“Lay a cloth beneath her.”
“Keep her upright as long as she can stand it.”
Ilys moved quickly. She fed the fire until it roared, set the kettle on, soaked and wrung out cloths, and rolled up her sleeves. Her hands stayed rooted, even as the room filled with the scent of blood and iron, primal and vinous.
The labor dragged on. Hours. The light outside shifted from silver to gray, then gray to pale. The frost melted off the windows. The floor darkened with splashes of water. There were groans and cries, then guttural things torn from Rowenna’sthroat. Her face slickened with sweat, her hair plastered to her temples. Her thighs trembled, her grip bruising.
At one point she vomited into a bucket, breath heaving like a bellows, and groaned, “I can’t,” over and over again.
“You can,” Rutha said flatly. “And you will.”
Ilys knelt by the bed, wiping sweat from her forehead, offering her hand when asked, withdrawing when it was struck aside. She fetched, poured, cleaned. She stayed.
When the baby crowned, Rowenna’s scream tore free. The cry of a woman breaking herself open, bone and skin and spirit. Her thighs shook. Her fingernails split. And then, one final, wrenching push, guided by a sound like tearing.
Ever punctual, Rutha caught the child in her hands, slick and red and loud. A wail rang out, peart yet overtired.
“It’s a boy,” she announced, voice softened. “Full head of hair on him.”
Rowenna collapsed back against the pillows, mouth open, chest heaving. She looked spent, hollowed out. But when Rutha placed the child against her chest, Rowenna curled around him instinctively, arms trembling.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t smile. She just looked, really looked, at her son, as though already memorizing the shape of him. His tiny fists. His wet curls. His furious little face.
Ilys sat on the edge of the bed, reaching for a clean cloth to swaddle him. Her fingers brushed Rowenna’s as she helped. The kettle hissed, boiling over and Rutha moved to tend it, wordless, already cleaning tools and bloody linens with practiced ease. Ilys stayed, knees stained, arms sore, hair sticking to her neck. She watched the two of them in this new shape they’d become. No celebration arrived. No sweeping music or miracle. Just breath. Sweat. Blood. The work of birth.
And Ilys, who had ushered so many into the dark, now bore witness to something else: a beginning.
Chapter 16
The cottage felt strangely quiet in the days after Woolf arrived, as if the whole place were holding its breath. Ilys felt time slipping away; worry of her absence at the Sanctum pricked her. Yet Rowenna lay pale and hollowed, her limbs loose with fatigue, curls clinging damp to her temples.
She slept more than she spoke, breath rasping low as her body remembered itself. Sometimes she stirred and whispered nonsense. Sometimes she reached blindly and whispered, “Are they all right?” before sinking again.
Ilys had never felt more ill-equipped and displaced.
The child—Woolf, as the name had somehow clung—seemed impossibly small. His fists curled like little seeds. His mouth opened and closed in wordless complaint. His eyes, when they opened, were dark and fathomless, like rain water pooled in a hollow stone.
Ilys held him like she might break him by thinking too loudly. Her hands, made for sword-hilts and saddles, were all wrong forthis kind of softness. She hovered when he cried. She flinched when he rooted. She cleaned him like one might disarm a trap.
“You are a damp, shrieking mystery,” she whispered once, eyes narrowed as she changed a nappy with the delicacy of a mutt braiding hair.
But Rowenna needed rest. And no one else was coming.
So, Ilys fed Woolf awkwardly, with one arm and half a prayer, rocked him in the creaky old chair by the hearth, and sang nonsense songs in a voice she hadn’t used since she was a girl. She burned the porridge twice. She kept the fire going. She learned, slowly, the difference between a hunger cry and a tired one.
And Woolf, for his part, tolerated her.
Somewhere in the second night, after feeding and tending to Spire, Ilys sat curled with the child in her lap, half asleep. Woolf had stopped crying some time ago and now blinked at her with unnerving calm, studying her veil to find the face beneath.
“You don’t know who I am,” Ilys remarked. “And I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Woolf made a soft snuffling sound and smacked his lips in approval, apparently unbothered.
Ilys touched his brow with one calloused thumb. “But you’re not so awful. For an animal that came screaming into the world.” Her voice, roughened to a hush, barely reached the air. “You’re not what I expected,” she admitted. “And yet… here you are. Stealing hours from me like it’s your right.”
She didn’t realize she’d begun to sway, back and forth in the chair, a rhythm older than memory.
By morning, when Rowenna finally woke, bleary, sore, and blinking against the gray light, Ilys dowsed in the chair, Woolf curled against her chest, fast asleep.
