"Before Victor found me," Emmet said, "there was something else."
He looked at Tierney.
Tierney looked back at him with the green eyes that were holding whatever they needed to hold and waiting for whatever came next.
"After the dark war ended," Emmet said, "I was moving. Not toward anything specific — I had lost the specific things I had been moving toward, the way you do when a war ends and the shape of the world it leaves behind is not the shape you were fighting to reach. I was just moving." He paused. "I was in a city I won't name because it doesn't matter. I was in the part of it that was trying to rebuild itself. And I saw a pixie."
The room went a particular kind of still.
Carlyle was very still.
"She was carrying a child," Emmet said. "An infant, small enough that she was carrying it in both arms, moving fast through the street the way creatures moved when they didn't want to be seen. I knew what she was. I knew what it meant — that she had a child and was moving with it and the child was not hers." He looked at his hands. "I didn't think. I just moved."
He was quiet for a moment.
"She didn't fight me for him," Emmet said. "That surprised me. She looked at me with the pixie eyes — the specific kind of looking they do, like they're reading something in you that you can't read in yourself — and then she put him in my arms and left." He paused. "I stood in the street with this infant in my arms and I had no idea what I was going to do and he looked at me with those eyes—" He stopped.
The room waited.
Carlyle was watching Emmet's face with the expression of someone listening to the story of their own beginning and finding that it was not what they had imagined it to be but was somehow more than what they had imagined, the specific quality of a truth that is larger than the version of it you had been carrying.
"He had red hair," Emmet said. "Even then. Barely any of it, but red." The corner of his mouth moved. "I thought — I didn't know what I thought. I thought I would find someone to take him. Someone who was looking for a child, someone who had the right circumstances. I was not those things. I had nothing." He looked at Carlyle. "But I had heard — before Victor, before all of it — I had heard that you had a baby, Tierney. That you had a baby and lost one."
Tierney's breath was very controlled.
"I named him Carlyle," Emmet said. "Because it felt like — because I still had a reason to keep going after everything that happened when the dark war ended. And he was part of the reason. A new part. And I wanted to carry the old reason alongside the new one."
The room was very quiet.
Tierney was looking at Emmet and at Carlyle and at the space between them, the specific geometry of a truth she had not had before and was now holding for the first time, understanding for the first time what her son's beginning had looked like from the outside.
Carlyle was looking at his hands.
Then he looked at Emmet.
"You named me after the one she lost," Carlyle said.
"Yes," Emmet said.
"For her."
"For her," Emmet said. "And because it felt right. Because you felt like a beginning and I wanted to mark a beginning with the name of something that had already mattered."
Carlyle was quiet for a long moment.
Then he nodded once.
Once, slow, the nod of someone receiving something they had not known they needed and finding that the receiving was not painful but was its own kind of arriving.