Authors: Janny Wurts
Elaira shook her cuffs down to muffle her exposed hands. “How long did it take you to reach me?”
“I left our steading before nightfall. Snow fell too thick to know the time.” The boy clenched his jaw to still chattering teeth.
Questions remained, over details the midwife might have shared that would tell how far the aunt’s labor had progressed. Yet as the gelding breasted through chest-high drifts, or plowed a crumpled trail across the pristine vales carved trackless by the scouring winds, Elaira held her silence. Nothing but hurry could improve the babe’s threatened chances. If she failed to arrive at the steading before the moment of birth, the infant might already be lost. Rather than pass her distress to the boy, she reined alongside a thin stand of alder and picked off a branch for use as a switch to force the placid gelding to trot.
The night engulfed her in its landscape of silver and black. Amid the wind-tortured swirls of dry snow, the horse underneath her seemed all that moved in the world. If hare ventured out to gnaw bark and dry grasses, or if owls flew hunting mice, she saw no sign of anything alive. The tattered plumes of the gelding’s breath embroidered hoarfrost on her patched leggings. His hooves stitched the hillcrests to avoid the soft drifts, and the boy sent as guide lolled against her shoulder and slept. Where the ground was swept bare, she flicked the gelding to a canter, the glassy chink of snapped ice compacted under the thud of his passage. The gentle, rolling downlands stretched ahead and behind, sere under unrumpled snow, the rippled ink of oak copse and the grayed trunks of alders snagged through by tinseled skeins of moonlight. Over marshes herringboned in storm-trampled cattails, and past the treacherous, inky wells of sinkpools, Elaira forged ahead in relentless urgency.
The fugitive hours were her enemy. The sensitivity of her talent let her feel them, slipping inexorably by as sand would sieve through a net. She drew rein at the crest of a dale, confronted below by the steep flanks of a gully, and the snake black outlines of iced-over current. Araethura’s downs were famed for such, obstructions to any traveler unfamiliar with the lay of the valleys. Elaira cursed, remiss with herself. She ought to have wakened the boy sooner to ask guidance, for the narrow, swift-flowing streams which fed the River Arwent ran in treacherous, deep beds, too wide to jump over in snowy footing, and unsafe to attempt a crossing without a known ford. The same had been true of Daon Ramon, long ago, before the diversion of the mighty Severnir’s flood by Etarran townsmen had rendered that golden land barren.
Elaira gave Kaid’s shoulder a shake before the cold let her thoughts stray further. He said as she roused him, “No need to cross over. Our steading’s beyond that stand of alders.”
Shadows obscured the building’s outline, a patched, oblate pattern where drifts had silted over the mosaic outline of roof shakes against the vale beyond. From some hidden byre, the bleat of confined goats breathed in snatched fragments between gusts. Elaira shook up the tired roan, pressed his laboring step downslope. The pricked gleam of stars came and went as the alders closed around her, branches wind racked against the zenith. Two hours until dawn, her tuned awareness told her. That time of night when death was most apt to be welcomed by a body and spirit in distress.
She slid off the gelding’s back, left the reins to the boy, to dismount as he could and see it stabled. She wasted more seconds, fumbling to close the iron latch of an unfamiliar gate. Finally arrived in the sheltered space between hay byre and cottage, she thought for a second she heard the pained groans of a woman. Whether the sound was born of labor, or grief, or just a last, cruel trick of the wind, the weight of the moment crushed hope.
Stiff, stumbling across the rutted yard, Elaira tripped the door latch and shouldered her way across the threshold into the cottage of Kaid’s aunt. Darkness swallowed her. Cut off from the clean bite of winter, the closed-in smells of lavender and birch coals and the ingrained musk of grease left from simmering a thick mutton stew made the air seem stagnant and dead.
Then, muffled through board walls, the midwife’s voice arose in terse encouragement, “Bear ye down, dearie. The time’s come upon us, and naught can help now by delay.”
A brittle, third voice made shrill with the quaver of old age remarked, “Let the babe come. The
fferedon’li’s
here at last.” The chosen term was a bygone word for healer, corrupted from the Paravian phrase which meant ‘bringer of light.’
Elaira moved on, tense and sharply uneasy, unsure she merited the confidence and trust implied by the use of the ancient title. The room she crossed seemed too still, too close, its eaves sealed tight against the weather, as if the vast, rolling moorlands of Araethura were an adversary worthy of a barricade. The cottage held its carven chairs and furnishings the way a miser might grasp a hoard of coins. A close-fisted family, Elaira sensed through observation; not the sort to ask outsiders for favors. The trained perception of her gift allowed her to pass their cherished clutter without tripping, to avoid the spinning wheel and stool jutted between the wool press and a tub of
drawn water arrayed on the flagstones by the hearth. Boards creaked beneath her hurried tread. This steading was prosperous, to have glazed and shuttered windows, and better than a packed earthen floor. Her next step fell softened by a throw rug. The byre and fenced pastures should have prepared her for comforts. Those Araethurian herdsmen less well off let their stock graze at large on the moors.
A paneled door creaked open. Raw, orange light spilled out in a swathe to guide her through to the cottage’s back room, a walled-off chamber beneath the beams of the loft, where a row of younger children peered down, their expressions all dread and curiosity. Elaira caught another flurried gesture to avert spells before she gained her refuge in the bedchamber.
A tallow dip in a crockery bowl rinsed the broad shoulders of the midwife, a middle-aged matron of competent presence, sleeves rolled back over rawboned wrists where she knelt to administer to Kaid’s aunt. The woman she attended was small as a deer, dark haired and wrung limp, far beyond fear or caring whether an enchantress or a demon had entered. She crouched on the birthing stool, her face lined with sweat, a plait wisped into tangles draped over the wet shine of her collarbones. Her feet were bare. The rest of her torso was swathed in a crushed mass of down quilts, her shift of undyed linen rucked into bunches above her thighs.
As though sensitive to censure, the midwife said, “It’s hot enough she is, but the husband insisted.” Past a sound of disgust through her nose, she added, “Matter of her modesty,
he
claims. It’s all foolishness. No wisdom in it, but the man wasn’t born in these downs who isn’t bullheaded useless over the propriety of his wife.”
The girl on the stool convulsed in another contraction, long since too tired to scream.
“Steady,” murmured the midwife in a striking change of tone. Her beefy fingers closed over the straining woman’s in comfort. “Don’t falter now, dearie. Just bear down.” She held on, encouraging, thick wrists gouged in crescents where suffering fingernails had dug through the violent cramping pains, weathering the terrible, fraught minutes of waiting, holding, resisting nature’s overpowering drive to push out a babe long since ready to be born.
Over the girl’s exhausted grunting, from the corner by a clothes chest, a mass first mistaken for a bundle of old rags stirred to scratch. Attenuated, white-boned fingers went on to sketch out a blessing sign in welcome. Behind the gesture, faint in the gloom, a withered face surveyed the enchantress who came as healer.
The traditional seeress, Elaira identified, grateful at least for one
courtesy. A matriarch gifted with Sight attended every birth, death, and wedding held in these isolate downlands, her place to interpret the omens and deliver a guiding augury appropriate to the occasion. Elaira made her response in accentless Paravian. “May the future be blessed with good fortune.”
Then she knelt on the boards beside the midwife, and caught the laboring woman’s other, clammy hand in reassurance. The wavering glow of the tallow dips threw a sultry gleam off the crown of the babe’s head, just emerged and cupped within the midwife’s other, guiding hand, which pressed gently downward to ease the child’s shoulder past the bone beneath the pelvic girdle.
“Ath preserve,” Elaira murmured. “I’m not too late to try and help.”
The laboring woman gasped a question.
“Lie easy,” Elaira told her. “Let the midwife instruct you. If all goes well, your babe will stay living and healthy.”
She straightened, unslung her satchel from her shoulder, and shed her snow-dampened mantle. While she struggled to unfasten the thong knots with chilled fingers, she added quick, low instructions to the midwife. “Now the birth is accomplished, cut and tie the cord as usual. But do not stimulate the child. It must take no first breath, nor rouse itself and cry before I can clear the fluid from its air passage.”
The midwife raised no question in protest. Quietly busy with towels and knife, she knew best of any which complications lay beyond reach of her knowledge; had seen warning enough when the mother’s water had broken, clogged and discolored. The trauma of birthing had stressed the unborn babe and caused it to void its bowels before it could be pushed from the womb. The fluid which had cushioned its growing had become fouled by its own excrement. If it chanced to draw such taint into its lungs, the newborn would perish of suffocation. No herbal remedy in her store of experience would change the outcome. The child would die within minutes.
If the Koriani witches knew a spell to avert tragedy, the midwife was too practical to spurn the aid of the one who had recently taken residence amid the fells.
But Elaira did not reach to free the chain at her neck from which hung the crystal her order used to refine magics. She rummaged instead through her satchel, found the thin, curved tube borrowed from the apparatus of her still, then warmed the cruel, outside cold of it away between her shaking hands. Methodical, she rinsed it clean of contaminants in a dish filled with her precious store of alcohol.
The laboring woman moaned through locked teeth at the weakened spasm of another contraction.
“No need to push further, dearie,” soothed the midwife. Her practiced fingers knotted the slippery cord, last tie to be severed from the mother. “Work’s all done. Ye’ve naught beyond the afterbirth left to drop now.”
Through the frantic few moments remaining, Elaira shut her eyes, wrapped a hold on her nerves to force controlled calm over screaming uncertainty. These were fells herders, distrustful of her kind, and knit close with unbreakable ties of kinship. Should she fail in her effort to help this child, she well understood its death might be taken as a bloodletting offense.
To the woman’s soft query, the midwife said, “Well-done, girl. By Ath’s grace, ye’ve delivered a fine son.”
Elaira steeled herself, turned, received from the midwife’s competent, broad grasp the sticky, warm bundle of the child. His blood-smeared skin was pale gray, his limbs unmoving, not yet quickened by the first breath of life. She laid him head toward her on the table, aware through the crawling, unsteady light that his wet, whorled hair was coal black. She pried open the tiny, slack mouth, arranged the skull and neck, and with a hurried prayer to Ath, inserted the tube from the still down the throat and into the infant’s airway. She must not tremble. The curved glass was thin, very fragile. Any pressure at an angle might snap it. Where a straw reed might have offered less peril, no interval could be spared to search one out. Need drove her. She must not miss the opening, nor tear the newborn’s tender flesh in her haste. All the while the awareness skittered shivers down her spine, that she had but seconds to complete what must be done.
If the child were to die now, it would be of her own, rank clumsiness.
She felt the tube slide in. A sixth sense, born of her talents and training, told her the insertion was successful. She bent, set her lips to the glass, sucked, and spat the juices into the bowl she used to mix remedies. Against the white porcelain, the secretion was greenish, foul. She sipped at the tube again. Another mouthful, and still the drawn fluid was discolored. She repeated the procedure, was rewarded with a slight change in hue. The fourth mouthful came out clean.
“Ath bless,” she gasped. She eased the tube free. The hot, close room seemed formless around her, the pinpoint focus of her concentration the lynchpin of her whole being. She slapped the infant’s feet. “Breathe,” she said fiercely, the exultation of success at last tearing
loose, to burst from her heart in searing joy. “Breathe, new spirit. It’s safe for you to join the living.”
The child’s fingers spasmed. His tiny chest shuddered. Small mouth still opened, he sucked in clear air and screeched as lusty a first cry in outrage for expulsion from the dark, wet safety of the womb.
Elaira bundled the squalling infant back into the care of the midwife, then found the nearest chair and let her knees give way. She sat, head bent, her face in her hands, while emotion and relief shuddered through her. The cries of the child grew louder, more energetic. His flesh would be blushing to pink, now, as exertion flushed life through his tissues. Elaira pushed straight, scarcely aware of the commotion which swirled through the outer room, then the blast of changed air as the door opened. Feeling every aching bone, and all the weight of a night without sleep, she looked up.
Then froze, jolted through her whole being as her eyes met and locked with a man’s.
He had black hair, green eyes. A face of lean angles bent toward her, the rage in each tautened muscle burnished by the hot flare of the tallow dips. The rest of him was muffled beneath a caped cloak, tied with cord, and woven in the fine, colored stripes preferred by the herders of Araethura.
Rocked out of balance, Elaira felt a cry lock fast in her throat. For a moment fractured from the slipstream of time, she could not move or think. Then the nuance of observation she was trained to interpret showed her the subtle differences: the fist, clamped in rough wool, with thick fingers too clumsy to strike song from a lyranthe string. This man was larger, coarser in build; not Arithon s’Ffalenn, Prince and Masterbard. The rough-edged male who loomed over her was the husband of this house, and the newborn child’s father.