The front chambers of the Healing-Hall were laid out such that one could access any cure in Raven Lake without needing to go further. I passed through this empty storehouse at a sprint.
Beyond, the room was less structured, more cavernous, laid out in the form of a dormitory. There were beds on the left, rush mats and furs on the right. The eastern wall behind the beds was made of wood, and draped hides there served to cover the openings to smaller rooms beyond.
Ahead on the right, a screen of reeds had been lifted into place some distance into the chamber, shielding the space beyond from view. I filed this away as confirmation that the druids indeed understood how to honor a demand for privacy. The low patter of several voices filtered from behind the woven barrier. On the nearer side of the screen, I was surprised to see Miles Fenson standing with his hands at his sides, looking more than a little out of place.
Healer Brix’s shout arrested my progress at the door. She leaned out just far enough to glare around the edge of the screen.
“Lan dalia,” she ordered. She gestured with her chin.
A tall statue stood to the right of the door. It was copper, or it had been copper, veiled now in verdegris save for the gleaming palms of a pair of hands. Beneath the patina, only the vaguest impression of a woman was still visible, and I pressed my palms to hers. The copper was cold, its sleek surface tingling faintly against my skin.
The Healer nodded and withdrew.
“M’lady,” Miles did not bow.
“Miles. It’s quiet.”
“Wasn’t before.” He shrugged, and looked as though he were on the verge of wringing his hands. “Helped carry her in. Thought I’d stay, ‘case they need–”
“Man!” Healer Brix appeared around the side of the screen. She held her hands in the air in a curiously suspended fashion, directed her words at Miles. “Sulmiir Saric thiirgranel-nin.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“What’s she after?”
“Find Saric,” Grannine stood by me as though She had taken the place of the statue.
“Why not,” Miles pushed to his feet. “Anything else?”
I looked to the Healer. Grannine spoke for her.
“The baby is young,” Healer Brix said. Now in a moment of urgency, her twinkling eyes remained, but her mein was now calm and confident. “We need Saric.”
“Nothing else. Miles—thank you.”
“I live to serve.” He scraped a quick but exaggerated bow and set off at an pace that betrayed the nerves in this attempt at comedy.
“Is that young Mariead?”
I felt more than a little relief hearing Lena Cooper’s voice, and the sharp question spurred me out of my hesitation.
“Stay. I go,” Healer Brix stopped my passage with one elbow. “I return quick. If the baby comes again, call to me.”
With some misgivings, I took her place behind the screen.
The tableau I discovered had the worn edge of long hours. There was no bed, only an array of cotton blankets atop rush mats. Half a dozen women were clustered here, kneeling or crouching or sitting on the rush-covered floor. The rest of the chamber was empty—seldom did the druids linger at the infirmary. Mercy Angelson was lying upon this mat, black-haired and ashen with a blanket draped across her body. She gripped Lena Cooper’s hand on the right, and Layla Fuller’s on the left.
Next to Layla, Faith Arquet was cooing in Mercy’s ear, brushing her forehead with a cloth.
“Easy, girl,” she said, and her eyes flicked up to mine. “Breathe, my darling. Just take the respite while it lasts. Here’s the Lady now, like you asked.”
“Come, come,” Lena Cooper beckoned to me, squeezing back against the cavern wall to let me pass.
I took Mercy’s hand hesitantly. Her palm was damp with sweat, and her grip was weak in mine.
“L-lady,” she breathed.
“I’m here,” I clasped her hands in mine. “I’m here.”
Lena’s strong hand landed on my shoulder, and she levered herself to her feet with a grunt.
“Where’s that Brix woman gone?” She stormed off.
“We’re just resting now,” Faith murmured. “Not long, my sweet. Not long.”
“Lady Mariead,” Mercy whispered. “Th-they said…too soon. It’s…” Her eyes flicked open, heavy-lidded, grey and electric. “Too soon for him. I’m…”
“Nonsense,” Faith said firmly. “The baby’s going to be just fine.”
“Don’t lie to me, Faith Arquet,” Mercy said, with a flash of lucidity. “I’m…the one carried him from…home.” Her face worked. “I wish…”
Faith mouthed something to me, indicated Mercy with an urgent nod.
“You’ll be all right,” I said quickly. I pressed her hand. “Healer Brix is here. I’m certain her people know as much of childbirth as we do.”
“Wouldn’t know about that,” Layla muttered. “She wanted to bring Mercy down to the baths.”
“Wanted that other Healer here too, what’s his name,” Faith frowned. “That man Delo.”
“Lena seems to have put a fright in her after that.”
Even Mercy huffed a weary laugh at Layla’s tone. Faith and Layla were comfortable here, even confident—weary, and alert, but calm. I felt very out of place, my nerves excited. My pulse thumped at the back of my neck.
“You wanted me?” I asked Mercy. “What do you need? How can I help?”
Her face twisted. I cast a questioning look at Faith, but her face was grim.
“Lucas,” Mercy whispered. “I’m frightened. Oh, God–” A spasm ran through her.
“Easy, my pet,” Faith set the cloth aside, brushing Mercy’s hair. “Here it comes. Breathe.”
“Don’t fight it,” Layla held Mercy’s arm as though she might float away, firm on hand and shoulder. “Trust me, girl, it’s worse if you do. Come, let’s get you up.”
Lena Cooper clapped a hand on my shoulder. I had hardly heard her return in the sudden loud hoarseness of Mercy’s breath, but now I served once again as her crutch as she took a knee at Mercy’s side. She whispered in my ear with neither malice nor courtesy.
“You look pale as a ghost. Get out before you scare her.”
I fled. Lena took Mercy’s hand in my place, her rough voice lowering to a soothing rumble even as Mercy raised her head into a long, drawn-out wail. In my haste to escape around the screen, I nearly ran slapdash into Saric, who caught me firmly by the arms. She was brilliant with exertion, breathing fast.
She winked. Quick as thought, she slipped past me and around the curtain.
“Oli, memma,” Her cheerful voice illuminated the hall. Mercy gasped something that might have been a scream, if there had been more breath to it.
Rina and Healer Brix passed me on either side, Rina pausing to squeeze my hand.
More voices. I followed them toward the front storeroom.
A small crowd had gathered. Men I knew, folk of Caer Lunan who all put on an air of vague surreptition when I emerged from the inner chamber. Perversely, their chagrin eased my nerves.
Blake Bauldry was there, broad and ruddy. So were Tyler Pace, Alan Lee, and the Fensons, Miles and Kell. Father Zachary and even Astrid Fuller were here, and from her I earned a quiet nod. They wore scraps and pieces of their old clothes mingled with deerskin and cotton from the druids, but no armor, no arms, no helmet or hat here in Raven Lake.
“M’Lady,” Tyler Pace said, a little subdued. “Faith.”
“What’s this now?” Faith squeezed through the door at my shoulder. “Boys, if you’re looking to help, I’m afraid we’re out of room at the bedside.” She looked about, made a beeline into the inner room and heaped up a stack of clean cotton, the same as the stuff the druids seemed to use for clothes and floor coverings.
Tyler Pace cleared his throat, moving forward to call after Faith. He looked too young and too clean to have been a Church soldier.
“Faith, begging your pardon. I knew Luke. He’d have wanted to be here, if he were still with us. So we figured we ought to be here for him, seeing as…”
He trailed off.
“Seeing as he’s not here to be a nervous lump on the doorstep?” Faith said, but there were no teeth in her voice. She folded the cloth into her arms with a huff. “Kind of you to take his place.”
Father Zachary cleared his throat, a mild man with silvering hair. No trace of his vestments remained.
“We never did hold a vigil for Goodsir Angelson,” he said. “And of course I thought I might be needed to bless the child, unless you will be fulfilling that duty, My Lady.”
The thought filled me with another sudden thrill of inadequacy. It was Rina’s words that came to me then. The blessing of a mouse.
In the brief hush that followed, Mercy’s voice raised from within the Healing-Hall in a guttural roar. A few of the men looked oddly cowed by the sound. Faith waved her free hand as if she could brush the scream from the air.
“She’s fine,” Faith said evenly. “As long as you’re here, you might as well fetch some more clean linens from the Store-hall. We’ll have need.” She looked about the storeroom, shelf and crate still in disarray from the departure of the Starfurrow expedition. “What a mess.”
Mercy cried out again, and Faith departed.
A strained, gentle silence fell over the room until Blake Bauldry cleared his throat with a loud, phlegmy grumble and lumbered across to a heap of half-empty crates. He bent down, picked up a small barrel, and set it loudly on top of another.
As if by silent signal, Tyler, Miles, and Kell joined him. Alan left with a purpose that suggested he might be making course for the Storage-Hall and its stock of clean clothes.
Grannine. I cast a subtle look in Her direction. Before I forget. Could Dermot fetch something for us?
“He isn’t far.” Grannine frowned, putting on an expression of focus. “I’ll ask.”
Thanks. Astrid picked her way around the edge of their sudden activity, hands clasped behind her back. The naturally solemn cast of her face was lightened by a grin.
“Banished by Lena? The woman’s a tyrant in the birthroom. Mercy’s in good hands.”
The woman thus named made her presence in the Healing-Hall known again with a long, rising shout of either pain or fury. “Layla’s in there? She’s always better at this. Animals I don’t mind so much, but…” She frowned as though I had something stuck in my hair. “M’lady, Have you been to a birth before?”
“Only my own.”
Astrid laughed. I heard it in a manner which seemed half-real. I felt as though there were some part of me which had become fixed upon the task of observation. Some quiet chronicler illuminating a manuscript as my thoughts ran on.
The men of Caer Lunan were here in the outer storeroom, while the women had gathered at Mercy’s bedside…save for Astrid and I. We stood together, not quite within, not quite without.
Kata. Qualdae. It was not so much the foreignness of the druid’s word as the familiarity which haunted me. Such a simple thing. Something I had known to be part of myself since I was very young, and something which I had hidden. How much more complex the world was when that part of myself could be named! Here stood Astrid and I, alike in this way, and here we stood between both worlds. I could not say whether we stood apart because of what we shared…but I did know we were apart, and that we shared this.
Healer Brix had aceded to a demand to bar male healers from the bedside. Had that been an uncommon request? Much like the mingling of sexes in the cavern below, the very thought of a man aiding in childbirth was one I never would have entertained. Yet I wondered at the force of that uncontemplated conviction.
Am I here because I feel I should not be by her side? Because I might frighten her? Or am I truly here because of my own discomfort?
I knew not how long I had spent wrapt in this contemplation, but the women inside the Healing-Hall raised their voices all together, and their rowdy chorus pulled me from my thoughts. Frustration, discomfort, or simple obstinacy won out, and I felt the feeling transmute to something else in the bed of my stomach; a violent, directionless impulse, a call to action. A sudden, powerful feeling of rejection ran through me.
“I’m taking in some linens for Faith,” I said to Astrid. She shrugged, folded her arms.
“Suit yourself.” Her attention turned to one of the men struggling to lift a sealed barrel, and she hastened to his side. “Tyler–don’t lift that on your own, here, let me help–”
With the last stack of clean cottons from the second storeroom, I again braved the bedside with self-imposed haste.
I had hardly made it any distance into the Healing-Hall before I realized the shouting and calling from the far side of the screen had gone utterly silent. All was still in the cavern, so still that I could hear the flutter of candles as some breath of wind evoked a puff of smoke from their tongues. I redoubled my pace.
Mercy had sunk back into the arms of Caer Lunan; Layla, Faith, and Lena supported her weight, drawing clean blankets over her. Faith threw a stained and bloody blanket to heap upon the stone floor, cast a sharp eye to Healer Brix.
Rina, Saric, and Healer Brix huddled at Mercy’s feet. Healer Brix fussed over something in Rina’s arms. Rina had a look in her eyes which I had seen on her very seldom—but one I knew well.
“Saric-dan,” Rina said, in a hushed, urgent voice. Her face was calm. Her eyes were wide.
I took another step. I felt out of place, invisible, and no face here turned to me.
In her arms, Rina held a child, a baby, smaller than any infant I had ever seen, half-swaddled in a blanket. The stump of an umbilical stood out from its belly, clasped with a coil of metal like a spring.
Something glinted in Saric’s hand, and I saw more blood on the rushes. She set a copper knife shaped like a crescent moon aside on a clean fold of the mat and only then turned to Rina. Healer Brix fell back at just a touch of Saric’s arm.
The child and its first swaddlings were still filthy from birth, but Saric took the babe into her arms as though it were her own. The weight left Rina’s shoulders more heavily than it should have.
Saric leaned forward, murmured something soft and warm to the infant in her arms. Another wind crept through the cavern, bearing with it the gentle scent of dried flowers, the evanescent hint of violet blossoming on the breeze.
“It’s quiet,” Mercy whispered. Her voice hitched; she tried to struggle up and found the gentle support around her was as much a restraint. “Why isn’t he crying?”
“It’s all right,” Faith said. Her tone was not one of conviction. “Just rest–”
“Faith,” Mercy pulled her arm free. “I want to see–”
Saric crooned again to the child. Then she shifted its weight into the crook of her right arm, lifted the bloody thumb of her left hand into her mouth, and bit with hardly a wince until I saw fresh scarlet welling.
“Tolex glacex,” she said fondly to the child, and pressed blood to its forehead. “Col thiir.”
In a rush from the farthest end of the Healing-Hall, the candles flickered, sputtered, and burned clean. A final faint wind sighed over Mercy’s sweat-damped hair.
The awful silence parted to welcome the cry of a newborn.
“Oh God,” Mercy held out her arms to Saric. “Please–”
“Oli, memma,” Saric said sweetly, and shifted across the floor, passing Mercy’s child into her arms. It paused in its crying, a tiny furrow in the pale and unmarked brow as color flooded into its cheeks—and burst out into another wail.
“My Lady, bless you,” Faith said briskly, looking up to me at last. “You’ve brought clean things for us.”
“Give it here,” Lena ordered, holding out one hand. I passed her the uppermost length of cotton from my pile, and she threaded her arms through Mercy’s without hesitation, switching out the birth-marked blanket for a clean one.
“You were right, Mercy,” Layla reached out to take the infant’s hand in three fingers. “He’s beautiful.”
“Lady Mariead,” Mercy looked up, blinking as if to shake off sleep. “Will you bless him? Please.”
“Father Zachary is waiting outside with the lads,” Faith said, perhaps reading the expression on my face.
“And Rina, too.” Mercy stirred again as if to stand, but surrendered as Layla passed a cushion behind her back. “Please. He wouldn’t…”
“We–” Rina’s voice wavered, and she cleared her throat, touched the sigil around her neck. “Saric has blessed him already, and we must not have four. Let us have a blessing from Saric and the Church, a blessing from me, from Suuna’astrea-dae, and one from you, memma, for your own child. That will be a good beginning.”
“Sit, suuna’astrea,” Saric leapt to her feet, offering me her unwounded right hand. Blood and slime were drying in place upon her clothes. “I will bring your Father Zachary-al.”
Loathe to resist the tranquil moment that had descended, I knelt before Mercy, and found myself face-to-face with the mother and her babe. All at once they seemed quite shockingly vivid, no longer ideas of mother and child—the urgency, the fear, the blood and the strange, intangible segregations of our kin and culture—but living things, blushing and vital. Animal. In that physicality I felt again uncultured and out-of-place, haunted by the feeling that there was something deep and complex here that I could not understand.
Why have I never realized before how little the Saints say of birth?
The child stopped crying. Blue eyes opened wide, taking in the room.
“So small, so bright.” When Grannine had returned, I could not say, but now She curled close at my shoulder, extending my finger to the babe in Mercy’s arms. Tiny fingers gripped softly around mine, fluttering in the effort of forming a fist. “Welcome, little one.”
“You–” My voice cracked. I looked up to Mercy’s face. Her brown eyes were glazed with fatigue, but she now looked almost luminously happy. I touched the infant’s unblemished brow, touched its heart. “Your mother came such a long way to see you safe.”
Life is its own value. The idea turned over in my head. Of course. In the form of a negation, it meant life had no other value; I had taken it for a moral stipulation, a warning or weight to considerations of death. But in the affirmative I found a voice for the wordless feeling in my chest.
“Bless you, and keep you.” I touched his little heart and head again in the sign of the Church. “Life is a gift beyond any value. You, little one, are such a gift. Blessed be the newborn. Blessed be we who lived to welcome you. Life is yours. Live.”
*
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