After two days, Daina found herself thinking longingly of the insecure seeq as a companion.
Seeqs weren't the worst people to take into the field. Akademicians were. Akademicians got thoroughly overexcited about things like the weather or soil consistency. They groused over the pace Daina set. She never let them linger for more than a night in any one location. When hunting a mark, one must go where the mark goes, she pointed out with increasing impatience. Gathering minute data from the Tchita Uplands wasn't going to capture any yarhi in the Estersand.
And that, of course, was Larsa's errand. Bring a few specimens back for study in Draklor Laboratory. He still pronounced Draklor like School for Mad Scientists. "The more we know about them, the better chance we have of stopping this insanity," he'd said seriously. "I have a team assembled and ready to go at your word, Lady Praeities."
Wherever the insecure seeq was, Daina hoped he had a gorgeous viera wayfarer as a partner. The viera would be infinitely better company than Dr. fon Lugubrious over there (his real name was Joe Perry, but Adelaide had a rather sneaky sense of humor), who was hauling around several hundred pounds of equipment, his thick, purplish lips stuck in a permanent pout. He only opened them to complain, as insistent as the rustling roll of a wave, or to reluctantly relay Daina's orders to his staff in soft undertones. The collar of his lab coat was two sizes too tight. His jowls hung over it, constantly a-quiver with his mumbled grievances.
"He's like a basset hound," Adelaide said in annoyance. She snapped out the tablecloth before deftly folding it over her arm. "The way he lumbers about as if everything was the biggest bother in the world. Lazy, that's what my mother would say. Malcontent. Did someone cast a gravity spell on his mouth? It sags to his knees, I swear."
Since the chair had already been folded and packed away, Daina finished her tea standing. She hoped the hot drink would help settle her stomach. She hadn't been feeling well since the night before. Although she'd been famished that morning, her eggs and toast weren't agreeing with her.
"That's not very nice, Addie," she murmured, smiling into the cup in spite of herself. The caravan was breaking camp on a misty morning in the Salikawood. Birdsong swelled in the green-tinged air. It was crisp and fresh, tree branches underfoot and flowers overhead. A far cry from the merciless sun of Dalmasca. They still had a long way to go.
"You'd think he'd be more grateful," Adelaide went on, now busily dismantling the table, working efficiently around her lady.
"I understand you," Daina said. She'd been thinking much the same thing. Apparently, Dr. fon Lugubrious and his team had been chomping at the bit like penned chocobos for a chance to study the yarhi. The only reason they were here at all was that Daina had chosen to accept Larsa's mission. She carried an injunction from the emperor to force passage through routes closed to civilians. She could distinguish yarhi in a pack of Ivalice's beasts and could protect the akademicians while they attempted to capture the yarhi alive. Or whatever passed as "alive" with the illusory Mist beasts. Without her, Perry and his team would still be holed up in Draklor, memorizing the snippets of information trickling out of Lemurés, tapping uselessly at their keyboards.
"Would it kill him to show a little more respect?" Adelaide continued, oblivious to the fact that the doctor in question had finished packing his equipment and was approaching with the peculiar, rocking gait that made his jowls sway like a basset's long ears. Daina tried to signal a warning to her, but Adelaide didn't see her. Still talking, she gathered up the tray with the remnants of Daina's breakfast. "The way he calls you miss. You're a married woman and a lady at that. It's insulting! As if His Excellency didn't know what he was doing when he appointed leadership to you."
She blushed as she said it, keeping her eyes determinedly on her work. Daina felt a flash of amusement and sympathy for her handmaid, who was, after a single meeting, well on her way to a crush on the young emperor.
"He could be a little more cooperative –"
"Just how exactly do you believe my cooperation needs to improve, Miss Charité?" Dr. Perry asked. He fixed droopy basset hound eyes on her, the corners of his mouth pointed down even while talking. "I have been nothing but cooperative, often against my better judgment."
Adelaide jumped. Daina rescued the china before it smashed on the road. The akademician watched them impassively, waiting for an answer.
"I think what she means, Dr. Perry, is that you obey the letter of the law, if not the spirit," Daina said, sending Adelaide away with a look and an armful of dirty dishes. Obviously thrilled to escape, Adelaide hastened off. Daina closed her eyes, willing the nausea away.
"Do you consider yourself the law, young lady?" he asked angrily.
The question pierced her like a lancet. Daina hadn't told anyone of Larsa's first offer. The one that would have made her a judge. The one she had instantly, instinctively refused, with something that, later, she classified as fear. Nabradian-bred, Dalmascan-tried, she was not immune to the pervading attitude toward Archadia's military.
Judge. The title would put Daina on equal footing with Basch, but was that really what she wanted? To compete with her husband? To be thrown into another set of people with far more discernment than their wives and daughters and, therefore, were far more dangerous? Or did she only want the freedom to be herself?
"In this case I most certainly do," she told the doctor. "I represent His Excellency on this excursion, and we will soon pass out of Archadia's borders. Your well-being is my responsibility. We are under a time limit, sir. By the end of the day today, we must reach the Highwaste. In no more than four days after that, we will cut into the Estersand. According to our reports, the greatest concentration of yarhi lies in wait there, and it is there that we will set up our base, in a place of my choosing. These are combat zones. I cannot stress this fact enough. We will be in danger, and neither pirate nor yarhi will wait for you to stick them with your probes and scanners before they kill you."
"Yet you bring your handmaiden with you," he sniffed.
"Yes, because Mistress Charité understands that the world does not stop at a monitor screen," Daina said with a touch of asperity.
"We are here to collect data, Miss Praeities," he retorted. "It is an ongoing process. We are currently no closer to understanding the yarhi and their effect on the environment, and vice versa, than we were before. In case you have forgotten, I, too, have been given a direct order from the emperor."
"Gather your team, Dr. Perry." Daina was tired of arguing with him, but then she swallowed and realized, with painful, blinding clarity, that she wasn't going to keep the eggs down. She had to get rid of him. "I guarantee you will get your samples, and at that point, my interference in the pursuit of science will end. You have ten minutes."
She turned and managed three dignified steps before the urge to vomit reached a peak. She broke into a run for the edge of the nearest suspended bridge, boots thumping on wooden planks, her hand clamped over her mouth and tears streaming from her eyes.
..::~*~::..
The cage clanged shut, which activated the storm magicite. Magickal electricity swarmed over the cage, the scanners woke up and began to hum, and the hyena trapped within yowled, shrinking from the bars. Its tail thrashed.
It sounded exactly like a real hyena. It looked no different than the hyenas that had roamed Giza Plains for centuries. It had the same short, brindled fur, the same curved horn and tusks, the same large paws. It even stank like a hyena. It could have been a hyena.
It wasn't.
Cheers erupted from the watching akademicians. After five days of failure, of making minute, painstaking adjustments to their equipment, of accidents and injuries that had resulted in Daina dispatching the rampaging yarhi they found and sending everyone back to the drawing board, of false alarms and one pirate attack, they had succeeded in discovering a lone yarhi. They had lured it out of hiding and into their cage. It howled again, clearly distressed.
"We've got it, sir," a woman in a white coat said excitedly. "Stats redirecting to your station now."
A flurry of scientific jargon followed. Each akademician shouted instructions or findings, seemingly with no one listening to anyone else. Their voices rang across the plains, unhindered by the tent walls billowing in the breeze. Everything in Giza during the dry was either prickly, or scratchy, or stung. Everyone spent most of their time in the flimsy tents, cursing every time a chirping, dancing cactoid wriggled its way inside.
Daina smiled and relaxed her stance. She'd been on the far side of a dry, tumbleweed-clogged wadi, lying in wait in case the yarhi got too aggressive. Adelaide's quickness with potions had rectified many injuries, but Daina wasn't taking any chances.
Now, her job finished, she sauntered toward the encampment. Seven white tents clustered around one of the towering sun crystals, which was ablaze with the solar power that fueled the workstations. A few gray-eyed, blond-haired, brown-skinned nomad children stood well back with their sacks of sun stones, having felt the lash of Dr. Perry's tongue more than once but unable to completely curb their curiosity. They grinned and waved at her, and she waved back.
The yakei and the iga blade tapped against the backs of her thighs. Rocky sand crunched beneath her boots. She yawned. Ignored by the busy akademicians, she wove through their makeshift desks and the cables snaking every which way across the tarpaulin floor until she found the refrigeration unit. It was buried beneath a growing pile of paper spewing out of a printer, which she shifted aside to help herself to cold water.
She hadn't felt sick since the incident with the eggs, which she was now avoiding, but she was exhausted. Perhaps it was a summer influenza. She often slept through the heat of midday.
"They did a good job today," Adelaide said when Daina entered their tent. Her black hair was piled on her head, wrapped in a turban nomad fashion. She wiped sweat off her neck with a handkerchief.
Daina flopped into a chair and started searching through a bag. She selected a succulent fruit. "Yes. Things will get easier from here on. With the data they compile today, we should be able to collect five or six more samples for transport to Draklor. Now that Dr. fon Lugubrious has perfected his radar, he and the others won't need my help distinguishing yarhi from a beast of Ivalice. They'll be able to send scouting teams without me."
"That's good." Adelaide sounded subdued, as if her mind was elsewhere.
Daina yawned again, covering her mouth with the half-eaten fruit. "I don't understand why I'm so tired," she grumbled. "The heat must be getting to me."
"Well, yes, that's really no surprise." Adelaide also sat, her sunburned brow creased. "You shouldn't be exerting yourself so much out here. I'll be relieved when we go home."
Daina raised her eyebrows at her. "Exerting myself? What's that supposed to mean? I haven't done much except sleep the last two days."
"My lady," Adelaide said, with a sort of exasperated, affectionate smile, "do you expect anything more of someone in your condition?"
"In my condition?" Daina repeated. She and sat up. "What are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with me."
Adelaide's expression might have been funny if Daina didn't feel like she was about to hear something she wasn't going to like.
"But – my lady –" Adelaide stopped, and then tried again. "I mean, I assumed –" Her blue eyes met Daina's green. It was hard to say which of them was more upset. She spoke softly, as if in a sick chamber. "I've seen it often enough with my mother, with ten of us and me the eldest. There are always signs, even though each time is different."
Daina waited.
"Do you not know that you're pregnant?"
..::~*~::..
"That's not possible," Daina had said flatly.
But of course it was. There was nothing wrong with her, not in that way, nor with Basch.
She'd laughed herself to sleep on a pillow wet with tears. It just wasn't possible. Was it?
Was she pregnant? Was she going to have a baby?
"It's still early," Adelaide had said. To Daina, it was as if the encampment had been engulfed in silencega. Or maybe the strange, muffled sensation was caused by the blood rushing in her ears like white noise. "Four or five weeks at most. I could be wrong."
She wasn't wrong. Daina's body knew it in the same way her muscles retained the lessons in swordsmanship, even when her mind had long forgotten them.
She was pregnant.
..::~*~::..
Did she want a baby?
Over the next week or so, while Dr. Perry collected more Mist creatures and the sheets of data continued to belch out of the printer, Daina caught herself massaging her belly, but her fingers never found the slightest difference. The differences were elsewhere. Her initial sleeplessness and her current fatigue. Loss of appetite. The wild mood swings, the increased sense of smell. Other, private differences that she wouldn't have registered for another month. Or so Adelaide said.
It was like coming down with a cold. The symptoms started out insignificant and isolated, until one morning a body woke up and – bam!
..::~*~::..
She'd thought of children, but she'd thought of them as a distant future, after she'd lived a little longer. She was only nineteen!
And Basch was nearly forty.
..::~*~::..
She dreamed he came home. She dreamed she told him the news. In her dream, the words she used didn't matter. The dream warped then, dipped, rewound, and repeated. Each time he reacted differently. There was joy, and there was fury. Confusion, disbelief, sorrow, happiness – her dream showed them all.
She woke up, and the anxiety cramping in her middle prompted her to be sick in a bucket. She cried all that day, too.
..::~*~::..
Four or five weeks. Daina's life had changed that long ago, before Basch had left Archades, neither one of them suspecting as they went on with their daily lives. It felt like the gods had ripped the world out from under her and left her spinning in space. Again.
..::~*~::..
Oh, Abyssal Celebrant. What was she supposed to do?
A/N: Hello, friends! I hope everyone's summers are going GREAT!
Reviewer Thanks! Darwin (Glad you liked it!), FinalAnimalMoonE (LOL, I considered it! It might be an unstated romance), ElTangoDeRoxanne(Why, yes they are! Good eye, as always. :) They're also taken from the hunts in the first game, because I'm a geek like that), and Persephone Falling (OMG, you know, when I first wrote that chapter, I DID make her a judge. Then I changed it, because I thought that was too . . . I dunno, easy, or something. It felt like a cheat. I was kind of happy that you came to that idea too, though. LMAO).
I love you all, dear readers, and remain ever yours,
Anne