Wisteria proved to be pregnant, to her and Nikola’s great delight. Justin pretended that the whole business did not trouble him, with an indifferent success that, itself, began to wear on him. He had performed a service at his spouses’ request, the results of which thrilled them. He trusted them implicitly. They had solid, well-thought-out reasons for believing all would be well. Their plans for raising the child were sound. His role at this juncture was merely to make the occasional supportive noise.

And it was not as if he hadn’t had an entire lifetime of practice at feigning amiability regardless of his actual mood.

Yet it was a relief when Nikola and Wisteria returned to Fireholt at the end of the season. Justin knew he’d been more snappish and irritable than usual, and worse than that: he had let it show. It was as if his subconscious mind had determined that their relationship was doomed and was doing its best to make that the reality by sabotaging their interactions.

After they’d left and he returned to the familiar rhythm of business and politics, Justin was able to put the subject from his mind. Correspondence sometimes forced him to confront it again, and he missed them both, especially alone in his chambers at night. But these were familiar difficulties of the sort he’d long been accustomed to managing, and caused no real trouble.

He fared tolerably well during the shorter visits in the next several months. These happened under various unimpeachable pretexts: they came to a house party he held at the start of hunting season; Justin had to inspect the progress of the mine at Fireholt that he held joint ownership in; they were in Gladeton so Wisteria could attend the Vasilver Trading annual shareholder meeting.

But when they came to Comfrey Viscountcy for a month in the summer, Wisteria’s pregnancy was far more obvious, and Justin found his mind frequently re-playing some of his least favorite childhood recollections of his parents. A part of him kept wondering, not just if the three of them were headed on the same disastrous course, but if he had wronged his mother for all those years. Why did I hate her for being intemperate in her passions, when I have never been temperate in mine? Why did I, who have never been faithful to anyone, despise her infidelity? Did I hate her because I am just like her, and could not bear to see my reflection?

Justin had always known he was a hypocrite; hypocrisy was a natural part of the human condition. But this notion, along with the irrational fear of ending as she had, of giving life to a child who would grow to despise him, plagued him.

One night, Nikola came to Justin’s bedchamber alone. It was a pleasant summer evening. Both windows as well as the doors to his second-floor balcony stood open, screened by translucent white windsilk to keep out insects. The balcony overlooked Comfrey’s private hunting preserve, a thousand acres of forested wilderness. The curtains on his bed were tied back, stirring in the light breeze. Justin woke from a light doze to the pressure of Nikola sitting on the edge of the bed, the door to the hidden passageway half-open in the wall beyond. Justin pushed himself up with one hand and reached for Nikola with the other. “I did not think you were coming tonight.”

“Wisteria isn’t.” The pregnancy was proceeding smoothly, with no more than minor problems that were easily resolved by petitioning. But it still took energy, and Wisteria had been sleeping more of late. Nikola took his hand and leaned closer. “I want you.”

“Then take me,” Justin murmured in answer, pulling his husband into his embrace. Though ultimately, it was he who took Nikola, his husband eager and pliable in his arms, every caress and kiss a silent invitation, offering more.

Afterwards, Justin rolled onto his back and pulled Nikola over to nestle against his chest. They lay together entwined in comfortable silence for some moments. Justin thought about asking Nikola to sleep there for the night. It was relatively safe; Justin had his guests habitually lock their bedroom doors, so servants wouldn’t stray in, and the hidden passage would let Nikola return to it in the morning without risk of encountering anyone. Before he’d formed the words to ask, Nikola shifted to rest his cheek against Justin’s, then spoke. “Justin, I – I am going to tell you a thing, because I know I can see it and you cannot.” Justin stiffened underneath him, and Nikola kissed him, hugging fiercely. “It doesn’t mean – oh, curse it all.” Nikola sat up next to him. “Remember during Ascension, when I told you that I could see you had some old traumas and that I thought you were coping with them in an ordinary and healthy way? And that if they turned out to be too challenging than the Savior could help. So. They look worse now. Which does not mean you need help, and if you are content as things are, so am I. But it does mean that if you would like help, I…am offering.”

Justin shifted as well, rolling on his side with some pillows stuffed beneath him, so that he was half-sitting and half-leaning on the headboard. He watched Nikola by the faint bluish glow of a night gaslight. “What does it look like?”

“Hard to describe.” Nikola gestured with his hands, drawing shapes in the air. “This is wrong, but maybe it’s good enough to give you an idea. Imagine that a brand-new trauma looks like an ugly jagged piece of glass in the mind. It cuts into the other mindshapes, damaging them and causing pain. As time passes, the mind will develop in any one of a variety of ways. It may layer a protective shell around the trauma, turning it into a pearl that nestles among the adjacent mindshapes: perhaps altering those shapes but doing no real harm. Adjacent mind shapes might shrink back or wither to avoid contact with the trauma: this may or may not cause the trauma to grow. The trauma may grow anyway, causing a kind of…bleeding? Scarring? in other shapes. The trauma may shrink or disintegrate entirely, remaining bits absorbed by other mindshapes.

“In your case: when I saw you before Ascension, you had a number of long-healed trauma-pearls. And no, I cannot tell with mindsense what caused them, or why they healed as they did. That’s ordinary, in any case. During Ascension, I saw that two of those pearl-casings had been damaged and bits of trauma were scraping at you again. Which is unpleasant but happens to everyone. Life is full of traumatic events. It looked like your mind was trying to wrap them back up in pearl encasement. Now – it looks like your mind has mostly encased one and been unable to encase the other. It’s grown, and it’s causing your mindshapes for confidence and pride to wither back from it.”

“Some might say that I could do with less confidence and pride.” Justin smiled.

“Yes, and they’d be wrong,” Nikola replied with a startling sharpness.

Justin raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know my arrogance was so endearing.”

“I love you as you are.” Nikola rested a hand on Justin’s cheek, tilting towards him until their foreheads touched. “You have accomplished a great deal and are possessed of many advantages. There is nothing unjustified in your pride or your confidence.”

Justin smiled again. “So. This…thing, that I cannot handle—”

“I didn’t say you cannot handle it. Only that the Savior will help, if you wish.”

“But it’s not like the last time, is it? Two years ago, when you told me that fear predisposed me to unjust rage. You did not wish to treat that. But this…”

Nikola took a deep breath. “It’s different. Your mindshapes for fear and anger – they’re actually less intertwined now than they were a couple of years ago, by the by – they’re unusual. But there’s nothing in them that’s causing clear harm. This…I can see it hurting you. Making you second-guess yourself, distrust your judgment, and weaken your ability to cope with ordinary nuisances. I – Savior, Justin, it’s your mind and I do not want you to change for me. I am not telling you to petition me or anyone else. This is trauma, not demonic possession. But no, I do not like what it is doing to you, and if you do not either I would be glad to call on the Savior on your behalf.”

Justin rolled to put his back against the pillows. “I feel the utter fool. It’s an absurd thing to even find an annoyance, much less to be traumatized by. ‘I impregnated my wife.’ What kind of man finds that traumatic?”

“It is not absurd, and that is hardly the root problem.” Nikola laid a hand on his chest, and Justin could imagine his glower even if the bedroom was too dim to see it. “This kind of difficulty – curse it, if you had a broken leg you’d petition. You’d not limp along thinking it a sign of weakness that you ought to overcome through force of will.”

Justin laughed. “Actually…”

“What?”

“When I was sixteen I took a tumble during a backball match and landed badly. My leg hurt afterwards but I thought it a mere bruise. Or an ache from over-exertion. My coach told me I needed to toughen up when I mentioned it was still troublesome a few days later. I didn’t see a healer for two weeks. In fairness, he said it was a very slight fracture. Or rather, had started as a slight fracture before I limped about on it for two weeks. The healer was not best pleased with me.”

“Very well,” Nikola said in strangled tones that suggested the exact opposite of ‘very well’. “But you’d not do that again. Correct?”

“Well…” Justin began, then laughed as Nikola seized his shoulder and shook him.

“You are impossible. And impossibly stubborn.”

“What happened to all that business about this being my mind and my decision and you’d abide by it?” Justin asked, pulling Nikola into his arms and caressing his back to show that he was only teasing.

The slender man burrowed down against Justin’s chest, face warm against his skin. “I will,” he said, discontent. “I just want you to say no for a good reason, such as ‘I believe I have more to learn from this experience’ or ‘I think I should second-guess myself more often’ or ‘this may be the closest I ever get to humility’ or really pretty much anything other than ‘It’s unmanly to petition’.”

“It is not unmanly to petition,” Justin said, and his husband relaxed against him until Justin added, “if one has a legitimate problem.”

“And this – argh. Did I ever tell you about the time I attempted suicide, Justin?”

The pleasant summer breeze from the balcony suddenly felt icy on his skin. Involuntarily, Justin tightened his embrace. “What do you mean?”

“I suppose I didn’t.” Nikola ran a hand along his side, comfortingly. “When I was thirteen, I contrived an infatuation on one of the older boys at academy. At first I thought it mere admiration. He was tall, handsome, athletic, and captain of the school fencing team. When he befriended me, it was a little like getting to meet you, I imagined—”

“Wait, you thought about me when you were thirteen?”

Nikola laughed. “I’d idolized you since I was nine. Not, granted, in the same way I did when I was older. But yes. With Ke – with this boy, I had an inkling, but I tried to pretend to myself it wasn’t the case. But I think he always knew.”

In the silence that followed, Justin smoothed Nikola’s long hair away from his face. “Are you withholding his name so I cannot hunt him down and find some pretext to duel him to the death?”

Nikola started. “What? Why would you do that?”

“If he did something that made you wish you were dead—”

“No! That is…it wasn’t like that. We were friends. No doubt he did keep me about to run errands for him and to cadge snacks from the kitchen staff. But he was kind, and safeguarded me from bullies. That’s – sort of how it started. I was small for my age – yes, I used to be short, don’t laugh – and he tried to show me how to defend myself in schoolyard fights. How to break a hold and the like. He was fearless about touching me, and I found it very…er…exciting. I suppose he did too. At some point while we were wrestling about, I grabbed him here—” Nikola cupped his hand over Justin’s groin by way of demonstration “—in a kind of confluence of desire and accident. I blushed at once and tried to apologize, but he just grinned and put his hand over mine to keep it there. Then moved my hand up and down. Stroking him. After that first time, we did quite a lot of that sort of thing. Only hands and grinding against one another until climax, we truly had no idea what we were about, but still. I knew it was wrong, I was terrified of being found out, half-convinced the Savior would hate me for it, and I could not stop wanting more.

“We carried on like this to the end of term. Throughout, I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I would want this sort of thing, why I would keep doing it. I am a mind-healer, and you’d think I could tell, but nothing in my mind looked wrong to me. The Savior would not allow me to alter my libido. I even tried to destroy it at one point. I have no notion why I thought the Savior would accept that. Part of me wanted to talk to my great-grandmother, but I was too ashamed at the idea of her knowing. I could not bear even the possibility that she might be able to look at my mind and guess at my desires. Justin, I was so ashamed to seek treatment that I sought to kill myself in preference.”

Justin swallowed. “Surely – surely you could tell that was madness?”

“Yes…I had some mixed-up notion that I deserved it. That it was my fault I’d done this terrible thing and couldn’t cure myself, and the madness was my punishment. Or that dying was my punishment.”

It was hard to listen, to imagine this man he had loved so long near to death. I might never have met you. “What happened?”

“When I went back to Anverlee for the end of term break, I made the attempt. Tied a stone to my leg and jumped from a footbridge. And regretted it at once. I was desperately trying to untie the stone when Jill rescued me from the river. She was furious. Threatened to tell my parents and carry me by the scruff of my neck to my great-grandmother, if I did not petition of my own volition.”

“Good for her,” Justin said, gruffly. “What did your great-grandmother do? Did she ever…learn the why of it?”

“I did not confess it to her, no. I told her I felt as if I had failed everyone who mattered to me, and as I could not fix the flaw in myself I’d wondered if it would not be better were I dead.

“She replied, ‘Sweet Nikki, I don’t expect the Savior to give me another century and someone is going to have to take care of Fireholt and her people when I’m gone. That means we can’t be losing you, now, and your father is simply going to have to cope with whatever little flaws you might have.’”

“…your father? How did he come into this?”

“He did not; she was guessing. And wide of the mark, but I didn’t correct her because I didn’t actually want her to know the truth. Granny Astraia’s treatment was to alter the shapes of my conscience and my loyalty, strange as that may seem. When I asked why, she said that I was vulnerable to ‘excessive and inappropriate guilt’ and that my ‘eagerness to please was too great’,” Nikola half-smiled, the shadows on his face shifting in the dim light. “She patted my cheek and said, ‘I’ll miss my sweet pliable baby boy, but you deserve better.’ And the Savior must have agreed, since He allowed the change. What I want you to realize, Justin, is that minds react in vastly different ways to different forms of stress. Did you ever attempt self-harm on account of an intimate encounter with a man?”

Justin stifled a snort, and shook his head. “No. Not that I thought I was behaving well, exactly. But it’s one of those rules that are made for other people. They don’t apply to men of our rank, not as long as one is willing to be discreet.”

“Ha. You know how you struggle to credit that I genuinely wish to raise your and Wisteria’s child? I daresay I find it just as amazing that you could reconcile yourself so easily to your desires. Not that I would wish otherwise for you.” Nikola drew circles against Justin’s chest with one slender finger, twisting curls of chest hair around it. “But when you say that it’s unmanly to petition for a mental difficulty – you may as well say that I am unmanly, Justin. Because I did.”

“That is entirely different. To start, you were thirteen and by definition not a man.” Justin chuckled as he felt Nikola sticking out his tongue against his skin. “More importantly, ‘attempted suicide’ is the very essence of a legitimate problem. One cannot get much more serious than a mental illness that is trying to kill one.” He curled muscular arms about Nikola and hugged his husband fiercely. “I did not realize how much I owed to your great-grandmother. And to Fela Anverlee. Savior, Nikola, I am glad you did not succeed.”

“Me too.” They snuggled in silence for a moment. “Justin…”

Justin kissed the top of Nikola’s head. “Peace, Nikola. I take your meaning. ‘But my house oughtn’t be on fire’ is a terrible reason to send the fire brigade away as it burns. And to be perfectly honest, I am heartily sick of not feeling myself. When did you want to treat me?”

Nikola raised himself on his forearms and peered into Justin’s face. “Truly? You do not mind?”

“Truly. And I do mind. I am still annoyed with myself for not managing better and for hanging onto this ridiculous obsession. But I am not sixteen, and I am not going to punish myself for weakness by remaining weak. Fix it. Please. Thank you.”

Pale fingers caressed Justin’s cheek and forehead, smoothing dark hair back from his face. Nikola exhaled in relief. “I can do it now, if you like. And you’re sure. I’m not tired, and it will take a little time but it’s not an exertion. It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep during, either.”

“Now is fine. And I am sure.”

Nikola smiled. “All right.” A sudden warmth filled Justin, a feeling of lightness and love. It was more akin to the sensation of the Savior’s presence during the Blessing of Newlant than to the comforting touch of a physical healer remedying an injury. But this was far more intimate than either. Justin felt as if it were not the Savior’s love suffusing him, but Nikola’s. Nothing could be more natural. He had not expected to be comfortable enough to sleep, but safe and secure in his husband’s care, he did.