In some distant, suddenly resurfacing memory, Croe recalled that childbirth was said to be as painful as a heart-attack.
That was her first thought when she awoke in the middle of the night, pinned to her cot by pain, like an insect skewered to a board. I am having a heart attack. No – I am going into labor. It is said that they feel the same. Her clinical assessment of her condition allowed a kind of momentary transcendence, pain flowing through her like thought as she observed, a disembodied consciousness. Then another contraction swept over her, insides imploding, stars dancing in her eyes. She wondered if this was how stars felt, when they died.
The pain was blinding. She tried to call out to Mallos with her thoughts, but it was like calling out in a vacuum – the words tearing away into nothing, disintegrating as soon as they passed her lips. Instinctively her feet found the floor; she began to pace and pant and moan and whimper, strange animal sounds that seemed to be coming from elsewhere in the room, certainly not her own mouth, her own alien body. Whose body was this? She felt that she was suddenly a passenger in it, a soul trapped in a malfunctioning automaton. In her peripheral vision (all vision, at the moment, felt peripheral), she saw the door creek open. The guard that looked in found her wild-eyed and feral. She threw him out with an outstretched hand and a surge of telekinesis, barely hearing the crack of his armor against the opposite hallway wall. Barely hearing the resulting cacophony of shouting. Barely hearing the guards and nurses that piled in minutes later, silencing her magic with a well-chosen Alliance Captain. He started to force her back onto the cot, strong hands like a vise on her shoulders.
“No, no, no, no,” her voice croaked out, plaintive and splintered. “Please, let me walk,” She was shattering, surely. He released her and let her walk, sweat beading on his forehead from the effort of quelling her magic, and the stress of bearing witness to something that felt primal and holy and completely inappropriate to watch.
She paced for hours. The nurses let her do it, since their soft suggestions to lay down were met with crazed looks and startling growls. Breathe, they chanted, instead, IN, two, three, four, OUT, two, three, four…. Their voices changed from gentle admonitions to a ritualized call-and-response. Their hands steadied her as she swayed and rocked, clutching her belly, her throat, her arms, leaving long red marks. Whatever she had been before she was imprisoned in this castle, she was now a woman, kin to all the women in the room. Mace stood apart in the open doorway, the headache of effort unfurling from the base of his skull. Gods, but her magic was powerful, and impossible to predict in this agitated state. He could feel the random lashes of her magic bursting beneath the weight of his, like throwing his body on a grenade.
A demon scream, straight out of a nightmare, set everyone’s teeth on edge.
The labor transformed from contractions to pushing without a single conscious decision. If Croe had felt like the hapless driver of a broken robot before, now she was strapped to a runaway train. “Get out,” she told the room in a low, dangerous voice. They all looked at each other, simultaneously nervous and sympathetic. “Get out!” Their sympathy gave way to fear. Mace stood aside as everyone fled the room, closing the door on the demon-woman, waiting in the hallway for something to happen. A tense silence fell over them.
A baby’s wail pierced through the quiet. One brave nurse, setting her jaw, slipped into the room and closed it behind her. Those in the hallway heard her soft voice, and waited for a sign of distress to storm the room. The guards drew their swords.
In the room, the young nurse held the newborn through the afterbirth, laid her on the table to check her over, counting fingers and toes. When the time came, she cut the cord, laid the baby in the mother’s arms, fluffed a few pillows to sit her up, dabbed at her forehead with a cold cloth. The motions were memorized, like the steps of a familiar dance. She had always been good at this.
Croe was numb to the woman’s ministrations. The candlelit room, and the memory of pain, made her vision blur at the edges; her daughter’s tiny head above her breast seemed surrounded by a halo. Distantly, she was aware of the baby drinking, and grateful that at least one of them seemed to know what they were doing. Her thoughts were wordless, beyond language. In her haze, she projected her feelings to Mallos, wherever he was…alone in the desert, maybe. Awaiting his fate.
Wonder. Awe. Gratitude. Love. Fear.
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