“The waters have broken within me,” Ashne’e said, “just now, while you were gone. How long before he comes?”
Lomandra shuddered. Words flooded from her mouth before she could control them.
“The Queen will delay him. She and I have poisoned you. You’ll lose the child and die.”
She could see nothing of the girl except the dim whiteness. She gave no sign of her pain or any fear; it was Lomandra who writhed in terror.
“I understand all this, Lomandra. You have done the Queen’s work; now you must help me.”
“I? I know nothing of midwifery.”
“You shall learn.”
“I can do nothing. I’d only harm you.”
“I am already harmed. This is the son of the Storm Lord. He will be born alive.”
Abruptly Ashne’e’s body arched in a great paroxysm on the couch. She let out one single mindless animal cry, so solitary, unhuman and remote that Lomandra wondered wildly who it was that uttered it. And then, wanting only to run out of the room, she ran instead toward the girl.
“Take off your rings,” Ashne’e gasped. Her mouth was a great tragic rigor of struggling breath, above which her eyes were blank and empty as glass.
“My—rings?”
“Take off your rings. You must thrust into me and seize the head of the child and draw him out.”
“I can’t,” Lomandra moaned, but a desolate power converged and overwhelmed her. The rings fell glittering from her fingers, with them the jewels Val Mala had bought her with. She found she had bent to her task like a peasant woman, felt her whole stance and physical presence alter, now rough and capable and indifferent, while in the core of her wailed the trapped court woman in horrified loathing.
There was a welter of scalding blood. The girl did not shriek or spasm but held quite still, as if she felt nothing.
Into Lomandra’s narrow hands emerged the brazen head, the wrinkled demon face of birth, and then the body on the dancing cord. In the uncertain dark, Lomandra saw the girl reach up and snatch at the cord, knot it, gnaw it through like a wolf bitch in the Plains.
The baby let out an immediate scream. It screamed as if at the unjust bestial world into which it had been dragged, half-embryo still, blind and unreasoning, aware, nevertheless, of all the agony which had been, the agony which was to come.
“It’s male. A son,” Lomandra said.
She shut her eyes and her tears fell on her bloody hands.
The physician hurried into the Palace of Peace in the first cool breath of day.
A woman, like a ghost in a dark robe, emerged from the colonnade. He had a moment’s difficulty in recognizing her as the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra. Brows creased in anticipated distress (for some idiot of a servant girl had delayed the message, and he feared the worst), he asked: “Is the girl dead?”
“No.”
“Then she’s still in labor? Perhaps I may be able to save the child. Quickly—”
“The child was born some time ago, and lives.”
The physician found that his hand had moved unbidden in a gesture of ancient religious significance as he stared incredulously in the Xarabian’s face.
With a flick of her fingers, Val Mala dismissed her attendants, and Lomandra stood alone in the room with her.
The Queen was big with child, overblown and beautiless; the loss of her looks made her the more terrible. And Lomandra, who had felt herself too weary to be afraid, became afraid as she looked at her.
“You’ve come to tell me some news, Lomandra. What?”
Harshly the Xarabian said: “Both the child and the mother live.”
Val Mala’s bloated face squeezed together in an ecstasy of malice.
“You come to me and dare to tell me that they live. You dare to tell me that you were present and they lived—both of them. The witch that sent a snake to abort me and her offal. May the black hells of Aarl swallow you, you brainless bitch!”
Lomandra’s heart raced desperately. She met Val Mala’s blazing eyes as steadily as she was able.
“What would you have had me do, madam?”
“Do! In the name of Dorthar’s gods, are you a fool? Listen to me, Lomandra, and listen carefully. You will return to the Palace of Peace and wait until the physician leaves her. Oh, don’t tremble, you can dismiss the whore from your mind, I’ll deal with her. Merely attend the child’s cot and see to it that it smothers in its pillows. It should give you little trouble.”
Lomandra stared at her, the blood draining from her face.
“I begin to wonder if I can trust you, Lomandra. In that case, I shall require proof of what you’ve done.” The Queen settled back into her chair and her face took on a look of impenetrability. In that moment Lomandra despaired, for she felt she was no longer communing with anything human or rational, but rather with some she-devil from the pit.
“Bring me,” Val Mala said, “the smallest finger of the child’s left hand. I see you will like this task even less than the first. Consider it the punishment for hesitation. You understand the alternatives, I think. Disobey me and you’ll live the rest of your life with every manner of scar on your body that my whip master can devise. Go now. Get it done.”
Lomandra turned and went out, dragging herself like an old woman. She scarcely knew where she was going. With dull surprise she reached the curtain of Ashne’e’s room and could not remember how she had come there.
The child lay sleeping in its cot beside the bed; the mother too appeared asleep, and the physician had taken his leave. Lomandra went to the cot, stood gazing down with burning, half-sightless eyes. Her hand went out and touched the pillow’s edge. Easy, it would be so easy. The pillow slid half an inch from below the head of the unconscious child.
“Lomandra.”
Lomandra turned swiftly, and the girl’s eyes were open and full on hers.
“What are you doing, Lomandra?”
The Xarabian felt the impossible compulsion grasp her.
“The Queen. The Queen has instructed me to smother your son. As proof that I’ve carried out her wishes she desires the little finger of the baby’s left hand.”
“Give me the child,” Ashne’e said. “On that table the physician has left a sleeping draft in a black vial. Bring me that also.”
Lomandra, moving in a dull and soulless incomprehension, did as she was told. Ashne’e took her baby in the crook of her arm, bared her breast, and smeared there a little of the dark liquid before giving the child suck.
“Now,” she said, “fetch me a knife.”
Never in all her life had Lomandra witnessed such an adamantine ruthlessness. Beside this, Val Mala’s malice became a scattering of dust.
It seemed to the Xarabian that she moved like a doll to do what Ashne’e directed, as though some puppet-master brought about all her actions by the twitching of silver strings.
A man in the Queen’s livery bowed low before the Queen.
“Madam, the Lady Lomandra begs to present you with this token.”
“Indeed? What a pretty box. Elyrian enamelwork, I think.”
The Queen eased up the lid of the box a little way and gazed inside. Not a muscle moved. Only the sight of her personal blood distressed her. She had that true stamp of Vis royalty which made her consider all others, particularly those born from the lower echelons of the people, to be progressively more and more subhuman. She shut the lid with a snap.
“You may tell Lomandra that her gift delights me. I shall remember her kind thought.”
Val Mala rose and went into the privacy of an inner room, where she tipped something from the box into an incense brazier.
Moments later her women were brought running by a sharp cry. The Queen’s labor had come upon her, somewhat prematurely.