A miasma of foul scents assaulted me as I entered: dead rodent, I thought, spoiled milk, rotting food. The pottage upon the hearth had burned, been filled again, and burned again. Rushes were strewn sparsely across the floor, barely enough to cushion the feet. Cobwebs hung in every corner and the air was stale and full of sick.
It had become so small, this house I grew up in, chokingly so. There are homes not merely lived in, but loved in. These will always feel spacious, no matter how tiny; no matter how bare, they will always seem full.
The Grieve farmhouse wasnotone of these.
I picked up a stained rag which dipped dangerously close to the fire and tossed it aside before it set the house ablaze.Eamon should have paid for a servant until Glenna was back on her feet and able to do for herself. But perhaps Eamon could not. I thought of the broken door, the yard devoid of livestock. Had Eamon sold off the cow? What desperate financial straits he must be in to do so.
My own words returned to me, from nearly six months before:May your milk sour, and your fortunes fail.
It seemed they had. And not only Eamon, but also Glenna Baker must suffer the cost.
I wrinkled my nose as I circled past the trestle table, noting the not-quite-empty bowls of porridge sitting there. They smelled as if they had not been cleaned in days.
I had moved far beyond this place. From shepherd’s cottage to baron’s attic, then hosted among his guests. I had healed his wife, and soon would heal his son, and afterwards, his bastard and I could be wed. I did not need Eamon’s welcome nor his approval anymore. And looking around the house, pity was what I felt.
Pity, and not a small amount of disgust.
“Mab’s tits,” I muttered. The house looked nearly empty. Where were my sisters, who should have come to help with the birth? Where were Glenna’s kinfolk? The father of her bairn?
Nay. Him I had seen.Escorted me here then vanished, the tricksy wight.
“Hello,” I called out. “Glenna, are ye here?”
A hideous groan came from a curtained area at the rear of the home.
I remembered the spot well. There had I laid out Mairi Grieve’s body, while the neighbors and kinsfolk came to pay their respects.
’Twas a place for death, and a place for birth. Two sides of a different veil.
Now Glenna Baker did labor there alone.
I was pulled by my promise, pushed by the lack of welcome, and driven by the need to help my friend.
I clucked my tongue and rounded the corner, pulling aside the curtain. Glenna lay on a straw pallet, rough linen sheets rumpled around her, with her ten-year-old brother seated on a stool beside.
I blinked for a moment at the sight of him under the wan glow of the rushlight, so exactly had Amadan captured his look. Fae glamour is remarkable, when practiced by one adept. Yet the boy’s eyes did not glow like emerald, and his hair had no iridescent gleam. Mortal he was, and her true kin.
I was glad Glenna was not alone.
Her hair lay damp across her forehead, and her skin was pale as milk. She rolled her head and smiled weakly at me, as she croaked out, “Bess. You came. I thought you’d left us! Rory says you haven’t been to the oven for months. Yet by some miracle, here you are.”
I scowled. It was not miracle, some whim of her Christian God. The lord of trickery had brought me here.
Young Rory stood awkwardly, staring down at his roughshod feet.
I claimed the stool and took Glenna’s hand, cold and clammy in my own. “Hush, dear heart. I am here now.” I brushed the hair from her forehead.
Glenna looked away uncomfortably, twisting a pendant at her throat. “I did not want you to find out like this, Bess. I’d have told you myself, in some other, kinder way. This is not what I wanted at all.” Her big brown eyes were moist with tears.
“Not what you wanted”—for me to find out thus? Or is it your union to Eamon Grieve you so regret?Yet pity kindled inside me, for what choice had she, really? Her bairn needed a father, and Amadan would not have come through. Gently I took her hand away from the pendant or tried to; it burned me worse than a rountree branch.
A bronze cross.
I recoiled with a hiss, a drop of water into a pot of heated oil. Amadan’s words came back to me:I will not have my offspring baptized. Who knows what it will do to a child of the fae?
The cross would not help the delivery, either. If the first sight it was to meet at its mother’s breast was a cross, why would the bairn ever want to come out?
“Is summat wrong?” Glenna asked, her eyes wide and horrible shadows beneath them.
