You cannot even speak the words “my courses are late.” How can you be ready to bear a child?I steeled myself against the slight tremble in her lips, the wet shine of her eyes. “You told me about your lover.”
At the mention of him she went starry-eyed again, as if she was well and truly besotted. More than besotted.
Enchanted.
Glenna might call her lover an elf lord in jest, but I feared he was one in truth. Love cannot trap the fae as it will the folk of earth. We hunger and are sated. We seduce and abandon, and care not what seed we have sown.
At least, we are not meant to.
Yet this child would be born on this side of the Veil. Likely it must pass beneath a horseshoe nailed to the lintel every day. Be baptized, and whatever harm might come to it from that, I did not know.
But I knew this: To be a child of two worlds, and citizen of none, is a fate no one should have to endure.
This pity I felt was not of the fae at all.
“I am not your friend,” I continued, as if by saying so I could harden my own heart. “If you wished to brag of your new love, you would have gone to one of the Douglas girls, or to the reeve’s daughter. Never would you come to me.” I was blunt, but grateful I need not be otherwise, my faery limitations for once coming of use. “Never would you tell Mairi Grieve’s daughter you had a dalliance in the woods, unless something had come of it, something you did not want.”
Glenna’s brown eyes were wide with wonder. “They say Mairi Grieve was midwife to the queen of the faeries herself.”
I gawped at her, speechless.Who said it? When?Was this idle rumor, a tribute to Mairi’s knowledge and skill, or did someone actually know?
Glenna’s elfin lover, perhaps.
But Glenna had already moved on from the subject. Shame flushed her cheeks. “Dinna tell my father. About the bairn.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as her gaze fell to the ground.
“He will figure it out in time!”
Glenna might be publicly humiliated or cast out of her own home. I remembered Peggy the Cottar, aged before her time and begging on the road.
Glenna bit her lip, looking vulnerable and young. “Not if I—” She trailed off, brushing her fingers across her belly.
There it was. Why she confided in me, what she needed me for. Glenna Baker was childing but wished to be empty, and like as not, she wanted my help.
Do not follow in your mother’s footsteps.The words of Eamon Grieve returned to me. And the priest’s:She messed with God’s will.
And Glenna’s own:They say Mairi Grieve was midwife to the queen of the faeries herself.
Glenna was a silly git, a goose of a girl, but she knew who to turn to in her time of need.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked quietly, fearing the answer.
She sniffled, her eyes round, and shook her head. And so, the question had turned right back around to me.
“I know an herb,” I said, and despite myself, put my hand over hers. “Do not fret. Mairi Grieve taught me everything she knew.”
Six
My heart trembled with whatI was about to do. Glenna Baker grew great with child, and I would seek out the herb to prevent its birth.
The babe was far from quickening. Some reckon that a lesser sin.
As if we fae care aught about sin.
Still, the Bess I had been for eighteen years told me not to do this. Not from any fear of eternal damnation, but because Eamon Grieve had cautioned me not to follow in Mairi’s footsteps, nor to meddle in God’s will. Disobedience would bring his rod against my back.
Yet in my mortal seeming I was Mairi Grieve’s daughter, too. Her daughter, her student, and recipient of the knowledge she passed on to no one else. Mairi had never denied anyone her aid, whatever their reasons. If I were to follow in her footsteps, I must follow that example as well.
I went to Carterhaugh.
