Or maybe—just maybe—something in me is still fighting to hold on.
25
Kess
On the sixth day,the bleeding fades to barely a whisper.
I stare at the cloth too long when Yaern changes it, searching for the rust color that's haunted the past week. But there's only the faintest trace of pink—so pale it might be nothing.
Might be hope.
"Better," Yaern says, her voice carefully neutral. "Definitely better than yesterday."
"Or it's stopping because there's nothing left to save."
She doesn't answer. We both know that's possible—that my body might simply be giving up, surrendering the pregnancy it couldn't sustain. But she squeezes my shoulder before turning away, and that small gesture says what words can't.
I'm here. Whatever happens.
I lie back against pillows that smell like lavender and wood smoke. Count the ceiling beams for the hundredth time. Seventeen of them, each one mapped in my memory now—the crack in the third from the left, the water-warped one near the chimney, the knot in the center beam that looks like a closed eye.
Outside, the village pulses with morning life. Chickens squabbling. Children's voices raised in some game I can't makeout. The rhythmic clang of the blacksmith's hammer shaping metal into useful things.
Life continuing. Indifferent to mine hanging suspended between one heartbeat and the next.
"You need to eat." Yaern appears at my bedside with a bowl of oat porridge drizzled with honey. The scent makes my stomach clench—hunger or nausea, I can't tell anymore.
"Not hungry."
"I don't care." She sets the bowl down with a firm thunk. "Your body needs fuel to heal. So does whatever's growing inside it."
Whatever's growing inside it.
My hand drifts to my stomach, still flat beneath the borrowed shift. No flutter of movement. No visible swell. Nothing to prove there's anything there except the bleeding that's finally slowing and the terror that refuses to fade.
"What if it's already gone?" The words emerge small and cracked. "What if I'm just waiting for my body to catch up to what's already happened?"
Yaern settles onto the edge of the bed, her weight dipping the mattress, and takes my hand. "The healer said bleeding happens sometimes. Said stress is the most common cause in early pregnancy, and you've been under more stress than any ten people should have to bear."
"So my body responds to stress by bleeding out my baby?"
"By adjusting." Her thumb traces slow circles across my knuckles. "It's slowing down, Kess. Each day there's less. That has to mean something."
I want to believe her. Want to take the fragile hope she's offering and cradle it close to my chest.
But hope is a trap with teeth. I learned that in his arms, in his bed, in all the moments when I let myself believe we were building something real.
Hope just makes the fall hurt more.
Still—I eat the porridge. Force it down spoonful by spoonful even though it sits in my stomach like wet sand.
Because maybe she's right. Maybe my body needs the fuel.
Maybe there's still something inside me worth fighting for.
Day seven dawns gray and soft, rain pattering against the thatch overhead.
When I check the cloth there's almost nothing there.
