Ten months. Simultaneously the longest and shortest span of time the scholar had ever lived.

The discovery of the life within her was shocking, of course, but only because it was the granting of an impossible wish. A child with the love of your life, a member of a completely different species. A ludicrous fantasy, until the moment it suddenly wasn't.

As far as everyone else was concerned, Aufei's mate was anonymous. She simply refused to tell anyone who mated her. With the eternal blight of low birth rates, unpaired pregnancies were somewhat scandalous, but they weren't shunned. The scholar was willing to stand by to defend her, of course, but thankfully the most ire directed her way came in the form of sidelong glances and quiet gossip. Plenty of woolcoats were familiar with the Scholar, the curious Human that spent nearly every waking moment at Aufei's side. Most admired his dedication; he was the one caring for her where her absentee mate chose not to, but more recently some plainly suspected they were probably more than close friends, even if they didn't say so out loud. The actual truth was simply so far out of left field that no-one could connect the dots.

As her due date approached, Aufei was relegated mostly to the healer's, as was apparently the usual practice. She had told the scholar some time ago that while Woolcoats were by and large familiar with magic, the most powerfully gifted among them almost inevitably ended up as healers or veilseers. And he could believe it. The healers had a medical and surgical competence that boggled the mind, even if their theory was lacking compared to most modern medical texts. It was easy to forgive them for it though, after he had seen them drain, clean, suture, and bandage grievous wounds in seconds that any human doctor would have been hard pressed to replicate with a university-level operating theatre. Their ability certainly put his mind at ease.

At first he intended to spend most of his day in or around the healer's longhouses, though after some convincing from Aufei and annoyed glares from the healers themselves, he managed to relegate himself to a visit or two per day. All that was left for him to do was wait.

And now it was time.