The Gantean (Tales of Blood & Light Book 1) (15 page)

Amethyst pulled me to our new room. “You should lie down,” she murmured. “I’ll go find out where to get a midwife. You should be examined immediately.”

The old woman Amethyst returned with probed at my large belly, frowning when I explained how far along I was.

“You’re too big,” she said. “And you’re such a tiny thing.” She clucked over me before advising exactly what Amethyst had. “Bed rest. You must try to prolong the pregnancy for as long as possible, else the child will come too early. Don’t spend more than an hour at a time on your feet. Send for me if you have any bleeding, any early pains. If you have the money for it, I’d recommend consulting a healing mage—they can see the aetherlights of both you and your child and diagnose far better than I can, but they are hard to find and costly.”

Since I could do nothing but rest, I knotted a net sack that would sling across my body to hold the baby, losing myself in the soothing practice. I always knotted as fast as I could—if I slowed or thought about what I did, the work would fall apart, and my task seemed the only thing holding me together as I waited restlessly for my time.

Many days passed, but the men did not return. My body grew more uncomfortable. After ten days ashore I worried I had made the wrong choice in leaving the ship. At least there I had enjoyed the sympathetic company of my people and good fresh air. I missed Miki, Merkuur, Pamiuq, and even quiet Atanurat.

My guts twisted; my back ached.

I tried to finish my knotting, but the pain in my back distracted me. When the door opened and Amethyst entered, I gladly put the work down.

“Leila! You look so pale.” She rushed to my side.

“My back hurts. I’m afraid the baby is coming.”

“Now? No! Another sennight, at least! It’s too soon!” She plumped the pillow behind me. “Where does it hurt?”

“All over. My center.” I winced. I fell back, gasping. “It must be beginning.”

Amethyst’s pale blue eyes widened. “I’ll send for the midwife.” She hurried from the room. As the pain faded, I pushed myself to my feet and paced until another one struck. I collapsed forward to rest my elbows on the bed.

I feared Costas’s child would be too large for me. By the time Amethyst returned with the midwife in tow, I panted deliriously, hunched over the bed in whatever awkward position soothed the agony in my center.

Amethyst and the midwife spoke to me, but their words drifted away into my clouds of pain. My world narrowed; Gantean advice counseled that surrendering to the pain of childbirth would lead to death. They said a woman must fight it, must hold against it.

The Lethemian midwife told me how to breathe, but I couldn’t attend. I teetered on the edge of exhaustion. The glittering lights of Yaqi hovered around me. Touch, vision, and sound all merged with each other. A burning ball of light tore through my insides. I screamed. When the worst of the pain finally passed, it began all over again.

I must have fainted or dreamed.

In the silence and blackness of that place below awareness, not Yaqi, and not in the physical world, either, in the layer of dreams and visions, a woman leaned over me. She had a bone face, husk-dry hair, and a glittering crystal body that shimmered in all the colors of the Hinge: black, emerald, sapphire, rose pink, moonstone pale, and cool opal. The Skeleton Woman who lived inside the Hinge.
Give them to me. Give them to me,
she chanted.
I hunger. Feed me.

“Not yet.” I pleaded with the last of my strength.
They are mine. You cannot have them yet.

The woman melted and changed before me, turning into the blackstone flow of the sorceress at the Brokering, dragging me down into a pool of pure dark.

“
I
s
she with us
?” Lethemian words, a woman’s voice.

I forced my eyes open.

“Yes!” cried Amethyst. “She’s opened her eyes.”

I struggled into the stark clarity of Ijiq
.
“Baby,” I mumbled, helpless and confused.

“Leila, it’s not just a baby,” replied Amethyst, grinning.

“Miss.” The midwife leaned over me. “You have two, and they came early. They are very small and delicate. Be careful these first few sennights. No visitors. Keep a perfectly clean space and remain in your room. The babies may take only your own milk. Eat well to keep up your strength. Come, will you hold them?”

Amethyst placed a small bundle into each of my arms. They were so tiny, hardly larger than puppies.

“At first I thought the boy must be stuck, he took so long in coming,” said Amethyst. “But you finally pushed him out. Then Midwife Mirea said you had a second baby coming!”

“What day is it?” I asked blearily.

“The seventeenth day of Amatos,” said Amethyst. “You were in labor for nearly two days!”

My children were beautiful. Certainly every mother felt so of her own child, even a Gantean mother, who showed no outward preference for her own blood. But my babies were as smooth and glowing as water-washed gems, not raw and red like so many newborns. I pushed back their swaddling; no one could tell them apart by their faces alone. I called my firstborn Tiriq after the mythical Gantean boy who traveled down from the stars and shaped the earth. I called my girl Tianiq, Tiriq’s sister who cried the oceans.

“Are you sure they should have such names?” asked the midwife when I told her my choices. “They sound barbarian.”

“I am Gantean. They will have names of my people.”

I
had known
babies enough in Gante, and babies born too soon were needy, and twins, ill omened, yet my two remained as serene and calm as drifts of snow; they slept readily and often, feeding and thriving. Amethyst and I could not get enough of staring at them.

“Truly,” said Amethyst one afternoon two sennights after the birth, “I have never seen more beautiful babies. Their skin glows!”

“They get that from their father.” I ignored her shy, furtive look. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, she didn’t ask the obvious question.

“They’re so easy,” she added as she rocked Tiriq. “Such happy babies. I thought little ones just cried all the time.”

All children are the children of the clan in Gante, and no mother holds her child as her own once it leaves her body. I loved my twins like a sayantaq mother—possessively and thoroughly. I would never be able to give them up. I carried vague fears about the men’s return—would they ask me to perform the ritual slicing of the bloodlight cords that connected me to the babies? I could not bear the thought.

The men finally arrived in Anastaia to find two happy women and two gurgling babies, none of us interested in worldly news. Merkuur, Pamiuq, and Miki came to the rooming house. I handed one sleeping babe to Miki and the other to Pamiuq as they settled into my little room’s available seating.

Merkuur immediately turned the conversation to pressing concerns. “Tension with the Vhimsantyr Empire escalates. It will make even our limited trade there soon impossible. We hear rumors of trouble closer to home. They say Princess Stesichore is unhappy in her marriage to Costas Galatien. She has left Galantia.”

“Those troubles are far away,” I said. Even when I admired the bronze glowing skin of my children, I avoided thinking of Costas. He was a gap in my memory, a void I glazed over because of the discomfort it caused. I had grown accustomed to the incessant awareness of the ung-aneraq; most of the time I could ignore it.

Amethyst reached across Pamiuq’s lap and smoothed her fingers over Tianiq’s soft cheek. “Isn’t it amazing,” she said, “how clear everything is, how simple, when one has babies to care for? War and politics seem like petty games of men when there are children to raise.”

Merkuur glowered at us both as if we had lost our minds. “My point is that I’m not sure it remains safe here in Anastaia. If the trouble were only between Vhimsantyr and Lethemia, I would not worry, but there is talk about a breach between the Ricknagel and Galatien Houses, a brewing civil war.”

“We can’t leave yet,” Amethyst argued. “The midwife said the twins would be very delicate at first. They aren’t to be taken out and about. You needn’t feel so obliged for our care. I can get work to help support myself.”

Merkuur and Pamiuq both stiffened their backs. She couldn’t know she had offended them, as Gantean men, to say such a thing.

Pamiuq attempted to explain, “You are one of us now, Amethyst.” He pointed at the fish charm she wore at her neck. “As one of our clan, you will be looked after. Your work is caring for these babies with Leila. You are the milk-mothers. We are the fish-fathers.”

Amethyst still looked perplexed, but she did not argue further.

Merkuur arranged for us to stay at the rooming house until the twins were stronger. Miki refused to return to
Northern Wind
with the men. “I want to stay here and watch Leila call the twins’ tormaqs,” he said.

“You will call their tormaqs so soon?” Merkuur asked in surprise. He knew I could do the magic ritual, I had done it often for the children of our clan, but in Gante the tormaq ritual was normally performed three or four moons after birth.

“I hadn’t planned to—”

“You must,” Miki insisted. “They need them. It’s important.” His face wore a frantic cast, a desperate look that made me wonder if he had other special magical talents than wayfinding. Foresight, perhaps?

“Then I can,” I said to sooth him, though my stomach twisted with dread. When I performed the tormaq ritual, I would come right up against choices I did not want to face: whether to cut the bloodcords that connected my children to me, whether to ung-aneraq that connected me to Costas.

Merkuur returned to the ship, taking Miki with him despite the boy’s protests—Merkuur knew the ritual to cut a mother’s bloodcord was a matter best left to women alone.

I sat with the babies on the bed in the rented room to begin the ritual. It had been so long since I had worked with my magic—not since those few desperate moments at the Brokering. I wished again for Nautien’s anbuaq—the spall of red crystal that it contained would have made it possible for me to feed the Hinge after my magic. Without it, I could only offer my blood to the Lethemian ground and hope it had some effect, but my children needed tormaqs. These spirits would protect them in the Layers where I could not. I collected the necessary blood by cutting my wrist with the ulio I had stolen at the Brokering.

Blood-letting opens the portals between layers, and I moved into Yaqi with surprising ease. The twins’ bloodlights glowed fiercely, one an orb of bright gold, the other silver. Twisted ropes of light connected me to them, the bloodlight umbilici that should be severed according to Gantean traditions. I would not cut them, though I expected to be scolded by the other Ganteans. Even so, I could not do it. They needed me, and they did not have a large clan with a full tiguat to look after them.

The gold and blue ung-aneraq stretched into a disappearing horizon, the living energy of the connection I had made to Costas Galatien. My ulio hand stuttered. I could slice that cord so easily, yet I did not do it, could not do it. I told myself it was because of the necklace and my need to find it again, but I knew that for a sayantaq lie.

The glittering lights suddenly pulsed in rhythm to a high, shrill note. Something was wrong. Yaqi spit me out like a bitter morsel. The ritual had not worked. I coughed and coughed, breathless with dismay. I had not seen any tormaqs for my children. What did it mean? Were they not Iksraqtaq?

A cold, hard knot of fear twisted in my stomach. With the wood and whittling knife Amethyst had brought for me to make the tormaquines, I carved only little wooden charms strung on twine showing the Gantean runes for Tiriq and Tianiq, a seven-pointed star and a nine-pointed one. They would have only these, instead of tormaquines.

W
hen Merkuur returned
to the rooming house again, he brought grim news that Amethyst and I had not heard because we spent all our time sequestered with the babies. “Stesichore Ricknagel is dead. Xander Ricknagel marches upon Murana, accusing Costas Galatien of the assassination.”

“Costas?” I said in disbelief, sitting upright and jostling Tianiq at my breast. She began to cry. “Why would he…” I trailed off, embarrassed by my unthinking outburst.

“Rumor says that Prince Costas wed Stesichore only at his father’s command,” Merkuur said. “By all accounts he and Stesichore Ricknagel made a loveless match. And perhaps even worse, they say one of House Ricknagel’s magic stones was stolen at the Brokering. Xander Ricknagel has accused Costas Galatien of being both a murderer and a thief.”

Amethyst blanched and squeezed my hand. She must be thinking of Lymbok and his purloined stone, too. “How could they know who stole the Ophira?”

Merkuur gave her an odd look but said only, “Anastaia is threatened. If Murana falls to Xander Ricknagel, he will almost certainly attack here next. King Mydon hasn’t acted to protect either city yet.”

“Why has he done nothing?” I wondered. “Doesn’t the High City depend on the Galatien ports?”

Merkuur shrugged. “All I know is that if he does not act soon, it will be too late to hold Murana from Xander Ricknagel. If Murana falls, we must all leave Anastaia, for the war will come here.”

“Where would we go?” asked Amethyst.

“Anywhere out of the likely path of this war. You must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.” Merkuur spoke in a voice that brooked no argument.

T
he urgent message
came in the form of Miki, dashing up the rooming house stairs breathlessly. “Murana has fallen. Atanurat says you must come now. He wants to get out of the port as soon as possible.”

We had packed most of our few possessions in preparation for this news. I slipped the carrier I had knotted around my neck and took Tiriq in it, while Amethyst tied Tianiq in her shawl.

We picked our way across the city to the harbor. The air carried a distinct buzz of tension, as though the denizens of Anastaia knew danger moved in their direction. Atanurat, Merkuur, and Pamiuq conferred for ages about where we should head while we sat on the deck.

Finally Atanurat announced, “We’ll sail west to Orioneport.”

Amethyst handed him Tianiq, excusing herself to speak to Pamiuq. Atanurat held my daughter gently, as though she might break in his big hands. He lifted the substitute tormaquine I had tied around her ankle, a nine-pointed star.

His brows drew together. “Is this meant to be a tormaquine?”

I pointed up at the clear sky overhead. “For their names,” I explained.

“Of course. Tiriq and Tianiq.” The Gantean tale of the mythical twins involved the formation of two horizon stars. He understood the significance.

Atanurat shifted Tianiq to his hip. “You and the twins will share my cabin. It is the most comfortable place for you. Come.”

Atanurat helped me string up another hanging bed beside his own. Sitting cross-legged, I tucked Tianiq up the nursing cloak Amethyst had found for me. I gestured to Atanurat, who had been watching silently with his Gantean eyes, the irises nearly as dark as the pupils.

“Can you help me lift Tiriq into my other arm?”

He picked up Tiriq, who gave a gleeful coo and grasped Atanurat’s braids with wavering hands. Atanurat smiled and tucked Tiriq beneath my cloak. Atanurat still knelt before me, a single hand lingering on my thigh. At first I had the startled thought that he stared at my breasts. Then I noticed the telltale blur of his pupils.

“What did you see?” I asked when his eyes came back into focus.

“They remain bound to you.”

I nodded. I did not want to explain my reluctance to cut the bloodcords. Not to such a Gantean face as Atanurat’s.

He continued, “And you have an ung-aneraq connected to someone far away. The father?”

I cleared my throat. “They have so few of us to watch over them. They need me. I know what the Elders would say about such cords, but I will not cut them.” I couldn’t explain it, but even the ung-aneraq that bound me to Costas gave me strength.

Tianiq fussed beneath my cloak. I guided her out with my right arm. Atanurat took her as if he had acted the milk-father a hundred times in the past. She batted his black tresses, giggling. Her eyes had started out blue like my own and Tiriq’s, but already they were changing, taking on edges of gold. She would have the same amber eyes as her father.

Atanurat kissed Tianiq’s cheek. She never let go of his hair, but he didn’t pry her fingers away. “The Elders never anticipated we would find ourselves in such a world,” he said as he played with Tianiq. “They faced difficult times. The customs they held onto so fiercely were like water in a vessel. Any small crack in the vessel would leak the customs out, in a slow stream, yes, but eventually, all of them would be lost. They saw their world slipping away. They clung to traditions desperately because of it.”

“And their vision was true,” I said sadly.

“No,” Atanurat replied, but he didn’t explain.

“But Gante is lost.” I laid Tiriq on the ground. Atanurat put Tianiq down beside him, and the twins wiggled until their arms draped over each other. They would only sleep if they touched each other.

“We who are left will decide which customs to honor and which to let wash away like so much water,” Atanurat said. “If we keep the children of our blood strung to us, that is our choice. The missing Cedna brought us the choices they would not give her.”

“She wanted to change the old ways?” Few Ganteans were ever willing to speak of the Cedna.

“She was half-Lethemian, you know. Ronin Entila was her father, and because of this, she was not raised like any normal Gantean. Her mother served as Cedna before her, and when her mother named her as the successor, there was a great outcry against it. The Elders believed they had both been tainted by sayantaq ways.”