by Jo Spurrier
‘I will,’ Isidro said. Sierra stood just behind Cam, and Isidro caught her gaze. ‘Stay with Cam,’ he told her. ‘Don’t leave his side for a moment.’
Her eyes flashed in response and he instantly regretted the words, but she replied before he could say anything more. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I will.’
Of course she knew. Hadn’t she been Cam’s right hand in the months Isidro’d lain ill and senseless? But there was no time for apologies. He bowed his head, and wheeled his horse as the last of the men scrambled into the saddle. ‘All of you ready? Time to ride.’
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
She couldn’t walk any further — the contractions were coming too hard now, and too close together. In desperation, Delphine had headed out towards the fields where she hoped Nikala and the coachman wouldn’t think to search. But she hadn’t made it far until, with the last bit of strength in her legs, she’d staggered to a patchy hedgerow, crawling into a hollow where some beast must have forced its way through, hoping desperately that the camouflage enchantment would make it seem like a solid wall of green. The stone was her only defence now.
At first, she’d been able to hear them searching, but they seemed to have moved away — or perhaps the pounding of her heart and the laboured rasp of her breath drowned them out.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Labour lasted for days, that’s what everyone had told her. Biting her lip in fury, she felt cheated and betrayed. There should have been ample time for her kin to reach her side, for Sierra to come help with the pain of the birth. That was what she’d prepared for, nor giving birth alone and hunted, crouching in a hedgerow like some wild beast.
Poor little babe, she thought to herself. Conceived in a tent in the mountains in a Ricalani spring, and planted in my womb only because I had to leave Rhia’s moontime herbs behind when we fled. Fed on frogs and rabbits as we marched westward, and then quickened amid an army of freed slaves as we turned to the east again. Is it truly any wonder you’ll be born on rotting leaves at the edge of a field? It seems far stranger to think that after all this, I thought you’d be born in a warm house on a feather bed.
Her waters had broken some minutes before she’d found this meagre shelter, and her instincts were screaming that the babe was coming and it was coming now. The pain was immense, unyielding, a vicious sensation that made her feel like she was being torn in two, but somehow she was able to dismiss it, to seal it up in a corner of her mind where it seemed distant and unimportant compared with the need to keep silent.
All her strength was focused on keeping her breath deep and steady, lest the sound of panting give her away. As each contraction came that was the only thought in her head, just keep breathing, in and out, as she knelt on the leaves smelling of damp and musty earth. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but there was no arguing with reality. The babe was coming, and it was up to her to get them both through.
Isidro crouched low over the horse’s neck as they thundered along muddy roads. They had a clear run, and yet it seemed the hills and fields crawled by.
He wanted to kick his horse faster, but it would be a mistake. No beast could cover this distance at a dead sprint, they had to pace themselves.
He glanced up at the sun, moving too fast through the sky. The thought of what could have gone wrong tormented him — they’d been on guard against infiltrators since the earliest days of the rebellion, but none had ever come close enough to do harm, until now. Did they have Delphine already?
There was nothing to do but ride, and hope.
On reflection, Delphine thought, perhaps it was better this way. The whole business was horribly undignified. She was drenched with sweat, straddle-legged and groaning like a beast, stripped of all clothing but a Ricalani-style breast-band and an underskirt of pale cloth now stained and soiled with blood and other fluids. If there was one good thing to be said of this situation, it was that no one else would see her like this.
The contractions were coming solidly now, with no breaks in between. Oddly, the worst of the pain seemed to be past, and now there was nothing left but the urge to push. When she reached a hand between her legs, she could feel something hard and round, with a thatch of damp hair.
Alright, she told herself. Almost there. Just a little further … whether she was talking to herself, or the babe making its way into the world, she couldn’t say.
By the time the edge of the village was in sight, the horses were stumbling with weariness, their strides grown short and foam dripping from their lips and flanks. They’d approached the town by a road leading from the western end, but something kept drawing his attention to the east, like a vine leaning towards the sun. When a narrow lane appeared, little more than a muddy track between hedgerows, Isidro signalled to his men and wheeled the horse to take it. ‘Where are we headed, sir?’ one of them called.
‘Don’t know, exactly,’ Isidro said. ‘I’m following my gut.’ Cam was the one who went on about trusting his hunches, but to Isidro it was never more than a suspicion, a feeling that he could pin no rational explanation to, and which was too insistent to ignore.
The lane took them to another, lesser-used street, and Isidro slowed to a trot. There was something to the east, he could feel it, throbbing like a heartbeat.
He reined in. ‘Alright, spread out eastward, make a search. If you see anything, whistle like you’re lost in a snowstorm.’
‘Yessir,’ the men replied in a chorus.
‘Anoa, stay,’ he said as the men peeled off, and she waited, watching expectantly. ‘Head around the outside of the village to the east,’ he said. She was the lightest of the riders, her horse had had the lesser burden and it could cover ground the fastest now. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for tracks, fresh wagon marks, anything.’
She gave him a salute. ‘Yessir,’ she said, then wheeled her horse and kicked it into a weary canter.
Nearby there was another lane leading to the east. Isidro turned his horse to that path and drove it onwards.
It was a girl, tiny and perfect, with a fuzz of black hair. Delphine wept as she cradled the babe to her chest, still covered with fluid and some slick, whitish stuff. The little one was darker than she’d expected, given that Isidro was so much lighter-skinned than herself, and her eyes were as dark as the night.
She’d hacked off the lower part of her underskirt, using half to wrap up the grotesque, fleshy mass of the afterbirth. As she wrapped the remainder around the tiny, shivering form, suddenly thrown out of warm darkness into a bright, cold world, the babe screwed up her face and began to wail.
‘Oh, no,’ Delphine said. ‘No, no, little one, hush. Please, for the love of life, don’t cry.’
She cradled the bundle to her chest, patting the little one’s back, but it made no difference to the reedy cry. She remembered, then, the advice to put the babe straight to her breast — well, that at least ought to stop the noise. She had to set the babe down to fumble with her breast-band, but that only seemed to make the child wail louder.
Delphine scooped the babe up again and turned her face towards her chest, trying to muffle the sound against her body as she rocked back and forth and pleaded with the strange new creature. ‘Hush, hush, hush …’
Then, there came a sound that chilled her to the bone — the sound of boots coming towards her.
The reedy wail of a newborn cut through the afternoon air, and Isidro’s head came up like a stag scenting dogs.
Somewhere off to his right came a piercing whistle, and a few moments later a figure came charging around a hedge. Anoa.
‘Follow me,’ Isidro said, turning his weary horse towards the noise and kicking it on. Ahead was a wall cobbled together out of scrap wood and brush. Isidro was already gathering his power and with a coiled lash of it he tore the wall down. His horse was throwing its head up to refuse, but Isidro pulled its head down, driving it forward with his heels. With a snort of surprise, the beast took the path of least resistance and le
apt the low remains of the wall.
Beyond was another, which Isidro tore down like the first, and then a hedge that gave way like butter under a hot knife. He stole a glance behind him to see Anoa on his heels, crouched low over her mount’s withers.
Within just a few moments they’d broken through to another road, where Isidro reined in, listening. The noise of their shortcut had drowned out the wailing, but now he heard it again, moving off to the south. But there was another sound, somewhere nearby, a scuffling of bodies, and a woman’s sobbing voice, somewhere nearby to their north.
Isidro caught Anoa’s eye. ‘That’s Delphi,’ he said. ‘Go find her. I’ll go after the babe.’
‘Yessir,’ Anoa said, and wheeled her horse away.
His mount was breathing hard, but Isidro kicked it onwards again, heading towards the sound of that wail.
After only a few dozen strides, rounding a bend in the road, he saw them — a small, slight figure hurrying away from the town.
He slipped down from the saddle without bothering to rein in. Without his heels driving it forward, the horse halted and he left it behind with a few long strides. ‘Stop!’ he shouted.
The figure turned to face him, though it never stopped moving away. For a moment he thought it was Delphine — it had her height and build, the frame small under the blanket-coat and stiff black curls spilling out from around the hood. But as soon as she turned, he recognised Nikala’s face.
She carried the babe in the crook of one arm, and in the other she held a naked blade.
Something was making the hedge thrash about, as though some great beast was snared within. There were voices, a man’s deep growl and a woman sobbing with pain and weariness, but there was nothing to be seen. Anoa shook her head — were her eyes playing tricks on her? While the branches thrashed wildly, a patch of them seemed to be moving out of time with the rest, swinging this way when the rest moved that.
Her horse spooked, tossing its head up in alarm and fighting the bit, and rather than wrestle with it Anoa dismounted and let the beast retreat. Swallowing hard, she laid her hand on the hilt of her sword. She’d seen enough of mage-craft to know she was being deceived. ‘Who’s there?’ she called out in Ricalani. ‘Madame Delphine?’
There was a sudden silence, then a renewed rustle of movement and the sound of a fist striking flesh. But then something strange happened — a patch of hedge as tall as a man and equally wide rippled like the air above a fire. A section of solid hedge melted away, revealing a hollow with two people struggling on the mud within. One was Delphine, streaked with sweat, the other a man with long, unkempt hair and beard. He hauled back and landed a solid punch on Delphine’s jaw.
Anoa drew her sword, and the sound of the steel leaving the sheath made him straighten. He, too, was armed she realised as he scrambled to his feet, drawing his sword. ‘Stay out of matters that don’t concern you, girl,’ he rasped in Akharian.
‘You’re making a mistake messing with my kin,’ Anoa snapped back in the same tongue, and lunged forward in a feint. The man backed up, but only by half a step, watching her with narrowed eyes. She was out of her depth, Anoa realised. She’d trained every day for the last year, but the Akharian likely had decades of experience on her.
Behind him, Delphine heaved herself up on her hands and knees, and groped for something in the mud. She picked it up — Anoa couldn’t see what without lifting her eyes from her opponent — and crawled towards him, her eyes wild.
As she started forward Anoa feinted again, flicking her sword up high to slash at the man’s face, and as his own blade swung up to counter it she pivoted on one foot and drove the other into the side of his knee, just as Delphine lunged at him, striking at his thigh.
The Akharian’s leg crumpled — he was already slashing at Anoa as he started to go down, but she knocked the blade aside and ran him through. As he stiffened in shock, she whipped the blade out and slashed his throat. With a rush of blood and a gurgle of breath he fell back into the mud.
‘See,’ Anoa told the dying man, ‘big mistake.’
Behind him, Delphine was trying to rise, breathing hard and only half-dressed.
When Anoa reached for her, Delphine tried to ward her hands away. ‘They took my baby! That bitch Nikala, she took my little girl! Find her!’
‘It’s alright, Isidro’s here, he heard the babe wailing and went after them,’ Anoa said. ‘He’ll get her back, you can count on it.’
Power seethed through him, an angry, jittering pulse. ‘Stop,’ he said again, his voice a snarl.
She kept moving away, glancing behind him as though expecting reinforcements. Isidro refused to take the bait; he kept his gaze on her and fought to steady his breathing, trying to keep his power in check. When he closed on her, she jogged the babe in her arms, and gestured with her blade. ‘Keep your distance,’ she said.
He slowed a little, but didn’t stop. ‘Or what?’ he said in Akharian. ‘Your hostage dies, so do you.’
‘Who said anything about killing the mite? She’s a sweet little thing, but she doesn’t need all her fingers and toes.’
She. He had a daughter.
Nikala kept backing away, knife poised, while the other hand kept a steady, reassuring pat on the bundle in the crook of her arm. ‘You’re said to be a clever man, so you ought to see how this is going to work. Any moment now, my friends will be along to pick me up. You’ll be sent instructions, and if you don’t want to receive pieces of your daughter and her mother, you’ll find a way to carry them out. Understand?’
‘Put the baby down,’ Isidro said. She gave a little hiss of annoyance, and with a flick of her hand exposed one tiny, kicking foot, and caught it in her grasp. ‘You think I’m lying, you stinking barbarian? Fine, I’ll give you a demonstration.’
As she brought the knife around Isidro struck with a lash of power and wrenched it from her hand. He felt the bones of her fingers crack with the force of it.
Nikala gave a strangled grunt of pain, her arms tightening around the babe, who wailed afresh. At last, her stride faltered.
Power was pounding through him, roaring in his head like a storm, filling his vision with a red haze. He’d given up keeping his breathing steady — he couldn’t tell if he was breathing at all. He didn’t need to … rage and fury were feeding him all he needed. Somewhere inside his head he could feel connections stirring — Sierra had sensed his sudden rush of power. ‘Set her down,’ Isidro said again. ‘And I’ll see that you’re treated with mercy.’
Nikala shifted the little bundle to her other arm, and wrapped her free hand around the baby’s throat. ‘I’ll break her cursed neck if you don’t stop.’
He stopped, but he couldn’t stand still — his blood felt like it was boiling. His hand throbbed with a pain he hadn’t felt in months, a deep splintering ache … but no, that wasn’t right. It didn’t hurt any more. It couldn’t. What he was feeling didn’t make any sense.
Nikala smirked at him, and shifted her hand from the baby’s neck.
Isidro snatched at her with a claw of power, a net made up of a dozen thorned vines. They bit deep, and the woman screamed as they sank into her flesh and snared on bone. The baby wailed again, a brittle shriek of pain and fear. The sound seemed to cut right through him, but he couldn’t let his grip falter. He had Nikala pinned, and with a slow clench, he crushed her, feeling her ribs give way one by one.
She fell slowly, collapsing on her side in the muddy road, her broken body slumping over the tiny bundle that slipped from her arms.
At that moment, Isidro realised what he’d done — it struck him like a blade to the heart. He thought of the flames, the burning man dragging himself through the mud, and how sick he’d felt at the thought of using this power around the people he loved, the ones who stood no chance of protecting themselves — and here he’d unleashed it without a thought.
His legs felt numb, but Isidro forced himself towards the crumpled figure. He dropped down at her side to heave the m
isshapen body onto its back, exposing the little bundle in a grubby wrapper of white cloth.
Once the weight of the corpse was off her, the baby began to wail again, but a lost and desolate sound. ‘Hush, little one, hush,’ Isidro murmured, stroking the babe’s bare chest as he opened the wrapper to look her over. She was smeared with dirt and blood, but none of it was hers. She was untouched, perfect. Somehow, his power had spared her. It was still running high within him — with every movement he was shedding wisps of inky blackness, like drifts of smoke.
He wrapped her up again as best he could, but it was a clumsy job. The baby, kicking her feet and waving her tiny fists, soon cast it off again. He murmured nonsense words, like calming a frightened horse, but it did no good as the babe’s cries grew more frantic.
The power pulsing beneath his skin worried him, but Isidro gritted his teeth and pushed it from his mind. All this time he’d been terrified of harming her … but she was untouched, and he had to trust that it would stay that way. He tried to gather her up, but the limp little form seemed as soft and yielding as a water-skin. In the end, he had to use the dead woman’s body and the metal hand both to steady her as he slipped his arm under her until her back lay along his forearm and her head — so very small — rested in the palm of his hand.
The wrapper had come loose, but Isidro ignored it and just cradled the tiny form to his chest, her head against his shoulder, and pulled his coat around her for warmth. After a few moments, the wail subsided to a grizzle of discontent. ‘Come on, now,’ Isidro said to her. ‘Let’s go find your mama.’
He started back towards the town, leaving the dead woman where she lay. Before long, he heard the rumble of a wagon heading towards him. After a few moments it came into sight, a small two-wheeled cart with an oilcloth canopy, drawn by a single horse. Two figures sat on the driver’s bench, and a pair of horses were tethered to the tailgate.
