Dierdre had managed to get herself out of bed, and dressed, and moved to a chair, where she was bent squinting over a half-sewn little gown. She jabbed her finger, hissed, and stuck it in her mouth, sucking on it with a grimace.

Niabheara, acting on the intuition that was second nature to Starling and Morgana but only an occasional glimmer in herself, gently pushed open the door without knocking, sensing, somehow, that Dierdre had only just gotten herself comfortably arranged. "Hallo?" She stepped inside. "Oh no, you're sewing. I'll put up a barricade and warn the village."

Dierdre snorted and held up the tiny gown. "You're horrible," she said. "I'm trying to take your advice and keep occupied. It's perfectly serviceable."

"It's not what you're sewing, it's that you're sewing at all. Your temper is as sharp as your needle." Niabheara smiled at the little gown, touching a sleeve. "I need to put my little loom back together. I think I can make a pair of blankets before the babies are too old to fit under them."

Dierdre grinned. "You can make two different colors so we can tell the babies apart," Goneril answered. "That would be lovely; I'd like that very much."

"One blue with white, and one white with blue, I was thinking." Niabheara hooked her ankles around a low footstool and dragged it close enough to sit on, crouched at Dierdre's knee. "I sent to town for a nurse for Marcello's sister's baby. The poor girl is o'erwhelmed."

Dierdre sghed, and gave Niabheara a pained look. "Don't remind me," she said. "That's going to be me sooner than I'd like to think. She needs a nurse for...for one baby? Even with all of her family about?"

"She's not bonding well," she said, "and the baby has colic, or something; and she's already worn thin worrying about whether she should give the baby up and go home, or e'en if she can go home."

"She's...you think she might give the baby away?" Dierdre asked, raising an eyebrow. "What...it's a girl, isn't it? I can think of half-a-dozen people who would take her. My mother would take her. She's wanted another baby for years."

"It's one of the things we discussed," she said, then added, with frustration, "And it's another one of those that apparently isn't done with tallfolk. She thinks she's a terrible person for e'en considering it. I e'en offered that Marcello and I should keep it here, with us, so that if nothing else she could see it again, perhaps when she's older and ready for it. But that's not what I want," she admitted. "Not the least reason being that it would be terrible for a child to grow up in one house, then have someone completely new come along and take it back. I remember how I felt when I thought that."