Guilt washed over me at disturbing the expectant mother so. I favored her with a weak smile, then turned to Rory. “Would you remove the cross from around your sister’s throat?”
The boy stared at me.
Glenna’s hand flew to her breast. “’Twas my mother’s.”
“All the more reason to see it kept safe.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Remembrances of one’s family should be treasured. I had no tokens of my own. “I fear... it will prove a distraction for me.”
For I could think of nothing but that repellent object, the wall of revulsion radiating from it, raising my gorge. It governed society beyond all reason and condemned the fae for nothing more than who we were.
It had made me like a stranger in my own home.
Glenna reached up to untie the leather, and the sound of heavy footsteps came from behind us.
“Leave it,” said the rumbling voice of Eamon Grieve.
I turned towards the man I once knew as father.
How had I ever feared him? He seemed to have shrunk since last I saw him, loose skin hanging off his jowls like a forlorn hound. What hair he had grew thin; his nose and cheeks were ruddy with a drunkard’s flush. Only six months had passed since I last saw him, but Eamon seemed to have aged at least twenty years.
My words again:May you wizen beyond your years, may your seed grow dry, and you never know love with another.
I stood and did not flinch at the scent of ale on his breath.
“Would you endanger her very soul?” he asked me, with a quiet threat in his voice.
“Would you endanger her life and her child?” I spat back. “Ye did not send for me, nor any other who might help deliver it.”
“We will manage,” he growled.
“With whose help? Ye cast me out of the house, but all the others, your sons and daughters you were happy to claim, where are they now? Did even a one of them come to help your wife give birth?”
His eyes flicked away, the only sign of how uncomfortable this truth was. To rear your children on fear alone is never to secure their love.
“Indeed, I sent you away,” he agreed. “Nor are you welcome now. Get out.”
Part of me wanted to. Never had I desired to return to Eamon Grieve’s home. Yet my promise pulled on me, burned in me, and Glenna’s face was so white, the covers twisted around her, damp with sweat. I could not go. “I am not here for you. I am here for her.”
“And she is mine. Glenna does not—”
“Eamon, please!” I do not think Glenna could have brought herself to protest, had she not been wracked with severe pain, for the words turned into an anguished cry.
I dropped to my knees beside her, hand on her arm, eyes averted from the cross. “I have no time to argue with you,” I told Eamon. “The bairn is coming. I need a wet cloth for her forehead. Smut rye for the contractions. Henbane and poppy for the pain.”
He did not move. His shadow hung over us like a storm cloud, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
“You need not help,” I told him, “but I will not have you hinder. Rory, you go.”
With a nod, the boy rushed off, though how he would find any of those things was beyond me. It wasn’t his house.
Glenna stilled. Heaving exhausted breaths, she propped herself on her elbows, giving Eamon such a glare as I had never seen from her. “I want Bess here,” she said. “I trust her.”
A grunt issued from Eamon, then came the stomp of his footsteps as he stalked away.
Once he had gone, Glenna carefully removed the cross around her neck. “You will let neither my soul nor my bairn come to harm.” She spoke it as she might have a prayer or a creed, thereby compelling me to be worthy of her faith. Something passed between us, and I nearly asked her what she saw, what she knew of her bairn’s true father, what she knew of me.
The spasms came again, and I had other things to occupy my mind. It would be a very long night.
Glenna writhed in her bedclothes, while Eamon busied himself in the other room—with what I did not know, or even care. He had retreated from his woman’s travail, the lazy coward.
