Chapter 27 #2
I picked up a stained rag which dipped dangerously close to the fire and tossed it aside before it set the house ablaze.
Eamon should have paid for a servant until Glenna was back on her feet and able to do for herself.
But perhaps Eamon could not. I thought of the broken door, the yard devoid of livestock.
Had Eamon sold off the cow? What desperate financial straits he must be in to do so.
My own words returned to me, from nearly six months before: May your milk sour, and your fortunes fail.
It seemed they had. And not only Eamon, but also Glenna Baker must suffer the cost.
I wrinkled my nose as I circled past the trestle table, noting the not-quite-empty bowls of porridge sitting there. They smelled as if they had not been cleaned in days.
I had moved far beyond this place. From shepherd’s cottage to baron’s attic, then hosted among his guests.
I had healed his wife, and soon would heal his son, and afterwards, his bastard and I could be wed.
I did not need Eamon’s welcome nor his approval anymore.
And looking around the house, pity was what I felt.
Pity, and not a small amount of disgust.
“Mab’s tits,” I muttered. The house looked nearly empty. Where were my sisters, who should have come to help with the birth? Where were Glenna’s kinfolk? The father of her bairn?
Nay. Him I had seen. Escorted me here then vanished, the tricksy wight.
“Hello,” I called out. “Glenna, are ye here?”
A hideous groan came from a curtained area at the rear of the home.
I remembered the spot well. There had I laid out Mairi Grieve’s body, while the neighbors and kinsfolk came to pay their respects.
’Twas a place for death, and a place for birth. Two sides of a different veil.
Now Glenna Baker did labor there alone.
I was pulled by my promise, pushed by the lack of welcome, and driven by the need to help my friend.
I clucked my tongue and rounded the corner, pulling aside the curtain. Glenna lay on a straw pallet, rough linen sheets rumpled around her, with her ten-year-old brother seated on a stool beside.
I blinked for a moment at the sight of him under the wan glow of the rushlight, so exactly had Amadan captured his look. Fae glamour is remarkable, when practiced by one adept. Yet the boy’s eyes did not glow like emerald, and his hair had no iridescent gleam. Mortal he was, and her true kin.
I was glad Glenna was not alone.
Her hair lay damp across her forehead, and her skin was pale as milk. She rolled her head and smiled weakly at me, as she croaked out, “Bess. You came. I thought you’d left us! Rory says you haven’t been to the oven for months. Yet by some miracle, here you are.”
I scowled. It was not miracle, some whim of her Christian God. The lord of trickery had brought me here.
Young Rory stood awkwardly, staring down at his roughshod feet.
I claimed the stool and took Glenna’s hand, cold and clammy in my own. “Hush, dear heart. I am here now.” I brushed the hair from her forehead.
Glenna looked away uncomfortably, twisting a pendant at her throat. “I did not want you to find out like this, Bess. I’d have told you myself, in some other, kinder way. This is not what I wanted at all.” Her big brown eyes were moist with tears.
“Not what you wanted”—for me to find out thus?
Or is it your union to Eamon Grieve you so regret?
Yet pity kindled inside me, for what choice had she, really?
Her bairn needed a father, and Amadan would not have come through.
Gently I took her hand away from the pendant or tried to; it burned me worse than a rountree branch.
A bronze cross.
I recoiled with a hiss, a drop of water into a pot of heated oil. Amadan’s words came back to me: I will not have my offspring baptized. Who knows what it will do to a child of the fae?
The cross would not help the delivery, either. If the first sight it was to meet at its mother’s breast was a cross, why would the bairn ever want to come out?
“Is summat wrong?” Glenna asked, her eyes wide and horrible shadows beneath them.
Guilt washed over me at disturbing the expectant mother so. I favored her with a weak smile, then turned to Rory. “Would you remove the cross from around your sister’s throat?”
The boy stared at me.
Glenna’s hand flew to her breast. “’Twas my mother’s.”
“All the more reason to see it kept safe.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Remembrances of one’s family should be treasured. I had no tokens of my own. “I fear . . . it will prove a distraction for me.”
For I could think of nothing but that repellent object, the wall of revulsion radiating from it, raising my gorge. It governed society beyond all reason and condemned the fae for nothing more than who we were.
It had made me like a stranger in my own home.
Glenna reached up to untie the leather, and the sound of heavy footsteps came from behind us.
“Leave it,” said the rumbling voice of Eamon Grieve.
I turned towards the man I once knew as father.
How had I ever feared him? He seemed to have shrunk since last I saw him, loose skin hanging off his jowls like a forlorn hound.
What hair he had grew thin; his nose and cheeks were ruddy with a drunkard’s flush.
Only six months had passed since I last saw him, but Eamon seemed to have aged at least twenty years.
My words again: May you wizen beyond your years, may your seed grow dry, and you never know love with another.
I stood and did not flinch at the scent of ale on his breath.
“Would you endanger her very soul?” he asked me, with a quiet threat in his voice.
“Would you endanger her life and her child?” I spat back. “Ye did not send for me, nor any other who might help deliver it.”
“We will manage,” he growled.
“With whose help? Ye cast me out of the house, but all the others, your sons and daughters you were happy to claim, where are they now? Did even a one of them come to help your wife give birth?”
His eyes flicked away, the only sign of how uncomfortable this truth was. To rear your children on fear alone is never to secure their love.
“Indeed, I sent you away,” he agreed. “Nor are you welcome now. Get out.”
Part of me wanted to. Never had I desired to return to Eamon Grieve’s home. Yet my promise pulled on me, burned in me, and Glenna’s face was so white, the covers twisted around her, damp with sweat. I could not go. “I am not here for you. I am here for her.”
“And she is mine. Glenna does not—”
“Eamon, please!” I do not think Glenna could have brought herself to protest, had she not been wracked with severe pain, for the words turned into an anguished cry.
I dropped to my knees beside her, hand on her arm, eyes averted from the cross. “I have no time to argue with you,” I told Eamon. “The bairn is coming. I need a wet cloth for her forehead. Smut rye for the contractions. Henbane and poppy for the pain.”
He did not move. His shadow hung over us like a storm cloud, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
“You need not help,” I told him, “but I will not have you hinder. Rory, you go.”
With a nod, the boy rushed off, though how he would find any of those things was beyond me. It wasn’t his house.
Glenna stilled. Heaving exhausted breaths, she propped herself on her elbows, giving Eamon such a glare as I had never seen from her. “I want Bess here,” she said. “I trust her.”
A grunt issued from Eamon, then came the stomp of his footsteps as he stalked away.
Once he had gone, Glenna carefully removed the cross around her neck.
“You will let neither my soul nor my bairn come to harm.” She spoke it as she might have a prayer or a creed, thereby compelling me to be worthy of her faith.
Something passed between us, and I nearly asked her what she saw, what she knew of her bairn’s true father, what she knew of me.
The spasms came again, and I had other things to occupy my mind. It would be a very long night.
Glenna writhed in her bedclothes, while Eamon busied himself in the other room—with what I did not know, or even care. He had retreated from his woman’s travail, the lazy coward.
Rory, on the other hand, was my earnest errand boy, though he was in unfamiliar surroundings, and would not directly help with the birth.
I did not fault him for it; these are reckoned women’s matters, and, after all, he was but ten years old.
I sent him for another blanket when it appeared Glenna grew chill, and then a hunk of hard cheese, so she might have something besides my fingers to clutch onto when the contractions came.
Yes, I was a skilled healer, but I was in no mood for my own digits to be broken.
“Bear down now,” I said to Glenna. “Are ye comfortable?”
“Do I look like I am comfortable?” she screamed, with a muffled curse.
Rory smirked. “Cor, sis, and if our father heard ye carry on so! He’d put the rod to ye and all.” Despite the circumstances, the lad looked impressed.
I tried not to think of another lad, only a little older, who lay in bed close to death and frozen in time. You’ll be back soon enough, I told myself. With the poppet there, he will get no worse. Or so I hoped.
At least my promise no longer tormented me so.
The spasm over, Glenna collapsed onto her pillow. “I am sorry for my outburst,” she grunted. “I must be your worst patient ever.”
I shook my head. “You have never gotten a splinter out of Duncan Smith’s hand, ’tis clear to see. Twice my size that one is, and twice my age, but didn’t he howl fit to wake the dead!”
Rory giggled, and Glenna gave me a limp smile.
“You are too kind to me, Bess,” she said. “Glad I am that you are here.”
And I felt Mairi Grieve guided my hand, even as I aided the one who replaced her.
“Push, Glenna!”
“I am pushing!”
“Push harder.”
“Aieeeeeeee!”
We were locked in this exchange as in an awkward dance. It did not seem to be going anywhere. “Let us try the birthing stool.”
“We have tried the birthing stool.”
“I could prop you up.”
“Then . . . there’s no one . . . to catch . . . the babe.” Glenna groaned and pushed again.
Mab save me, but I hated Bess’s sisters then. If even one of them had come to help, she could hold Glenna upright while I delivered the child.
“Rory,” I shouted. “You come here.”
He obediently trotted up, then recoiled, his face turning green. “Oh, it is not meet for me to see it.” His face twisted into a hideous grimace, and he threw his arm across his eyes.
Squeamish menfolk. Useless they are, the lot of them. “You will see nothing. Stand at your sister’s back and support her.”
He shook his head vigorously.
“Either that, or you get to deliver the child. And what a sight won’t you see then? How would you like that, la?”
If possible, he went even greener, but obediently came round behind his sister, propping her into a seated position.
“I need wine,” Glenna moaned.
“I can get it,” Rory offered.
I threw him a dark look, then told Glenna. “You cannot have it. Not now.”
“I thirst so bad.”
“It will be over soon.” At least, I hoped it would. I needed to be getting back to the manor. “Then you can have it. Bear down . . .”
“Aiiiiiiieeeee!” She pushed.
I watched. I thought I saw the baby’s head, but I was not sure. “Keep pushing, Glenna.”
Her only response was anguished weeping.
I could not stand to see her in such pain.
“Calm ye,” I crooned, “rest ye. Your time of toil shall not last long.” Something stirred beneath my skin, akin to the sensation when I had comforted the ailing Douglas boy, and when I bent Thomas to my will.
I took a deep breath and pictured spring again.
Gentle breezes. The soft glow of the sun on my skin.
The scent of new growth. Birth and renewal.
Glenna’s eyes were glazed, staring entranced at my face.
“That’s a good girl,” I murmured, reaching down. “We’re almost there now. Oh, Glenna, you are brave, and you are strong enough to do this. Push for me one more time.”
And she did.
Then screamed. The cheese in her fist crumbled.
Glenna fell back, exhausted, upon her bed.
At last, I held her child in my arms.
She was tiny. And she was perfect, with slightly pointed ears and ebon curls, tinted golden at the ends.
There was no denying she was Amadan’s child.
Oh, the little misfit. Trickster’s child. Cuckoo’s egg.
I kissed her on the top of her little red forehead, while she twisted her face like a wizened imp and shook her tiny fists.
“Child of two worlds,” I whispered. “Mab keep you safe in this one and beyond the Veil, wherever you choose to roam. May you be treasured, may you be wanted, and may you know home.”
This one—she might have a rough path before her, even as I did, outsider to the mortal world.
“Thank you for your blessing and baptism,” Glenna said.
I glanced over at her in surprise. The words did not repel me, as they usually would.
She offers thanks for what I have not done.
Glenna stared at me thoughtfully. “I know,” she said softly, “this child could have no greater benediction than the words you just spoke.”
There it was again, unexpected wisdom, as if Glenna saw more than she let on. With a secretive smile, she held open her arms to take the child.
Amadan’s words echoed in my head as I gave her over: I will not have my offspring baptized. I know not what it would do to a child of the fae. And so, this daughter of his had not been. My promise to him had been kept.