The Spokane case sits open on the counter, forty foil strips racked in their cardboard like a hymnal, and I sign the receiving log the way I've signed it every spring for thirteen years — M. Vesely, received, count verified — because nobody thinks to double-check the healer.

Forty in. Forty on the log. Thirty-eight left in the box when I close it.

I don't feel like a thief. I feel like a woman doing inventory, which is its own kind of lie, the kind you tell your own hands so they'll keep moving.

—

The infirmary door has a bolt Kastel installed for exam privacy and I've never once used it for myself. I use it now. Then I take the roll of brown paper we wrap splints in and tape a sheet over the top panel of the window, because Ossian's fence-line round doesn't end for another hour and this room has a clear sightline to the yard, and because a healer taping paper over glass in daylight is exactly the kind of thing nobody in this pack has ever thought to ask a question about.

On the back of a wormwood seed packet, in my mother's shorthand, I do the arithmetic I've done for every pregnant woman who's ever sat on this table.

Twenty-first of April. Six weeks since the night, by the calendar. Eight weeks by the dating I've used since I was sixteen and helping Sable count backward from a missed cycle — she taught me to add two weeks onto the act itself, because the body starts its clock before anyone else's does.

Eight weeks. The number Dorian gave Kastel. Mark the twenty-first and count forward six, seven, then eight.

I already know what happens at eight weeks. I've known it since I was old enough to read the infirmary's own pamphlets, the ones printed decades ago and never revised because they've never needed revising: an alpha's seed is hostile to a human-born body, and past eight weeks it always fails. Always. That's the word they use. Not usually. Always.

I peel the foil, dip the strip, and set the timer on my phone for ninety seconds, and I narrate it to myself the way I'd narrate it to a first-year apprentice, dry as a chart note. Control line for validity. Test window for result. Ambient temperature acceptable. Sample fresh.

I get to eighty seconds before the second line starts coming up, and it doesn't hesitate, doesn't hedge pale the way the pamphlet photos show a borderline result hedging pale — it comes up pink and gets pinker, fast, greedy almost, like it's been waiting.

The floor tilts.

Not metaphorically. Actually — the tile goes soft and grey at the edges the way it did in this same room three weeks ago when I stood up too fast, except I haven't moved at all, I'm exactly where I was, and still I end up on my knees on the cold linoleum with my back against the cabinet and the strip held flat and level in my fingers the entire way down, because some idiot animal part of my brain has decided that if I keep the strip level the result can't fall out of it, can't spill, can't become more true than it already is.

I run the second one to be sure. While it develops I say the facts out loud, to the empty room, to the taped-over window, because saying them makes them do something my brain isn't managing on its own.

"An alpha's seed is genetically hostile to human-born women." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone giving a lecture. "Pregnancies fail in the first eight weeks. Always. That's why there's no heir. That's why he buried a wife with no issue."

The second strip goes pink at seventy seconds.

I check myself instead of it, the way I'd check a patient who told me a story I didn't believe. No bleeding. No cramping. Breasts sore for two weeks and I told myself it was the iron tablets. Sick every dawn for three weeks running and I told myself it was Casker's venison, which was a lie I told Kade to his face behind a woodshed and which was, I understand now, kneeling on tile with two pink lines in front of me, a lie I'd already half told myself first.

A split lip closed in three days in April. Bruises gone yellow by day three that any textbook says should still be black at day ten.

The conclusion arrives whole, the way a diagnosis does when you've been circling it too long to be surprised by it anymore, and it will not go back into whatever drawer I try to file it in.

It isn't the pregnancy that's impossible. It's me.

Whatever I am, it was never in any pamphlet I've handed out, never in the thirteen years of case files under the counter, and Dorian told Kastel to count to eight weeks not because he was hoping. Because he already knew there was something worth counting toward.

Count the days for me.

Same blows. Same order. Nine years apart, down to the omission of the face and the belly, and I go very cold and very still trying to make the word unlucky fit what that means, and it will not fit, it keeps sliding off the shape of the thing underneath it, and the word that's actually there, waiting, is chosen — and I can't finish following it because my hands have started shaking too hard to hold the strip level anymore, and it tips, and I let it.

I feed one strip to the woodstove and stand there while the foil curls black and the plastic goes soft and stinks. The second I wrap in waxed paper, the way I wrap seeds I mean to keep past a season, and push it into the tin under the floorboard, next to the chart that already says, in her shorthand, in my handwriting: Not temper. Method.

I add nothing to it. I don't have the words yet. I'm not sure I ever will.

The door handle turns.

I'd forgotten I bolted it — forgotten there was a door at all, for the length of time I've been on this floor, which I could not tell you in minutes if my life depended on it.

"Mira." Kade's voice, low, close to the wood. "It's me. Fennick says Reyle's been at your fence since noon."

I can't build a lie fast enough. That's the whole problem with lies — they take time you don't have when your hands won't stop, and mine won't, and my knees are done being useful, and there is a smell of burnt plastic in a locked room with paper taped over the window, and I have exactly nothing to say that explains any of it.

So I unbolt it.

He takes one look — the floor, me on it, the brown paper over the glass, the wax-paper corner not quite swallowed by the tin — and doesn't ask a single question out loud. He just steps in, shuts the door behind him, and turns the bolt himself, and the small click of it is the loudest thing in the room.

He crouches. Takes my wrist without asking this time, thumb finding the pulse the way it did three weeks ago, except this time he doesn't let go after a count of ten. He holds it, watching the second hand of nothing, because we both know he doesn't need a watch to count a pulse, and after a while he says, "That's one-twenty. How long've you been down?"

"Four minutes." My own voice, from very far away, reporting a vital sign like it belongs to a patient and not to me.

It's the ordinariness of the question that does it — that he asked it the way he'd ask about anyone, plain and clinical, and something in me that has been holding since April finally gives, all at once, no warning, the way a fence gives.

"It took," I say.

He goes still in a way I've never seen him go still, not even at the fence line with Ossian ten feet off. He says my name once, just that, Mira, like he's checking the word still means what it meant a minute ago.

Then he asks the only question either of us has left.

"Is it his?"