The birth of Erevis’s child.
The child, the voices said. The child.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wondering where Erevis was, if he was safe. He had left her to save his friend and she had reconciled herself to it, but she missed him still, and always would. She hoped he was well, but Derreg’s words resounded in her mind-Ordulin is a wasteland. Sembia is gone.
How could that have happened so fast?
“Oh, gods,” she whispered, as realization broke over her. It seemed impossible, and yet. .
“What’s wrong?” Derreg asked.
“What year is it?” she said, her voice breaking on the rocks of the question. She braced herself for the answer. Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Year?” Derreg said. “By Dalereckoning, 1450.”
The child squirmed within her and she cried out.
The child is come, said the voices.
“Are you all right?” Derreg asked.
She nodded as one pain passed, replaced by another.
1450.
How was that possible?
Seventy years had passed in what felt to her like moments. She wrestled with understanding but failed. She could not make sense of it. Her child was seventy years old before he was ever born.
She began to weep, not with pain but with grief for all that she’d lost, all she’d left behind.
“How can this be?” she whispered, and had no answer.
If Derreg heard her, he offered no answer, either.
They emerged from the mist, leaving the voices of the spirits behind. Through tear-filled eyes, she watched the last, glowing sliver of the sun sink behind the western mountains, watched the long shadows of the peaks stretch across the pass. The already meager light faded to black. They had reached a forested vale. Huge cascades fell from cliffs and a simple stone abbey was nestled in the trees.
The priest’s head appeared between her knees. Sweat slicked his thin hair to his pale, age-spotted scalp. The dim lantern light put shadows in the hollows of his cheeks.
“If I’m to save the child, you must not push until I say.”
“Breathe in and out slowly,” the midwife said.
Varra swallowed, nodded. The rush of her heart boomed in her ears. A contraction girdled her pelvis in agony. She screamed, and the portly midwife, wincing, sopped up more blood from the bed, cast some of the sheets into the gory pile on the floor.
“I’m thirsty,” Varra said.
“Almost,” the priest said, not hearing her as he stared into her body and tried to save her child.
“Do something!” said Derreg from somewhere behind Varra. “She’s in too much pain.” He had refused to leave her since bringing her to the abbey.
“We’re doing all we can, Derreg,” the priest said, tension putting an edge on his voice.
“Do more!” Derreg said.
Varra focused on her breathing and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. Her entire frame of reference distilled down to an awareness of only her abdomen, the birth canal, the child she was soon to deliver. But there was no ease from the pain. Her vision blurred. She feared she would be too weak to push when the priest told her to do so. She feared she would never see her child.
She screamed again as the priest manipulated the child within her, a dagger in her belly.
“Get the child out!” Derreg said, stress causing his voice to break.
The priest looked up from between Varra’s legs, looked first at her, then past her to Derreg.
“I can’t. It’s dying. The cord is. .”
He trailed off, but his words left Varra hollow.
“No,” she said, and tears wet her cheeks. “No.”
The priest looked at her, his expression soft, sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”
“You are not trying hard enough, Erdan!” said Derreg, and she heard him move across the room toward the priest, although he remained behind Varra, out of sight.
The priest’s soft voice never lost its calm. “I’ve done all I can, Derreg. We must. . take steps if the woman is to have a chance.”
Varra felt Derreg’s hand on her head, on her hair, a protective gesture that soothed her, warmed her.
How strange, she thought. She realized in the clarity of the moment that in another time, another place, he was a man she might have loved, despite the difference in their ages.
“Her name is Varra,” Derreg said. “And there must be something-”
“Cut the child out,” Varra said, her voice as soft as rain, its quiet resolve slicing through the room.
Derreg’s hand lifted from her head as if he were recoiling.
The priest looked as if she had spoken in a language he could not understand. “What did you say?”
The midwife squeezed Varra’s hand. “You’re not clearheaded-”
“Cut my child out,” Varra said, louder, her mind made up. Her body tensed, a contraction gripped her, the child moved within her, and she screamed. “Cut it out! I’m already dead! I see it in your face!”
The priest and the midwife stared at her, eyes wide. Neither gainsaid her words.
“I’m already dead,” Varra said, more quietly, the words spiced with her tears, her grief.
The priest swallowed, his tracheal lump bouncing up and down. “I haven’t prepared the correct rituals, and I do have not the needed tools. . ”
“A knife will do,” Varra said, and managed to keep her voice from faltering. The room began to spin. She closed her eyes until it subsided.
“A knife?”
“There’s little time,” Varra said.
“Right, of course,” the priest said, looking past her to Derreg, as if for permission.
Derreg’s hand returned to Varra’s head, cradling it as he might an infant, as he might a daughter. His fingers twisted gently in her sweat-dampened hair. She reached up and covered his hand with hers as her tears fell. His skin felt as rough as bark. His bearded face appeared next to hers, his breath warm on her cheek.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“It’s my child,” she said, three words that said everything there was to say about anything. Her eyes went to the sheets piled along the wall, a crimson pile. “I’m dead already. We both know that.”
The priest produced a small knife and held it aloft in a shaking hand. The lantern light flickered on its blade. Stress squeezed sweat from his bloodsmeared brow.
The midwife’s clammy fingers clenched Varra’s hand. Varra alone seemed to feel calm.
“Derreg, listen to me,” Varra said. “Someone. . did something to the child, changed it. I do not know what, but it’s my child. Mine. Do you understand?”
His hand squeezed hers. He buried his forehead in her hair.
She breathed in the smell of him-he still smelled of the rain-and wondered how she could have come to care for him so much in mere hours, in mere moments. How cruel that they’d had only hours to share rather than a lifetime.
“I understand,” he said.
She swallowed in a throat gone dry, nodded. To the priest, she said, “Do it.”
The priest winced, steeled himself to his work.
“This will pain you,” he said, but did not move.
“Do it,” Varra said. “Do it now.”
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. His hand shook uncontrollably.
The midwife took the knife from the priest’s hand, stared for a moment into Varra’s eyes, and began to cut.
Varra walled off a scream behind gritted teeth as the edge slid across her abdomen and opened her womb, spilling warm fluid down her sides. The midwife’s resolve spread to the priest and he moved forward to assist.
Spots formed before Varra’s eyes. Sparks erupted in her brain. She might have been screaming, she could not be certain. She felt the priest and midwife manipulating the hole they’d made in her, felt them reaching inside her.