Two days passed that were like weeks. Her body felt scoured, like her lungs after a hard run in winter, like a pot subjected to salt and steel wool. For two days she barely moved, and then, only to relieve herself – painfully, until she remembered that she was as full of magic as she was blood and milk. The healing power drained her like a tap, sending her off into a sleep like death, even as her flesh knit itself back together. Her grip on her daughter was as still as rigor mortis. Her nurse – the brave one, who had come back in when all others stayed without – had checked for a pulse.
But she did not die, much to the chagrin of the guards outside the door. It would have been easier for everyone if she had, she supposed. Easier for the King, to be spared having to spare her (for Mallos would never allow her execution, she knew now). Easier for the watchmen to stand their watch no longer over her, wondering if she might set the door, or them, on fire. Easier for the other nurses, to tend to the beautiful offspring of god and demon without fearing for their lives. Not that Croe had threatened them, precisely…or even raised her voice, since childbirth had released her body and the words like portents no longer fell from her lips. Her reputation sat with her like another person in the room. Rumors, mostly. When had she ever killed a civilian?
Well, there was one time, but it was an accident, memory reminded her. But that was in a past life. That was on a mission, which made the civilian collateral damage…not that the classification made much difference to him, or his family. Amusing, how killing was the highest crime, unless it was done with the blessings of authority; then it was just, or necessary, or tactical. All of her skills, she’d gotten in service of authority. If only she’d remembered, she could have gotten a message to Alliannah in time, could have spared herself this mess of circumstance, could have avoided becoming a pirate altogether.
Would Mallos have liked her, then? She wondered.
The baby stirred, drawing her mother’s sleepy gaze. She was so perfect, impossibly perfect, her little pink mouth like a flower bud, her smooth skin like dulce de leche, flawless and scarless and spotless. Croe knew she must have looked like that, once, but it was impossible to imagine, her scars were too many to count or recall. Not to mention the ink. It was a relief, not to have a mirror in her comfortable prison; every time she spotted her own skin, she was struck by another memory. Not that she was looking at herself much, in the past two days. She was not what one would call maternal, but she was on the lookout for her daughter’s needs.
Those needs were so few, so simple, but so relentless. The nurse had changed her half an hour ago, and she’d just woken up from a nap, which left hunger. This baby’s hunger was a force. It reasserted itself every few hours, sudden and ravening, and Croe could barely get her breast out of her shirt fast enough to quell it. In the last half-day, she’d taken to just leaving them out. She lifted the baby to one now, amazed that all she had to do was point the tiny head in the right direction and let nature take care of the rest. Her small, contented noises did something odd to the captured pirate’s thoughts. They fizzled out, fractured, turned to dust. Her hormones spun through her, shrieking “LOVE” in rabid, manic voices.
So it was strange when she heard a different one, saying something else.
I’m here, he said. Croe opened one eye, the voice so present, so immediate, that she expected him to be here, with her. He wasn’t, but she felt a familiar brush of magic over her skin, and smiled as he appeared beside the bed.
“You’re here,” she confirmed, as if to reassure herself. Her relief was so acute, it hurt. Nobody had told her anything about the trial, saying she did not have a right to information, reminding her that she was a prisoner. She’d wanted to remind them that she’d surrendered, that she’d refrained from killing all of them, that she’d stayed like a good little girl within her designated walls despite the powerful desire (and power) to leave. But all of that seemed very distant, now. Mallos was home, which meant he had been spared. She hoped.
He slipped into the bed next to her, and she rested her head on his shoulder, feeling for all the world like a normal couple, as crazy as that seemed. She did not notice the silence, because his presence to her was plenty to feast the senses on. His smell, the warmth of him, the sound of his breathing. Gods, but she had worried. Who would have thought, in this life or the last, that she’d ever have someone to worry over like this?
Mallos asked her how she was. “I’m never doing that again,” she answered sweetly, with a smile in her eyes. Then she shifted, so she could look at him properly. “Are you? They wouldn’t tell me anything…I still haven’t heard.”
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