The Burning Stone

Anne moved forward until the lantern light limned her. The gold torque gleamed at her throat, and like any queen or empress, she shone with that confidence which is called power, the ability to turn others to her will.



“The only one who can stop them, my child, is you.”



XII



A BLESSING



1



SANGLANT had not realized how much he disliked Sister Anne until he spent the rest of a night, a day, another long and exhausting night, and perhaps the most agonizing day of his life at the side of his laboring wife as she struggled silently, suffered silently, and weakened inexorably. The pains came and went in steadily heightening waves, like the tide coming in, but the baby did not come.



Heribert tended the fire, brought hot cider for Sister Meriam and Sanglant and wine for Liath to sip when she could get it down, and fretted over the birthing stool he had constructed to Meriam’s specifications a month before. When Meriam needed to rest, Sister Venia sat at Liath’s side and chafed her hands and kneaded her back.



“I remember what it was like for Heribert’s mother,” she said with feeling.



Zoë and Severus stayed away, which was no doubt for the best, but Sister Anne, too, ignored the sweating and straining in the hut, had no words of advice to give and no comfort to offer. She was too busy to attend, or she didn’t want to see.



“Doesn’t she remember what it was like?” demanded Sanglant finally, but Sister Meriam merely grunted. She was examining Liath again, one hand probing the shape of her belly from the outside and the other from within the passageway.



“My daughter-in-law had easier births than this,” she commented. “So did I. I fear the child is breech.”



“How much longer can she go on?” he asked in a low voice, but after two nights and two full days of laboring, Liath was too tired to hear him. Sister Meriam merely shrugged.



Dusk came, and with it came the evening star, a beacon above the horizon. He hadn’t seen it for weeks. According to Liath it had been hiding behind the sun, but now it shone reassuringly from the safe harbor of the constellation known as the Sisters, protector of women.



Something shifted then, a last gasp, an unloosening, or perhaps it wasn’t Somorhas’ influence at all, perhaps it was the infusion of wormwood that Meriam got down Liath’s parched throat. Meriam greased her hands with pig’s fat and felt up the passageway, got a grip on something. By this time Sanglant was holding Liath up bodily on the birthing stool. She was too weak to sit on her own, and her entire weight sagged against him.



“Come, my love,” he said. “Push.”



The baby’s feet came first, then a rump, then a body all smeary-white. Liath barely had enough energy to bear down to get the head out. After that she fainted and she bled, and he thought maybe he would faint, too, not at the sight of blood but out of fear. He had never been this afraid in his life.



Meriam handed him the baby brusquely. “Wash it,” she said, and she set to work kneading Liath’s flaccid belly until the afterbirth sluiced out with another gush of bright red blood, Humming, the old woman bound a poultice over Liath’s groin as if that might stem the bleeding.



“Mind the baby!” she said sternly, for he had been staring in horror at his unconscious wife all this while. Jolted into obedience by her curt tone, he looked down into a pair of eyes so startling a green that he thought for an instant that they weren’t eyes at all but chips of emerald. He went outside, unsteady on his feet but with a good grip on her, as tiny as she was, and washed her in a basin filled with cold spring water.



She squalled mightily.



“Good lungs,” said Heribert, who was dancing from one foot to the other, trying to get a good look. “She sounds strong.”



“She’s a blessing,” murmured Sanglant, kissing the tiny creature on its wrinkled forehead.



“What will you name her? It’s your right as her father to name her.”



He looked up then, surprised. One of her tiny, perfect hands found his little finger and clutched it. She had the stubborn grasp of a warrior born. “I just did,” he said, knowing the words as truth. “‘Blessing.’”



Liath was too weak to nurse the infant. Meriam tried nettle tea and parsley, but after a few beads of clear fluid welled up on her nipples, she went dry and no matter what Meriam tried, fennel, strips of meat mashed into a soft pulp, an infusion of vervain or of chaste tree, her breasts produced nothing more. She slept almost constantly and sometimes it was hard to rouse her even to get her to take wine and porridge. At times she burned with fever; at times she lay as cold as death except for the slight exhalation of her breath.