6
Newborn babes are not very cute.
It’s more than the constant bowel movements that stink enough to run me out of the room, and the milk that regurgitates with a slight burp, and the crying that claws at my ears and has me wishing for a nursemaid to just magically appear.
It’s the look of them, too.
The babe that Serena holds to her chest, that she hums a soft tune to, has a complexion that’s pale in patches, purple in others, has eyes that are wrinkled shut, and little white dots on its nose.
His nose.
Serena gets mad at me when I say ‘it’.
Bet she would lose her mind if I called him what I really thought.
Monster.
How else does one describe a creature that tears its way out of a woman like that?
That’s what I remember.
That is what is seared into the grooves of my brain and will stay there to haunt me forever.
It tore out of her.
The blood, the stretching, the pulling—
Then I passed out.
Woke up on an armchair in the corner of the room, a damp towel on my forehead, and there on the bed with dated checkered sheets, Serena was slumped on the pillows, holding that swathed baby as though it didn’t try to rip her in half.
That was weeks ago now.
And what sleepless weeks they have been.
I lean against the dusty window.
Serena still hums that soft, gentle tune. I don’t recognise a pattern in it, so I think she makes it up as she goes. Not a melody I’ve ever heard before.
I’m glad when it stops—but not so much when Serena takes to talking to me instead.
“Isn’t he the cutest?” she asks, then her voice lightens into that awful babytalk she does, “Aren’t you so handsome? I love you. I love you so much, nothing in the world will come between us.”
My mouth twists.
I turn my cheek to the glass to hide the faint repulsion on my face.
But Serena doesn’t look at me.
She has eyes only for the babe.
It’s not the baby himself that I’m uncomfortable with. It’s how blatantly and openly she adores him.
It’s that she breastfeeds him herself, right in front of me, without any care.
It’s that he has become the only thing in her life, her world, her existence.
And maybe it’s how much she loves him that makes me want to avoid our bedroom as much as I can.
Her loving tangents continue like background noise. But when she says, “You are going to be so strong, I just know it,” I bristle.
My spine stiffens, and I turn my back on the window.
I ask, blunt, “What if he isn’t?”
Serena’s smile falters. It lifts, and she looks plainly at me. “Pardon?”
“What if he isn’t strong? What if he’s like me?”
Understanding takes a moment to settle in her sluggish mind.
Something to do with pregnancy and motherhood scrambles the mind, according to Sofía.
It’s more common among mothers who care for the babes themselves, without any nannies or nursemaids.
“If he is deadblood,” she says, carefully, like there’s restrained irritation creeping up inside of her, “then I will love him as I do now.”
My face tightens. “Maybe that’s easy to say.”
But not to do.
Because I’m sure there was a time my father held me as a babe, promised to love and protect me, then somewhere along the way, that all faded.
“If he is,” Serena says, “then he will never know. Not in this world where there are no witches.”
Her smile hurts my heart. It is so true and so loving, and aimed down at her son.
I grunt an answer, then turn to look outside.
And time passes.
The evening light fades, night comes, and after a while, when I turn around again, the baby is in the cot, and Serena is sleeping alone on the bed.
With just a flimsy sheet pulled over her body, she snoozes through her exhaustion.
I won’t wake her for dinner.
I need her asleep for now. Less chance of her following me out to the garden.
So I’m quiet, careful, as I pull on a lumpy woollen sweater, then slip out of the room.
The door clicks softly behind me before I tackle the creaky steps one at a time.
Down one landing, and it’s like stepping out of a quiet bubble and into a chaotic one.
The house is claustrophobic at the best of times. But rush hours—breakfast, lunch, dinner—has the thinnest air and the slowest, most clogged traffic down the staircases.
It’s also the best time to sneak out to the garden unnoticed.
My face twists with the annoyance as I side-step along the wall, avoiding the staggering manure-smelling workers from the goat enclosure. I guess the goat enclosure because they don’t have chicken feathers clinging to their clothes as they push by in their rush to the upstairs bathroom.
Sofía is insistent on everyone being clean for dinner.
But between the runaways returning from gruelling physical labour—that I consider to be more along the lines of slave labour than paying off shield debts—and the ones now getting up to start their night shifts, it’s a good few minutes before I’m even on the ground floor.
I slip outside, and the fresh air floods my lungs.
The sky is brushstrokes of pinks and purples above me as I rush across the dirt, out of the lights that glare from the house, and down to the private garden.
The gate squeaks against its hinges—but the noise of dinner and the runaways clogging the halls and stairways masks it.
I haste downhill, following the trail until I’m out of sight, and I’m surrounded by shrub.
It’s dark this far down.
I don’t risk using a torch.
All I have right now is the fading sunset on the horizon, hardly there anymore, and the moon that’s starting to rise.
I drop onto my knees and roll up the sleeves of my sweater—the same sweater I wore in the chilly hours of Bluestone.
I force that out of my mind.
‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’
Sofía’s warning is what I hold onto, a way to trick my mind out of memories, and I just repeat her words over and over in my head.
With my bare hands and nails that were once manicured, I reach under the roots of the apple tree, and I start to dig.
‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’
I hum the tune of the words in my head.
A song that grounds me with each wrenching handful of dirt out from under the exposed roots.
A memory tries to intrude.
The ritual on the mornings of the New Year. Digging up the earth by hand with my family, pouring my blood into the soil, a bagged sacrifice that I convince myself is just an animal…
‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’
But it’s the plea I make to the gods that snakes into my mind, stubborn.
‘I offer no blood, because it is unworthy.’
But what is unworthy about deadblood, blood that should still contain the gods’ magic, blood that should reflect the night sky?
The three extra phials of blood in Witchdoctor Dolios’s briefcase burrow deep into my brain—three extra phials that did not come from me.
The whisperings between Mother and Father, of bribing witchdoctors and a dreadful truth realised with blood tests.
I thought I was beloved and cherished, and that’s why I was taken out of Bluestone every time I was injured. Even just a scrape on my knee would send Father into a panic, and I would be taken home for Witchdoctor Dolios to tend to.
But the fear in me doesn’t dissipate.
The dread doesn’t ease.
The doubt doesn’t leave.
So I dig up what I buried under the roots of this tree months ago.
The syringe that I took from the infirmary’s storeroom the night we ran.
What’s strange is I don’t remember actively choosing to take it that night.
I just… took it.
Like, as I considered it, touched it, and felt the walls of my life coming down around me, I realised something deep down in the hollowness.
I just knew a horrible truth.
Something I haven’t been strong enough to face. Brave enough to check.
But this is my last chance to face it.
Serena and I leave soon.
Sofía wants us to pay more if we stay longer—and both of us are itching to get out of here.
We need to leave and start our lives with Sofía’s shield following us around.
We can’t be like the other runaways here. Stuck and too afraid to leave, too afraid of the outside world.
Even though I am scared.
Fear coils through me, like some wet and thick creature, a squid slopping and slashing inside of me.
My fingers drag over the plastic-wrapped bag.
And I falter.
My breath pins to my chest and I can feel it, my heart beating, thumping and thumping.
I dig my nails into the earth at the edge of the bag, then wrench it out.
It rustles, far too loud.
With a glance up at the sky, I see that the sun is gone, and the moonlight brushes over the earth, and the stars glitter so clearly.
Dinner will still be buzzing in the dining room.
I doubt anyone heard the rustle.
Still, I am frozen for a moment, waiting, listening—and I hear nothing more than nature, the breeze through the shrub, the crackling of dry leaves, and my own heart beating in my eardrums.
The breath shudders out of me.
I can’t put it off any longer.
And I know, deep down, I’m just buying time.
Time is something I’m short on now.
Carefully, I take the syringe out of the bag, then clasp the phial onto the latch.
The needle is separately packaged, and it’s a fumbling moment before I’m slipping it into place, then it locks.
And it feels like a gun in my hand.
Dangerous.
Too dangerous.
I should put it down, bury it again, run out of this garden—and never return.
But I wind a strip of fabric around my bicep and stretch out my arm.
I move slow, slower now that there’s murkiness in my vision, like terrified tears are brewing but not falling.
I pause.
Strap around my arm, my veins are starting to rise, and I aim the syringe at myself—and my hand starts to tremble.
I swallow back an audible gulp.
But it does nothing to soften the lump in my throat.
I inch the needle closer to the larger, lifted vein.
A groan thrums in my throat.
I pierce my flesh—and a hollow sound ribbons out of me.
The pain is more than I expected.
Maybe since I do it to myself.
Maybe that my insides are in turmoil.
But I draw blood.
Red crimson floods the phial. It sloshes and splashes against the glass.
Then, once it’s full, I peel the needle out of my vein.
Teeth bared, I fight off the rattle that aches to shudder me.
But that shudder locks into my hands, hands that tremble as I unlatch the phial, then let it fall onto my palm.
I still.
On my knees, moonlight cascading over my back, I hold the phial of my blood in my shadow.
My face twists.
The tears finally fall.
And I lift the phial into the moonlight—