I sat there in silence. Granny, the aged elven matriarch, sat in silence too. The chair creaked as I shifted slightly, trying to get comfortable. It was hard to find a good position when your stomach looked like you'd swallowed a watermelon.
She looked down at her notes, back up at me, and back down. She sighed. "Okay."
"Okay?" I asked, not sure what to make of the one-word answer. "Okay, what?"
She rubbed her eyes. "I just needed a moment to process that. That was a lot."
"I did warn you that it was quite a story," I told her. I could feel a blush creeping up my face and warming my ears.
"That you did, Amaranthea, that you did." She seemed to rally, and sat up straighter. "I've been keeping track of the days going by and, assuming your recollection is good, I've built a bit of a timeline here. It's very approximate, but it's the best we've got. A half-elf's menstrual cycle is all over the place at the best of times, but if we take the averages we can get likely ranges."
I nodded, following along. She had laid some of this out before, but as she turned the notebook around to face me, I saw how much more detail she'd added.
"Between week six and seven are the likeliest, and it was during that time that you had sex with the satyr and the dwarf. It's true that the dwarf pulled out before finishing, but it's still technically possible to get pregnant in that situation. Fortunately, I think we can rule out your Captain Rockbeard, because the odds of impregnation after a pull-out are much lower, and dwarf and elven bloodlines have a low rate of mixing."
"So that's one man off the list," I said, trying a smile. My smile met her stern face, sputtered out, and died.
"Yes, one man down. I still believe that we can rule your human ex-boyfriend out. Of the five remaining partners, the satyr is the most likely candidate. You had sex with him during this prime fertile period," she tapped a spot on her timeline with one bony finger as she spoke. "But we don't know for sure if that's when you were ovulating. If it happened a bit earlier, it could well have been one of the three orcs whose seed quickened in you."
I nodded, looking at the diagram she'd drawn. "But if I ovulated later than the six to seven week mark, it could have been..."
"The minotaur?" she confirmed, and I nodded. She settled back in her chair and sighed again. "I truly don't know. I've heard of very few reports of a human laying with a minotaur, and never an elf, and none of those stories mention progeny. These reports were all third-hand information, so they wouldn't be reliable anyway. Whether a human or half-elf could procreate with a minotaur..." she shook her head again. "It depends on what exactly a minotaur is."
"How do you mean?"
"One piece of lore claims that minotaurs were once humans, cursed or blessed by the gods to have bestial form. If that's the case, then they are almost certainly able to breed with humans. If minotaurs are instead a fully separate race from a different branch of the tree of life, then it is very unlikely that cross-breeding is possible."
"So, Tialdin is a 'maybe' on our list?"
"I'm afraid so. I just don't have the data I would need to make an inference there. He was during the later end of our assumed fertile range, but it's certainly a viable possibility."
"How much further does that 'late range' of the possible conception extend?"
She frowned down at the notebook, and dragged a thin finger along the line. "It's possible that you ovulated as late as week eight after your period, which would be day fifty-six, in which case conception could have occurred as late as day fifty-eight." She looked up from her notebook and turned her frown towards me. "Why? You didn't have another sexual partner before then, did you?"
"I, uh..." I stammered, looking away from her, and she sighed.
"Who did you sleep with? And more importantly, what?"
********
Once you've seen one port city, you've seen them all. While I was first meandering the streets of Limani, I had been stricken by the differences in architecture, clothing, speech, food, and just about everything else. But after a few hours, I realized it was the exact same as Newport: fisheries and docks close to the water, with taverns that appeal to sailors, then mercantile stretches along the big roads to and from the docks, and nicer homes up the hill. The food tasted exotic, but it was still mostly fish-based like other port cities.
After getting myself some skewered and roasted salmon, I tracked down a cartographer and got the best map she had to offer, which used up most of my remaining coin. Finally, sticky from sweat and sea air, I needed a bath.
Unlike my home country, Patridike seemed to have less regard for modesty. On a stretch of lawn I saw a woman lounging in the sun, wearing nothing but a small towel on her lower quarters. I managed to avoid stopping and staring at exposed breasts, but it took an effort of will.
I found more people able to speak my language than I'd expected, and I quickly learned that bathing came in three varieties in Patridike: small tubs in your own home, expensive private baths that catered to nobles and rich merchants, and public bathhouses. Inviting myself into someone's home wasn't going to work out well, and I certainly didn't have enough money left to go to a fancy bathhouse, so I managed to track down a public building that had a low enough cost while still keeping an adequate reputation.
I stepped into the building and immediately appreciated the refuge from the sun. It was a long building broken into the front area where one pays their fee and leaves their shoes, a small storage area for your goods, and then three large pools of water.
One of the pools had a family in it, and I passed them by. Of the two remaining pools, one was a bit above room temperature, probably heated through an alchemical or magical source, while the other one was icy cold on my foot when I tested it. I decided on the warmer pool, and stripped down beside it. I folded up my clothes and set them on top of my shoes within easy reach of the pool, and walked down the ramp into the warm waters.
The pool was simple in its construction: a rectangular shaped container sunk into the floor, about four feet deep in the middle. At one end there was a ramp for getting in and out, at the other end a pipe fed fresh hot water.
I picked a spot about halfway along, where the water was warm but not uncomfortably so. The wall of the pool had a sort of bench under the water, so one can sit while they soak, and I happily settled onto it. The warm water started working its magic on my muscles right away, and I sighed happily as I felt myself loosening up.
