“I—I don’t know that I want to get married,” she continued in a low tone. “But I have to eventually, and Thane asked me, and he is the best of the boys our age. By quite a lot.”
“He is the very best,” I agreed.
Torm Sheridan officially chose to then install Rowena in the apothecary building with the house in front and garden in back. Rowena spent more and more of her time in town, only a few days here and there at the farm. I spent the duration of her betrothal shamelessly leaning on Magda. The old woman may have been her usual grumpy self, but there was a softness in her eyes when she regarded me. She seemed to double the number of tasks I had to carry out for her, but I was grateful for it. I needed the occupation.
Had I known what would transpire next, I would have paid more attention to the midwife, would have gleaned all that I could from her.
Half a moon before Rowena’s wedding, Magda and I were sent for in the middle of the night. A keep guard carrying a cresset torch rode his mount hard up to our fence, flung the gate open, and pounded on our door. A lady-in-waiting to Torm’s wife, married tothe captain of the lord’s guard, was having birthing pains. Magda only recently knew of the woman’s pregnancy and turned to me, a satchel of supplies slung over her shoulder, saying, “This is bad, Robbie. This is too soon and the mother is untested. It is her first and she’s barely three moons on.”
“Why don’t they just ask for Rowena? She is mostly at the mill house now and would have been closer.”
“They asked for us and so we go.”
Magda mounted Apple Dumpling and I mounted our old mare. We rode with the rather rude guard back up to Torm’s castle keep. I had never been inside it. It was impressive and large, housing an entire community of folk within Sheridan. We entered not through the monumental double ironclad doors at the front but a servant’s entrance in the side.
As we made our way up several stairs within a turret to the lady’s chambers, I glanced around, stupidly looking for Thane. I had not let myself really see him since our fight in the forest. I had kept my eyes downcast on tenth days.
The idea that my twin would marry my lover, that he would then have all that he wanted from his father and that he had so quickly moved on from me, sickened me.
When we arrived at a sedate but richly furnished room, mostly in reds and grays, a tapestry of a silvery flame hanging from the wall over their bed, I realized the woman and her husband were likely Perpatanian. They must have been sent to Torm by King Pollux to increase the lord’s guards and control of the town. They were more folk who would readily endorse Starling’s every word.
The priest himself stood just outside the half-open door, arms folded over his chest, a polite smile on his face.
“Madam Geist,” he said, nearly cheerful in his greeting.
Magda nodded. “Father,” she replied. “I assume you’ve said some prayers over the mistress inside?”
Starling frowned, but not angrily, almost as if he was disappointed in a child’s behavior. “Now, madam, I would not stain myperson or my spirit with the goings on of womenfolk. It is not for a man to interfere. I stand here in the hall to offer comfort to the lord’s captain.”
“I see,” she said calmly.
I was in awe of her restraint and stewing over his use of “stain.”
“Then I pray, good priest,” Magda went on. “Tell me if the physician King Pollux gifted to us has seen to her.”
Starling frowned again. “Calling you is a kindness granted to the lady by our most gracious Lord Torm. We understand that you—you countryfolk once had a way of doing things. It is not for a physician to see to a child’s birth. If the grace of Rodwin should allow for a babe to live, then it and its mother’s survival is up to our saint.”
“Well then, that is a kindness. My apprentice and I will see to the woman now. I thank you for your prayers with the father. I am sure he is upset.”
Her words were said with such solemnity that there could be no sarcasm heard within them, but something in her face must have irked the priest.
I waited for his rebuke. But oddly enough, his irritation was quickly replaced with a satisfaction, as if we had proven him right about something. A chill went down the back of my spine.
Something was not right.
Magda charged inside and shooed out all of the other ladies save two female servants who waited, hands crossed over their midsections, heads bent.
The woman’s name was Gayla and she was young, perhaps only a winter or two older than me. She was lying on her back, sweating and weeping.
I watched Magda pull the coverlet down, grumbling about how the poor girl was clearly overheated. When the coverlet came all the way off of her body, we saw the blood between her legs. Magda rolled up the sleeves of her dress and then ran her hands over the woman’s flat belly, her pregnancy not that far along. She clucked and shook herhead.
“Oh, dear,” she said, and the grace I only saw in the midwife when she was at a birth came over her features. Her usual gruffness faded. Taking the lady’s hand in hers, she said, “Your body pushes the child out soon because it has died in the womb, my poor girl.”
The woman began to sob. “I—I knew it.”
“I am so sorry,” Magda replied. “I know what it is to lose a child like this.”
My eyes flitted to the midwife in surprise, but I continued unpacking the satchel out onto a small table near the bed and looked away.
