Dusk came, and with it came the evening star, a beacon above the horizon. He hadn’t seen it for weeks. According to Liath it had been hiding behind the sun, but now it shone reassuringly from the safe harbor of the constellation known as the Sisters, protector of women.
Something shifted then, a last gasp, an unloosening, or perhaps it wasn’t Somorhas’ influence at all, perhaps it was the infusion of wormwood that Meriam got down Liath’s parched throat. Meriam greased her hands with pig’s fat and felt up the passageway, got a grip on something. By this time Sanglant was holding Liath up bodily on the birthing stool. She was too weak to sit on her own, and her entire weight sagged against him.
“Come, my love,” he said. “Push.”
The baby’s feet came first, then a rump, then a body all smeary-white. Liath barely had enough energy to bear down to get the head out. After that she fainted and she bled, and he thought maybe he would faint, too, not at the sight of blood but out of fear. He had never been this afraid in his life.
Meriam handed him the baby brusquely. “Wash it,” she said, and she set to work kneading Liath’s flaccid belly until the afterbirth sluiced out with another gush of bright red blood, Humming, the old woman bound a poultice over Liath’s groin as if that might stem the bleeding.
“Mind the baby!” she said sternly, for he had been staring in horror at his unconscious wife all this while. Jolted into obedience by her curt tone, he looked down into a pair of eyes so startling a green that he thought for an instant that they weren’t eyes at all but chips of emerald. He went outside, unsteady on his feet but with a good grip on her, as tiny as she was, and washed her in a basin filled with cold spring water.
She squalled mightily.
“Good lungs,” said Heribert, who was dancing from one foot to the other, trying to get a good look. “She sounds strong.”
“She’s a blessing,” murmured Sanglant, kissing the tiny creature on its wrinkled forehead.
“What will you name her? It’s your right as her father to name her.”
He looked up then, surprised. One of her tiny, perfect hands found his little finger and clutched it. She had the stubborn grasp of a warrior born. “I just did,” he said, knowing the words as truth. “‘Blessing.’”
Liath was too weak to nurse the infant. Meriam tried nettle tea and parsley, but after a few beads of clear fluid welled up on her nipples, she went dry and no matter what Meriam tried, fennel, strips of meat mashed into a soft pulp, an infusion of vervain or of chaste tree, her breasts produced nothing more. She slept almost constantly and sometimes it was hard to rouse her even to get her to take wine and porridge. At times she burned with fever; at times she lay as cold as death except for the slight exhalation of her breath.
When she burned, she was incoherent, tossing and turning and babbling at intervals, lost to him. “The heavens run swifter than any mill wheel, as deep under the Earth as above it. But they and their creatures are eternal. The Earth is mortal. Yet, behold, she departeth very suddenly. What is this ribbon of light tunning through the heavens, disturbing them? It has only one side, and it never ends. It only returns again to its starting place.”
Sometimes, when she raved, unlit candles would come alight, or lamp wicks snap into life that hadn’t been burning before. At these times the servants fled from the hut, frightened. Only Jerna, who was braver now, would stay in the hut, always hovering hear the baby, stroking it, blowing its black cap of hair into wispy spikes and then smoothing it out again. She even curled around the baby’s cradle at night, an unearthly guardian, when Sanglant caught such sleep as he could, although his sleep was disturbed constantly either by the baby’s crying or by Liath’s sudden restless fevers.
Now and again Liath tried to show interest in the baby, but she would drift off at the exertion of letting it lie on her chest or, worse, break into a wheezing, weak cry because she couldn’t feed it. Then the crying would exhaust her and she would slip into a cold sleep, her hands like ice.
The baby squalled and squalled. Sanglant carried her in a sling against his chest, or on his hip, or settled in a rocking cradle that Heribert had devised, and everywhere he went the servants crowded round, trying to touch Blessing, so wildly curious at this apparition that they neglected their labors and Severus complained peevishly that his bread was burned, his porridge cold, and the blankets left in disarray on his pallet when they ought to have been neatly folded after he rose in the morning.
At Meriam’s suggestion, Sanglant milked the goats, and they tried everything they could, heating the milk and dropping it in her mouth bead by bead, soaking the corner of a cloth in goat’s milk and putting it between her lips, molding a nipple out of sheep’s intestine for her to suck on. But she would only take a minuscule amount before turning her head away. Squalls turned to mewls and mewls to whimpers.
“Ah, well,” said Anne four days after its birth, observing the baby with equanimity. “It will die. That only goes to show that it was never meant to be born.”
He felt the growl slip from him, enough that his Eika dog stood and barked, enough that Anne’s new attendant, the black hound, growled and lunged for him.
“Sit!” said Anne, and the hound sat. She had not yet named it, nor did she seemed inclined to do so. But she only smiled at Sanglant, and it seemed to him that she was mocking him, waiting to see him fall apart in a rage as he watched the life leach out of his precious daughter.
But fear and desperation had healed him somewhat—he hadn’t had nightmares since the day Blessing was born—and now fury banished the old instincts. He set a hand on the head of his dog to calm it and looked Anne straight in the face.
“Do you have so little feeling that you would stand by and let your own granddaughter die?”
“God’s will is unknowable.”
“Then if you have so little love in your heart, think instead of the gold torque you wear at your throat. Don’t you have a responsibility to your kin to keep your lineage alive?”
Now she was far more interested than she had ever been in the child. “What do you mean, Prince Sanglant?”
“Since the day we met, I have wondered to which royal lineage you owe your blood. If I’m right, then it makes no sense to me why you would not make every effort to keep this infant alive. Is it possible that you aren’t Emperor Taillefer’s granddaughter?”
“What makes you think that I am?” she said, but he saw that he had surprised her, and by that reaction he saw that his blow had hit true.
“Who else could you be? You aren’t of Varrish kin because they’re gone except for my aunt Sabella, her daughter Princess Tallia, and her poor, idiot husband who isn’t fit to rule. You’re not of Wendish blood because I know all my kin. All the Salian princesses whether married or unmarried or given to the church were discussed by my father’s council after Queen Sophia died, from the eldest old crone of sixty to the girl of nine, because they wondered if there was one suitable for him to marry. A woman of your age and appearance was never mentioned. In Karrone they dare not wear the gold torque. Nor do the royal houses of the eastern realms decorate themselves in that way. The Alban queens wear armbands, not torques, to show their breeding. I admit you might be Aostan, but according to every rumor the royal house of Aosta was wiped out except for Queen Adelheid.” He smiled a little, thinking that if not for Liath, he might have been bedding Queen Adelheid now. Yet if not for Liath, he would still have been chained to Bloodheart’s throne, a madman. “Who else can you be? St. Radegundis was pregnant when Taillefer died. No one knows what became of the child born to her. But you do.”
she burned, she was incoherent, tossing and turning and babbling at intervals, lost to him. “The heavens run swifter than any mill wheel, as deep under the Earth as above it. But they and their creatures are eternal. The Earth is mortal. Yet, behold, she departeth very suddenly. What is this ribbon of light tunning through the heavens, disturbing them? It has only one side, and it never ends. It only returns again to its starting place.”
Sometimes, when she raved, unlit candles would come alight, or lamp wicks snap into life that hadn’t been burning before. At these times the servants fled from the hut, frightened. Only Jerna, who was braver now, would stay in the hut, always hovering hear the baby, stroking it, blowing its black cap of hair into wispy spikes and then smoothing it out again. She even curled around the baby’s cradle at night, an unearthly guardian, when Sanglant caught such sleep as he could, although his sleep was disturbed constantly either by the baby’s crying or by Liath’s sudden restless fevers.