For the first months of her life, there was only the slow, humbling business of learning a body from the inside out, and if there exists a more thoroughly undignified process available to any creature, human or otherwise, no one has yet come forward to report on it with any real enthusiasm. Every single person who has ever lived was made to do this same tedious work, and almost none of them remember having done it, which is very probably, on balance, for the best.
It was not learning she was aware of, at the time, only a long and unglamorous string of small failures strung together with the occasional small victory, none of it possessing so much as a name yet. Her hand would not close around the wooden spoon Elen dangled patiently in front of her, and she would cry about it, loudly and without shame, the same way any baby cries about anything held just out of reach, until the crying itself wore her down and she fell asleep still reaching, her small hand curled in the air as though it had simply forgotten to give up the argument. The grown-ups around her made sounds that clearly meant something, she could feel that much, could feel the shape of the meaning pressing against her without ever quite managing to catch hold of it, and this not-catching was its own particular, helpless kind of maddening, all urgency and no words whatsoever to carry that urgency anywhere useful.
She was not, however, a solemn or gloomy child, whatever people would later come to whisper about her. She laughed often, and easily, at all the ordinary things that make babies laugh: the family dog's ears flopping wildly when it shook itself dry by the fire, her father's exaggerated look of horror when he pretended to steal her nose and found it, every single time, entirely to his surprise, still attached to her face.
"You're frowning at her again," Elen said one evening, not unkindly, watching him watch the baby sleep in her basket by the hearth.
"I'm not frowning." He was. He knew perfectly well that he was; a man can generally tell when his own face has gone and betrayed him, it being one of the few honest witnesses left to him past a certain age. "I keep waiting to feel the thing I'm apparently supposed to feel, looking at her. The wrongness of it, is what the old man called it. He made it sound as though I ought to feel that every single time I looked at her face."
"And do you?"
Aedan turned the question over seriously, the way he turned over most things Elen asked him, weighing it rather than reaching immediately for whatever answer might end the conversation fastest. "No," he admitted, finally. "I feel like a man looking at his own daughter, mostly. Even though he tells me she isn't, not by blood, and I believe him well enough, since I've no particular reason not to. I just don't know what to do with the two of those things sitting together at once. Knowing it, on the one hand. And not feeling it, on the other."
"Then don't do anything with them," Elen said, coming to sit close beside him, her shoulder settling against his. "Feel whatever it is you feel. Know whatever it is you know. I don't see any reason they have to agree with one another, for you to still be her father, in every single way that's actually going to matter to her."
He did not have a spoken answer for that, but he reached over instead and laid his broad, calloused hand gently against the baby's small chest, feeling the fast, steady rise and fall of her breathing beneath his palm, and let that stand in, quietly, for whatever words he still hadn't managed to find.
By eight months old she was pulling herself upright against the stones of the hearth, wobbling badly, catching herself, and wobbling again, the whole small production accompanied by a furious little noise of protest every single time gravity won yet another round, and gravity, it ought to be said fairly in its own defense, won nearly every round available to it, being a considerably more experienced opponent than any eight-month-old had much right to expect fair treatment from. She fell more often than most children her age, if Elen was honest about the matter, largely because she flatly refused to stay sitting down anywhere it might have been considered safe to sit. Aedan took to hovering nearby with his arms half-raised, ready to catch her at the first sign of trouble, and found, more often than not, that she would rather take the tumble and simply try again on her own than let him.
"She's got her mother's temper," he said one evening, laughing despite the small bruise already darkening on her forehead, scooping her up regardless before she could protest too loudly about it.
"She's got her own temper," Elen said, taking the baby from him and pressing a kiss to the bruise, the same way she had for every one of her children's small hurts before this one, as though the kiss itself really were half of the whole medicine. "Let her keep it. The world will smooth some of it off her soon enough on its own. No sense in hurrying that particular process along."
By her first year she was walking, badly, arms held wide for balance, prone to sitting down hard and unexpectedly in the very middle of a room, as if her own legs had simply changed their minds partway through a step and neglected to properly inform the rest of her about it. Words came more slowly than the walking had, though when they finally arrived, they came in small, careful bursts, as though she wanted to be entirely certain of a word before she would trust it out of her own mouth, a caution one does not typically find in the very young, who as a general rule will say almost anything at all, true or otherwise, provided it earns them some kind of reaction. Her very first word was dog. She pointed insistently at the old hound stretched by the fire until someone finally confirmed she had gotten the word right, and then repeated it, thoroughly delighted with herself, for the better part of an entire afternoon, until even patient Aedan finally begged her to please find some second word to be excited about instead.
The second word, when it did finally arrive some weeks later, was her mother's name, said clumsily, half-swallowed, on a morning grey and thick with rain, both arms reaching up out of her basket because Elen had taken just a moment too long to notice she was stirring. Elen would go on remembering that particular morning for years afterward, not because anything remarkable had happened in it, but precisely because of how ordinary it was, how plainly and achingly ordinary, a small voice calling out for its mother in a room that smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool, with no omens anywhere in it, only a child who wanted, quite simply, to be picked up and held.
"There you are," Elen said, lifting her, and the baby pressed her face into her mother's shoulder with the boneless, total relief of a child who had only ever wanted exactly that, and nothing at all more complicated than that, not that particular morning, and not for a good while yet to come.
It would be some months more before the old man began coming by more often than plain courtesy really required of him, before Elen started to notice the particular way he watched her daughter from across the room, clearly weighing something in his mind that he never once said fully aloud. But on that grey, unremarkable morning, none of that had yet found its way into the house. There was only a mother and her sleepy child, and a father standing quietly in the doorway who had stopped frowning some time ago without ever quite noticing he'd stopped, and the rain outside, and the woodsmoke inside, and nothing more being asked of either parent than exactly that small, quiet moment, which, considering everything that would eventually be asked of their daughter in the years still to come, turned out to be a small and entirely unrepeatable kind of mercy.