Chapter 12
Hannalinde
Life in the eyrie was not unpleasant. She loved the height of the ceilings and the way the narrow window in her room framed the city like a painting.
She loved the carved woodwork and the fine furs that filled her unusual bed.
Most of all, she loved the locks on her window and door, which she turned each night with deep satisfaction.
She felt safe here, and Rikard and his parents were each good company in their own way.
But the fact was, from dawn to dusk, all three were stone.
They were present and absent simultaneously.
She could talk to them if she wished, but talking to a statue felt close to madness, so she often talked to the child growing inside her instead, telling it of her activities and the things it would see and do once it was born.
She tried to stay busy to pass the time.
She had her routines already, old ones dredged up from her days as a lady: Her toilette.
The watering of the roses. The sorting and re-sorting of embroidery silks into the perfect palettes of color.
When they were arranged to please her eye, she stitched new, lovely things for the eyrie.
A table runner. A cushion for Roul’s chair.
She even began a bonnet for the baby before she remembered it might have horns or unusual ears that would require a unique design.
But usually by the time her noon meal arrived, the routines were spent. And without conversation or a pile of mending to do, the afternoons were long.
So she went out whenever she could find an excuse.
She’d climb down the seven ladders and cross the city to Carlijn’s townhouse, where they traded gossip and ate sugared almonds.
Sometimes they visited the markets, fingering the fine fabrics and designing imaginary dresses while they ignored the stares and whispers around them.
At least now people called her the gargoyle’s wife instead of the traitor’s daughter.
These outings were her lifeline, the brief hours among her own kind. But they required the descent, and the descent required the climb back up, and the climb was growing harder as her belly swelled. So her visits with Carlijn naturally tapered away, from daily to weekly and then even less often.
She missed her friend between visits. Carlijn was a tonic stronger than anything Betje could brew, and the afternoons they spent together in her cluttered bedroom were the brightest hours of Hannalinde’s week.
But once or twice a fortnight was not enough, and Carlijn had her own life and her own concerns as she prepared for her impending marriage to the wool merchant and her inevitable move to Meravenna.
What would Hanna do then to relieve her loneliness?
She would find no friends among the keepers. They came and went during the day, delivering provisions and collecting refuse, wiping woodwork and scrubbing floors, but they were trained not to linger. They did not sit and talk. They did not even trade greetings or pleasantries.
And she certainly found none among the gargoyles of the Tower during their waking hours.
She could not even convince a mason to supervise her pregnancy or attend the birth, though Betje insisted one would be necessary.
Thankfully, Cléa hit on the idea of hiring Old Aalis, the former head mason.
She’d been the one who rebuilt Rikard after his injuries, though she’d left the masons’ ranks in disgrace soon afterward.
Hannalinde heard the abridged story of her downfall from Cléa.
Aalis had been blackmailed into a conspiracy during the war, something to do with the cover-up of atrocities and the manipulation of gargoyle memories.
The details were murky and heavily guarded, but the result of her involvement was clear: she’d been stripped of her title and tier and cast out. Hanna could certainly relate.
The elderly mason lived and worked in the rookery now, in quarters that were a steep fall from the head mason’s eyrie.
A gargoyle who had once rebuilt heroes, reduced to patching minor cracks and salving scraped wings.
And, apparently, acting as midwife to pregnant humans carrying gargoyle hatchlings.
Hannalinde descended to the rookery after dusk, hurrying down the ladders, past corridors filled with the scrape and shuffle of gargoyles going about their evening.
She kept moving, and the gargoyles she passed on the landings either ignored her or stepped back with wary courtesy.
A few stared at her or hissed, which was unsettling even though it was nothing new.
The pressure at the base of her skull increased. Her true mate, the dark shadow in the back of her mind, was looking for her. He could feel her fear, and he liked it. She hurried down the last two ladders, eager to reach the safety of her destination.
The rookery occupied the first and second tiers, and the difference from the seventh was striking.
The corridors were narrower, the ceilings lower, and the stone more roughly hewn.
Doorways opened onto communal roosts where a dozen gargoyles might sleep in rows, their wings folded tight to avoid overlapping their neighbor’s.
The lamps were fewer and dimmer, and many of the roosts shared public garderobes rather than having their own.
These were not the type of gargoyles who would run to the Zenith for justice if she encountered her tormenter down here. They’d look the other way.
She found Aalis’s quarters at the end of a passage so narrow her shoulders nearly brushed both walls. The door was ajar, spilling warm lamplight and the medicinal smell of pine resin into the hallway.
Hannalinde knocked on the doorframe. “Hello? It’s me, Hannalinde.”
A voice came from inside, thin and dry as parchment. “I know who you are. Come in and close the door, but check the corridor for moths first.”
Hannalinde glanced behind her uneasily. The passageway was dim, the nearest lamp several paces away and free of moths. She could not see in the darkness behind it. Anyone could have followed her and be lurking there. Hurriedly, she stepped inside and pulled the door shut.
The room was cozy but tiny, with barely enough room for a roost and a worktable.
Cléa, who’d flown down from the seventh tier to meet her, was already inside, standing in front of some shelves crammed with jars and tools.
Aalis perched on the roost, her ancient, eroded form so still she might have been stone if not for the slow blink of her deep-set eyes.
Her wings were folded close, their membranes papery with age, and her hand, when she extended it toward Hannalinde, was gnarled and shaky.
“Sit,” Aalis said, indicating a low stool next to where Cléa stood. Hannalinde perched on it awkwardly, her knees drawn up higher than was comfortable. Aalis seemed disgruntled still. “Take off your cloak and let me see your belly.”
Hannalinde did as she was told. She unlaced the top of her bodice and pulled the fabric of her chemise aside so the old mason could examine her without obstruction.
Aalis’s hands were cool and dry. She pressed here and there along the curve of Hannalinde’s abdomen, mapping the position and size of the hatchling inside.
“The child is still high,” Aalis said. “It will stay up under your ribs until the final weeks, and your lungs will feel the press of it until just before the birth. That’s how you’ll know it’s time, when you can breathe again. Not so easy now, though, is it?”
“No. I’m always out of breath on the ladders,” Hannalinde admitted, laughing at herself.
“The ladders?” Aalis made a disapproving sound and her eyes shifted to Cléa. “Her mate should carry her.”
“My son cannot carry his own weight.” Cléa pressed her lips together, sounding annoyed at the reminder. “As you should know, having rebuilt him from a sack of rubble.”
It seemed she blamed Aalis for his inability to fly. Hannalinde braced herself for an argument, but Aalis merely nodded her attention still on Hanna’s belly. “I know what he can and cannot do. But if he cannot manage it himself, he should arrange for someone else to do it.”
The comment was not lost on her. Old Aalis had not just rebuilt Rikard’s wings, but everything else, too. She would know better than anyone that he could not sire an heir. She was likely aware that the hatchling in Hanna’s belly was not his, even if Cléa was not.
Aalis continued her examination, pressing the heel of her palm below Hannalinde’s navel and holding it there. “Have you felt movement?”
She nodded. “Flutters, like a bird trapped in a jar.”
“They will strengthen. A gargoyle infant is stronger than a human one. It may push so hard that you bruise, here and here.” She pressed the spots on either side of her abdomen. “Your body will accommodate it, but you’ll be sore.”
“I remember that too well,” Cléa said, smiling. “If the hatchling is anything like Rikard, you will have little sleep in your final weeks.”
“Training to be a fighter even before he was born,” Aalis chuckled.
Hannalinde swallowed. She’d tried not to think about the specifics of what was happening inside her.
She ate when she was told to eat, drank the tonic Betje had prescribed, and let her belly expand without examining the process too closely.
But the way Aalis spoke made her think about the baby and what it was doing in there. Who it might become.
Would it be her enemy, like its father?
“The birth itself,” Hannalinde said, clearing her throat. “What should I expect?”
“I will be frank with you. You should expect pain.” Aalis climbed back on her roost with a grunt, her thin tail curling around one ankle.
“It will be more difficult than a human birth because of the child’s size and claws.
But it is possible. Human bodies are resilient, and I will be there to tend you.
I’ve delivered gargoyle whelps for two hundred years.
Three who had human mothers, not including yours. ”