“Not the baby,” she choked out. “Not my baby.”
But whatever negotiation she had entered into was finished.
She had failed to trade her life to end her sentence. Instead, she had made a sacrifice larger than life.
She had sacrificed a love she did not yet know.
For months, she disappeared into the forest. Her anam cló devoured her—the lithe dancing of its long, limber legs pure comfort after the agony of her damaged Gentry body; the smooth simplicity of its animal mind a balm for the layers of anguish that threatened to smother her.
She preferred the nights. She liked the moon, rising soft and slow, striking silver sparks off the iron anvil of the lough. Therustle of birds in the dense muffled dark of the trees, their songs fading, then dying in the watercolor sweep of green and black.
She wished she had a voice, so she might join in.
But the nights were punctuated by bright days—burnished branch and gilded leaf. Sharp scents lofting in the moss-scented breeze. Foraging—the susurrus of shifting grasses, hard acorn and crunching nut, scraps of birch bark curled tight as fists. Summer.
Then short gray days—polished silver sky and ruffled undergrowth. Furred head bent to the glass-sharp wind. Cold mud seeping quiet and strange between her hooves. Autumn.
A feather’s touch within her belly—a mote of warmth, curling inward; an embrace like the silent forest.
Then pain. Pain so strong she feared she would once more be broken, shattered, ended.
In a way, she was.
She birthed her child in the cold, quiet solitude of a forest at dusk. No midwife blotted her sweating brow; no parent nor partner rubbed her aching back. She fisted her shaking hands in the crooks of saplings, nearly ripping them from their roots as she screamed into the night. The stars made a silver gyre as she squatted in the grass and pushed until blackness threatened to overwhelm her. At last, it was done. She scooped the tiny thing from the moss and laid its glistening form upon her distended belly. Its fists were curled like snails. Its hair was the black of nightshade berries. And its eyes—open already, and gazing at her like she was everything—were mismatched. One light, one dark.
Not it.She.
A daughter.
“My little deer.” The immensity of her emotion nearly engulfed her voice. “My Fia.”
But the child was not hers. Already, the compulsion tugged at her—the bargain she had made with Ínne. With her magic. With her destiny. It called to her, and though she fought it, she was weak.
She had always been too weak to deny her own doom.
She swaddled the baby, then cloaked herself against the frigid night. Ínne met her in a clearing, vast arms outstretched. But Deirdre clutched her daughter close. She was so tiny. Deirdre could not imagine how she would possibly survive cradled by those claw-tipped hands.
“She is too new.” Deirdre’s belly was still soft and round; her hair, stiff with sweat; her thighs, slicked with her own viscera. It had been but an hour. “She cannot survive without me.”
She is the price balance demands.
“Please.” Deirdre’s whole body trembled as she tried to fight destiny. Tears spilled over her face like rain. “Let me have a little time before you take her. A year. Even a month. Just one day.”
Do you think it will be easier then?Sorrow wrote a poem beneath the silver antlers.She belongs to us now. She will live. She will love. But she is no longer yours.
And so Deirdre relinquished her daughter to the forest and wished Death had claimed her first.
She tried to keep her distance.
She could not.
She watched as the forest nursed her daughter, even as her own breasts grew painful with too much milk, then dried up. She watched as the babe grew into a child and danced along dappled paths between trees, parented by every Folk creature save her own mother.
Deirdre shifted into her anam cló and did not shift back.
One day, the child disappeared.
Deirdre followed.
