften it afterward. "She was small and she was early and the cord was where it should not have been, and if it had gone another quarter hour I would have been making a different kind of decision. I want you to know that plainly rather than discover it in ten years from someone else."
"Is Victoria—"
"Victoria is fine. Victoria was extraordinary, actually, and did precisely what I told her at a moment when very few women could have." Cecily's own hands were unsteady, Thomas noticed, now that it was over. "The child is small and will need watching for a month and I would not put her outside in this weather for any reason whatsoever. But she is here, and she is breathing well, and I have seen considerably worse starts end in considerably better outcomes than anyone predicted."
They named her Margery, after nothing and nobody, and she spent her first six weeks in a basket by the kitchen fire because it was the warmest place in the house, and Thomas spent a good deal of that period sitting beside the basket doing absolutely nothing useful.
"You're watching her breathe," Victoria said, on perhaps the ninth such evening.
"I am."
"She's been breathing for six weeks. She's rather good at it now."
"I'm aware." Thomas did not stop watching. "I have been through a siege and a plague and a royal hearing and fourteen years of a number falling in my pocket, and I have never once been as frightened as I was for two days in December, and I find the fright hasn't entirely gone away yet. Give it a month."
It took rather more than a month.
Margery grew slowly, and stayed small, and was — from the start, to a degree that eventually became a family joke — the most self-contained of the four. She did not demand. She observed, and she reached for things, and if a thing did not come she waited and reached again, with an absence of frustration that Victoria found faintly unnerving.
"Edmund shouts," she said. "Alys negotiates. This one simply outlasts you."
Alys, four, appointed herself Margery's principal authority within about a week and defended the position vigorously for the next decade.
"She's mine," she informed Thomas, with great seriousness, having been discovered in the kitchen at some unauthorised hour standing guard over the basket.
"She's everyone's, sweetheart."
"She's mine most." Alys considered. "Edmund can have her some."
Edmund, four and a half and uninterested in the negotiation, was at that moment attempting to take apart the door latch with a spoon, and had to be extracted.
Thomas wrote down that conversation. He had started doing that, in the years since Wat died — a small book, separate from the Codex, in which he recorded things the children said and did that he wanted to keep. It was not for anyone. He had considered making it a document for them and had decided against it, on the grounds that a father's account of your childhood, handed to you in adulthood, would be an unbearable weight.
He kept it anyway.
Victoria found it in the spring, and read four pages, and put it back exactly where she had found it and said nothing about it for years.
Aldith, who was by then in her sixties and had formally handed the fever house to Cecily two years earlier, came to see the baby in her third month and stayed most of an afternoon.
"Three," she said. "In four years. At your age."
"At our age. Victoria's thirty-nine."
"Victoria is thirty-nine and made of iron and I have told her so directly." Aldith adjusted the blanket with a practiced hand. "I am not scolding you, Thomas. I am observing that a man who spent a decade certain he had no future has produced three of them in four years, and that I am not entirely sure he has noticed the shape of what he is doing."
Thomas had not, in fact, noticed the shape of it until she said it.
"It's not deliberate."
"No. It never is. That's somewhat the point of an instinct." Aldith handed the baby back. "I would only suggest — and then I will stop, because I am old and interfering and I know it — that you consider whether three is a family or whether you are still building something. You have a habit of building. It is your best quality and it does not switch off simply because the material has changed."
He thought about that for a considerable time afterward, and eventually raised it with Victoria, badly, on a Sunday.
She laughed at him for most of five minutes.
"Aldith thinks you're constructing a family," she said, wiping her eyes. "Like a distribution network."
"When you put it that way—"
"I am putting it that way because it is extremely funny and I intend to enjoy it." She recovered somewhat. "For what it's worth, Thomas — no. I don't think that's what this is. I think you spent a very long time being a man who could not have anything, and now you can, and you are being greedy about it, and that is an entirely different failing and a much more forgivable one."
"Is it a failing?"
Victoria thought about it.
"Ask me after the fourth," she said.