This was a fun little idea I had to detail the first year of married life between Mordred and Lethira. Mordred was his adorbs self and made this sooo enjoyable to write.

The next one-shot I have an idea for is something with the young Segelas family, before their parents left. Little Fiona, anybody?

Miaw.

The cat side-stepped a pile of dusty hay, and slunk casually past the swishing tail of the grey horse that was standing in its stall. She did not belong here; she had wandered from the Earles. There were always too many cats at the Earles, and this one was a ten-week-old kitten, old enough to be sure of herself and walk with a disdainful air, old enough to strike out confidently on her own. She liked the smell and the feel of this barn; already she was establishing its boundaries in her mind as her territory.

Crossing paths with a chicken, she slouched back on her haunches and hissed, and the creature retreated with requisite flapping and squawks. The cat's walk grew a little straighter, a little bolder. No other cats dwelt in the barn: no other sly shadows crept around her, nothing leaped out to bare its claws and trounce the guilty intruder. Yes, this barn was hers.

Perhaps she sensed the need for a benediction – a solitary, unnoticed, useful benediction – on the house of a newly married couple.

~

Mordred drifted out of dark, encircling sleep into the sublime stillness of morning. He lay there for awhile, perfectly happy to be in that intermediary state, neither awake nor asleep, and listened to what might have been a cat's whine coming from some distant place outside. He did not know why he felt so happy.

Gradually, as sleep's hold retreated, he became aware of a gentle pressure on his shoulder, limiting his movement there, and something soft coiled over his face that tickled with every breath that left his nose. He brushed it away with a quick movement that woke him fully, and groping for the object of discomfort, he brought it to his eye and studied with interest a lock of flame-red hair. A wondering smile broke across his face, passionate tenderness brimmed in his eyes. He rolled over onto one elbow and gazed down at his wife.

Her eyelashes, such a queer, lovely, bronze colour, fanned across her pale, slender cheeks, flickering as his shadow fell across her. She stirred and looked up at him with the dreaminess of someone half-aware. "What are you thinking of?" she murmured.

He could not help but bend down and brush his lips lightly across those witching, uncertain lashes. Lethira's nose twitched; she sneezed, laughed, and pushed him away. "What were you thinking of, Mordred?"

"I never..." He hesitated, searching. "I never thought I would be so happy."

She got up, slipping her old green homespun dress on over her light shift. In the midst of knotting the belt, she checked suddenly and looked at him, a candid, vivacious picture with the sun firing her riot of soft, tumbled flame-locks around her face. "I wish I had been with you in some of the things you endured. I came after all your trials; I was never a part of them with you."

Mordred swung his legs over the bed, stood, and put an arm around her. "You have all the rest of your life to endure with me," he said, stroking back her hair. Then he tilted her head back and grinned cheekily down at her. "And as Laufeia will doubtless tell you at breakfast, and many times hereafter, that is something of an ordeal."

"I feel as if I'm eating by myself," Laufeia declared in the middle of breakfast.

"Oh, hush," Mordred told her, glancing away from Lethira for a moment; "you'll be doing the same thing with Daren shortly, only you'll have your own house to do it in, so don't pass yourself off as better than me here."

"And how Fenris will manage then, I daren't think," said Laufeia. "I fear that once I'm gone and married the both of you will forget how to eat."

Mordred tossed his head saucily and ignored her.

"Twenty years old and look at him," murmured Laufeia, rising to clear the dishes.

~

Braegon crested the hill, whistling between his teeth, his eyes scanning the countryside with rapid, keen regularity in sharp contrast to his twisted gait. He saw the tall figure on the road ahead, and recognized Mordred Kenhelm at once; but where Mordred usually walked with head flung back and stride long and graceful, today his head hung low, and he wandered with the aimless, shuffling walk of a sulky child. A more disconsolate picture could not have been.

"Mordred!" Braegon exclaimed as they drew near each other. "What's amiss?"

"Laufeia's getting married tomorrow," said Mordred, folding his arms and staring at the ground.

"Aye," agreed Braegon, staring at him in perplexity, "and is that not wonderful?"

"Well," said Mordred, "as far as that goes, it's wonderful. In fact, I wish she were married and out of the house already."

Braegon reached up a slow hand and pushed his hair off his forehead. "Shall we sit down? I am getting a crick in my neck looking up at you, and I should like to hear the full of why you look like a whipped dog today."

Mordred obliged.

"Let's hear it," said Braegon, crossing his arms over his knees. "Has two weeks in the same house proven too much for your sister and your new bride?"

"They are sewing Laufeia's dress," said Mordred, "and Laufeia told me to go out or I would make myself a nuisance. And Lethira laughed and let her."

"Is it that she laughed?" said Braegon, for he could not imagine that Mordred cared so much for watching two girls making a wedding dress.

"I want to be with her," said Mordred, the hurt of rejection shining out of his eyes. "Does she not want to be with me?"

Braegon sighed, his brow cleft in hard thought. "I have yet to love a woman with that kind of love, Mordred. But I have lived with one for seventeen years, and it seems to me that women are not forever satisfied with the company of men. Sometimes, they want a woman and only a woman to speak with, and then they will shut the door in our faces until they have had their time. I much doubt that Lethira even knew she hurt you, my friend. She is young, and she is merry, and she is happy that her husband's sister is to wed tomorrow. Why do you not walk awhile and enjoy this fair summer day?"

"'Twould be fairer with Lethira," Mordred muttered. But he got up, shaking his shoulders a little, and tossing his head back to catch the warm hay-scented breeze.

He walked for a long time, and came back to the house with a loose, swinging step. He stopped in the barn to check the animals, and stooped to stroke the back of a purring cat that came winding itself around his legs.

Just inside the cottage, he paused, his hand on the door-frame. Lethira looked across at him, and her face lit up with joy. "Mordred!" she cried. "Oh, I missed you."

~

Mordred stood on a little ridge, looking out over a wheat field that the sun had tipped with dark, shining gold. Lethira was beside him, and his hand was around her shoulder.

"Look at it," he said, his eyes alight in a pensive way. The wind ruffled the dark forelock on his brow. "Look at the harvest. There was no harvest like this last year."

She stirred against him. They had not met until the war was over, but it had touched both of them. "There were fields here at least," she murmured. "And harvests, though small."

Mordred's hand tightened on her shoulder, and he let her think of the village she had left behind, houses aflame, fields razed and salted, a father dead and only an aunt to tend to two sick brothers. He found himself remembering the cool stone walls of the hospice in Orden City and Captain Rhodes' quiet voice speaking on his ear: "...In the north, villages displaced by the enemy: houses razed..." And his own voice answering, teeth shut hard on pain without and within – "None of it should have happened..."

"Do you wish it had not happened?" Lethira questioned in a small, almost childish tone. He was startled.

"For you, yes," he said after a moment, rubbing his hand gently down her back. "For myself... I do not know. It has been a year now, and that fades the horror from the memories somewhat. And there are things I learned that would not have happened without that war, and healing that came, that could not otherwise have come. If I have a question, then it is, 'Why did they have to come this way?' But no-one knows the answer to such questions; they are better left unasked. Someday, maybe, we will know."

"Then that is the way I feel," she said.

~

Mordred threw an arm across his brother's shoulders as they trudged up the shorn slope. "You are getting brown with all this sun, Fenris."

He said it for the bright smile that edged so gently across his brother's tired face.

They had been cutting the harvest for three days now, under the hot September skies, eating their mid-meal in the field, coming in to dinner late, exhausted and covered in chaff.

"I'll check the animals, Mordred," said Fenris, turning towards the barn.

Mordred wavered, watching him go – it was still hard to let Fenris do anything when he saw him tired, even though they switched the duty regularly, and he had had his own turn yesterday. He pushed the instinctual urges slowly back and walked up to the house, thinking of his weary legs, the emptiness in his stomach, and a steaming meal inside.

Just inside the door he stopped, however, because the table, usually laden with bowls and food, was empty.

"Where is dinner?" he asked, glancing around the kitchen.

Lethira spun around from the fire, her lips pinched into an uncharacteristically thin line. "What does it look like?" she snapped.

Mordred blinked at her, floored by this reception. "In... there?" he said cautiously, nodding to the pot swaying over the fire.

Her lips thinned even harder, her eyes sizzled, and she looked as if she wanted to shoot him. "No," she said sarcastically, and put her back to him, giving the contents of the pot a vicious stir.

"Excuse me," said Mordred, "but would you mind telling me when I can expect to receive my dinner?"

Lethira whirled back. "Can you wait?"

Mordred was tired, very hungry, and beginning to feel resentful. He jerked a chair back and slammed it down on the ground, dropped heavily into it, and deposited both feet with a thud on the table. "Wait for my dinner? Yes. Wait for an answer? Why on earth?"

"Because I don't feel like being badgered!" shouted Lethira, her face getting very red, and angry tears starting to glitter at the corners of her eyes.

Mordred stared at her, feeling at once annoyed and confused. Laufeia had never acted this way. But Laufeia's meals had never been late either. "I asked a question," he said obstinately, feeling doubly annoyed that she said nothing about his feet being on the table. Laufeia would have told him to take them straight off.

"Leave me alone!" Lethira screamed, and with a stamp of her foot she wheeled back to the pot, back stiff and shoulders quivering with pent-up fury.

Mordred folded his arms and stared into the distance, and for a short while there was stony silence on both sides.

"What on earth happened?" Mordred finally said, with cold insistence.

Lethira gave a little toss of the shoulders that seemed to say, Fine, if you must know. "In the first place, the fire went out."

"Why didn't you light it again?"

"I tried!" she exploded, turning on him in a tigress's outrage again. "I tried, and tried, and it just wouldn't light. I don't know why!"

"Why didn't you come to get one of us out of the field?"

"Oh, I'm sure that would have gone off so well! 'You let the fire go out, Lethira? And you can't fix it yourself? You have to drag us from the important field work to help you with a child's chore?'"

"I would not have–" Mordred started, feeling a righteous indignation.

"Well, you would have thought it," said Lethira hotly. "I went to fetch a light from the Kings, that's what I did."

"Two miles there and back? No wonder it's so late! Good land." Mordred shoved the chair violently back and stood up. "Next time, for pity's sake, come get me for help. We might as well still be out there."

"And I knew – I knew – you were going to want your food when you came back – and that I made a mess of everything – and I tried to hurry – and the knife wouldn't chop – and I singed my hand – and my hair got tangled on the spit – and I've made you unhappy because you had – to – wait–" Lethira put her hands over her face and dissolved into sobbing.

All the vexation faded out of Mordred's face, leaving anxiety in its stead. He crossed to her in one long stride and drew her gently into his arms. "I'm sorry," he murmured against her, "so sorry – so sorry." He patted her back, held her close, whispered a constant stream of apologies and endearments into her ear.

Lethira quieted and rubbed her eyes. "I'm sorry too," she whispered. "So silly of me."

"If you'd only told me all that when I came in," he said reproachfully.

Lethira snuffled a little. "I couldn't. I was too angry at the world." She laughed faintly and looked up adoringly at him. "I love you."

The door squeaked. Fenris came in.

"Oh!" shrieked Lethira, pulling out of Mordred's arms. "The stew! It must be burnt to cinders by now!"

Mordred let her go with a laugh. "Don't fret, little bird. I'm hungry enough to eat even cinders."

~

Winter winds moaned distantly on the mountain-side. Mordred sat on a chair in front of the fire, hands idle and eyes aglow with reverie. Fenris was in the other corner, his slender fingers deftly whittling a new center-tree for the plough. Lethira sat on the floor beside Mordred's chair, her head resting against his thigh and her hands clasped possessively about his knee as she too gazed into the endless dance of flames.

"Mordred," she said half-aloud, almost drowsily, "what were your mother and father like? Tell me."

Mordred looked quickly down at her, and put out his hand to stroke her hair. "She was pretty," he said. "She had thick dark hair, and green eyes like Laufeia. She was only sixteen when she married, and he was nineteen, younger than you and I. He would call her kirre linia."

" 'My darling'," said Lethira. She smiled.

"I didn't know what it meant." Mordred stared back at the fire. "They died the same day, of a coughing sickness. Twenty-nine and thirty-two."

Lethira was silent a moment. "I knew they died," she whispered, "but so young!"

"It is like that in Rehirne," Mordred said.

"I'm so sorry, Mordred."

He turned back to her, his mouth tight with pain. "I didn't love them, Lethira."

She was startled.

"How could I? They didn't love us."

"Oh," she said quietly. "Were they – cruel to you?"

Mordred's eyes softened and he smiled gently at her, a smile that made him look much older than he was. "No, little bird. They just didn't care. I don't think they knew how."

This time it was Lethira who moved, reaching up to take his sensitive, long-fingered hand and close both hers around it. "That is over, kirre linia."

His smile was impulsive this time, a genuine reaction to her words, but sadness still lingered around his eyes. "Not that name, little bird."

"My darling, then. You are not that little boy any longer, Mordred. I care for you, and I will never stop."

~

"Mordred."

The one soft word from her lips was enough; Mordred turned from stacking logs by the fire and smiled at her with a particularly arresting charm, his cheeks ruddy from the warm light and the cold outside, the melting snow causing his hair to hang down over his forehead in little, almost-curling strings.

"Mordred," she said again, and paused.

"What is it, little bird?"

She hesitated again. She felt very strongly that this must be said just right. It was special, and special things must be done with care. "A month ago – right around the end of harvest – I was feeling a little queer. Sick, really."

Mordred's eyes grew wide with concern. "I never noticed – are you all right–"

"You didn't notice because you were gone all day, and I didn't think I ought to bother you, because it really wasn't serious at all. And yes, I'm quite all right now. It hasn't happened in weeks. But a few days ago I started thinking – and Mordred, I think I'm going to have a baby." Lethira pronounced the last two words with all the conviction and elation in her soul, and lifted shining eyes to his.

She had never seen anyone in her life look so ecstatic and so panic-stricken at the same time.

"Lethira – that's wonderful – how did you –" Mordred grasped his head in his hands and shook it. "When? – and do you think it will be a girl or a boy? – and I'm going to be a father – I've never been a father – I don't know how to do this – oh, Lethira–" and he snatched her in his arms, her squeak muffled against the scratchy wool of his coat, and hugged her so tightly that she thought they both would burst.

They staggered apart, she gasping and half-laughing, he still jubilant and horrified all at once. "Lethira," he said, the panic seeping back. "I can't do this."

She shook her head with teasing sternness. "You can, and you will do it so well."

"It's wonderful." Mordred looked a little dazed now. "So wonderful – too wonderful for words. I don't think I know much about babies, Lethira. How will I hold it? What if it won't come out when it's supposed to? How will you bear dragging it around for months? Is this where it is?" And he knelt, and laid a hand with the tenderest touch he had ever given on her abdomen.

"Somewhere around there," said Lethira.

Mordred's lips moved soundlessly in some secret address to the unborn infant. Lethira bent and kissed the top of his head.

~

Mordred swung the door wide, sensing the warmth from the quiet indoors pour over him while the fresh, blustery wind nipped at him from the back.

"Still huddled in a shawl by the fire?" he teased, looking at his wife. "Spring is coming outside and you don't even know it."

"Shut the door," said Lethira, huddling deeper.

"I don't understand what you have against some good, bracing air–" Mordred began, prepared to defend his preferences thoroughly.

"Should I invoke the baby?" Lethira demanded.

The door slammed shut.

"Are you all right, Lethira?" Mordred tiptoed anxiously around her, inspecting the half-hidden bump. "No chills? Is the baby coming?"

Lethira bent over her knitting, her laughter filling the room. It was not the first fit of giggles she had had at his expense. "Mordred, the baby's not coming for three months at least. I declare, Murdoch doesn't believe the half of what I tell him about your mother henning."

Mordred frowned. "What have you been gossiping about to your brother?"

"Everything," said Lethira saucily.

"I suppose I am the butt of all Ceristen's jokes now," said Mordred.

"Mordred, sulking ill becomes you," said Lethira, reclining back and holding her knitting up to study.

"The more worried I grow, the happier you get," said Mordred. "It's not fair."

Lethira giggled again. "I have to take it back. Sulking becomes you all too well."

"It does not!" said Mordred.

"It does! You look so handsome when you're moody."

Mordred did not know quite what to say to this, so he put on an air of injured dignity, dropped a kiss on Lethira's hair, and left the room.

~

"It's big," said Mrs. Earle thoughtfully, patting Lethira's protruding stomach. "Only seven months? Are you sure?"

"Maybe a little less," said Lethira, "but not more."

"Do get back a bit, lad," said Mrs. Earle, waving Mordred away. "Stop hovering over everything and breathing down my neck. Gives me shivers, it does."

Mordred backed away perhaps six inches, and shifted nervously from foot to foot.

"What do you think, lad?" said Mrs. Earle, appealing to the other young man in the room – Murdoch Gerisson, Lethira's older brother. "You've had surgeon's training, they say. Do your eyes say the same as mine?"

"My lady, I'd trust your opinion above my own," said Murdoch, pushing back his brownish curls. "But it does look big to me." He reached forward and passed his hands gently over the whole belly, measuring.

Mrs. Earle turned to Mordred. "Lad, you're twitchy as a horse with colic! Get out of this room before you have me in a flutter."

Mordred squared his shoulders and strode for the door, throwing desperately over his shoulder, "I don't know what is the matter with Lethira, but I expect to be told!"

"Do you think–?" said Murdoch, looking at Mrs. Earle.

And Mrs. Earle was nodding. "I'm thinking that it may be that. Lass, as great as you appear to be at this moment, you're either carrying a giant man-child or you're expecting twins."

"Well!" said Lethira. She did not appear too disconcerted.

"Don't tell Mordred," said Murdoch.

Mrs. Earle agreed. "Not that boy. He'll take it all wrong, and it's still a maybe anyway. Once he sees the infants laid out in your arms, then he'll be happy."

~

Mordred scratched around the ears of the cat that was stretched out across his legs. "'Twill be time for another hay-cutting soon," he remarked to the broad-shouldered, dark-bearded man standing nearby him.

Berethar nodded without much interest. "And Lethira?" he questioned.

"Lethira is doing marvelously, as is to be expected," said Mordred. "Everyone says I am fretting about her – which is, of course, absurd."

The shaft of light falling through the barn door shed little light on Berethar's face, but Mordred seemed to sense the smile creeping underneath the beard. He shifted uncomfortably and threw a faint glare up at his friend. "Absurd," he insisted.

"Not fretting at all," said Berethar in an unreadable tone.

"A little honest concern does not count as fretting. Look at this cat," Mordred continued with a blatant change of subject. "She is expecting, too. Look at that belly!"

"Do you fret over her, too?" said Berethar.

~

A noon sun glanced across the open space between barn and house. Mordred walked across that open space and halted by a spreading ash tree near the path, under which his very pregnant young wife was sitting with her eyes closed and her slender face relaxed in sleep.

He put his hand out, touched her cheek, and she jolted awake. "Getting some rest for the little one?" he murmured with a grin.

She smiled and laid her head drowsily against his hand. "I found myself needing some fresh air," she answered.

"Even my heat-loving wife has her limits, then! Astonishing." Mordred sat down beside her and leaned his back against the tree. "In any case, now that I'm here and you're here, why don't we enjoy this moment together. Mid-meal can wait."

"I'm surprised I could sleep at all," Lethira said, shifting against him. "I've been so tired but I can't sleep at night."

"I've heard you tossing." Mordred caressed her cheek with a finger. "No position comfortable anymore?"

"Not for more than two minutes." She gave a slight laugh. "I suppose I was tired enough that my body couldn't take any more work just now."

"That's all right. Rest, my little bird."

"Ooh," said Lethira sharply.

"No, don't worry about whatever's cooking inside. I don't care if it burns. Mid-meal can wait five hours."

Lethira bit down on her lip. "It might have to wait. I don't know if I can – ooh!"

Mordred snatched her arms with shaking hands, his face ghost-white. "Lethira–"

"Let go of me, Mordred. It's past now." Lethira relaxed back against the tree. "It might be a false alarm – I've had a few, in the middle of the night, there and then gone. But maybe you ought to get Mrs. Earle, just in case."

Mordred watched her tensely, still trembling from head to foot.

Another grimace passed across Lethira's face after several minutes. She glanced up at him. "You might as well go for Mrs. Earle now. It wouldn't hurt. No, never mind. Don't go. Send Fenris."

"Why? Do you need me here?"

Lethira gave another faint laugh. "I might want you to go. At this point, I would trust a robin to carry a message better than you."

"I'll get Fenris." Mordred stood.

"Tell him that if Mrs. Earle can't come right away, then fetch my brother."

Mordred ran as if werevultures were on his heels.

~

Murdoch Gerisson came into the kitchen and added some wood on the fire. He glanced at his distraught brother-in-law, who was pacing with incessant, rapid strides across the floor. The pacing had been going on when he arrived in the house, and had not stopped since.

Murdoch shook his head wearily and left the room.

When he came in agaub fifteen minutes later, he was smiling. He waited for Mordred to notice his presence, realized that was not going to happen, and cleared his throat.

Mordred came to an instantaneous halt, his wide, grey eyes boring into Murdoch with terrified expectancy.

"Twins," said Murdoch. "Lethira is fine."

Mordred stared at him, stupefied, his mouth agape. Then he sprang to Murdoch, wrung his hand in a bone-crunching grasp, and fled to the bedroom.

~

"Derek, William. William, Derek." Mordred lay stretched on the floor in front of the sinking fire, his face inches away from the infant cradled in his arm. "Which one is this?"

"Derek," said Lethira. She was nursing William, her eyes closed.

"Oh, yes. Derek! The one who hit my nose earlier." Mordred chuckled. "What a brilliant child. Look at him, sleeping. So quiet. How can he be so small? So small, so red, so beautiful. Yes, you. What a beautiful boy."

Mordred bent lower and brushed noses with Derek.

"What are you doing?" said Lethira, and tired as she was, there was a certain expostulation in her tone. "You'll wake him up."

Mordred grinned, half in amusement at his wife's remark, half in pure adoration of the little human on his arm. He stood up and sat down carefully on the bed beside Lethira, nuzzling Derek's nose again.

"Go to sleep," he told her. "You'll see sense in the morning."

"Mmm," said Lethira.

Mordred put one arm around her, and looked at the babe in her arms and the babe in his, and felt that he had never been been so whole in all his life. He was satisfied with good, he was brimming over with it.

And he held his family while they slept, while the fire died and the night waned and out in the barn a small black-and-white cat nursed her first litter. His life seemed to have opened up before him. His heart was full.