“Get that baby out of me-now!” Brianna shrieked. She lay in front of Avner on her outspread cloak, her arms, legs, and head pinned to the floor by front riders. Although she was doing her best to hold still, she had been unable to keep from jerking and twisting as Avner opened her womb, and the struggle to restrain her had left the five front riders almost as exhausted as she. “Take it out, you clumsy oaf!”
An angry whinny sounded from deeper in the tunnel, where Blizzard had been tied to a rough-hewn mining timber. The mare’s hooves scraped a warning across the stone floor. Avner ignored the beast and pushed his hands back into the warmth of the queen’s stomach. He slipped his fingers under the baby’s jawline, then pulled slowly and steadily. The head and shoulders came out of the womb with a loud sucking sound. The child smelled coppery and sour, like a concoction of blood and curdled milk. It was wet with its mother’s blood, and covered by a thin coating of something that felt like wax. The infant was so large that Avner had to move his hands beneath the armpits before he could extract the hips and feet.
“By Stronmaus!” gasped Gryffitt, who was holding his belt over the queen’s forehead. “That boy’s as big as my two-year-old!”
“Tavis… was right? A boy?” Brianna croaked. Without awaiting an answer, she ordered, “Avner, clear… clear his-”
“I remember,” Avner replied. The queen had given him explicit instructions about every phase of the birth. “This is the one part I couldn’t forget.”
Avner turned the infant around and placed his mouth over the child’s nose and lips, then sucked the mucus plugs from the airways and spat the membranes onto the tunnel floor. They left a coating of sour-tasting slime in his mouth, but the young scout hardly noticed. The baby was as blue as a robin’s egg and just as still. His dull russet eyes were open, and he was staring at Avner with a vacuous, unblinking gaze.
“He’s not breathing,” Avner said. He looked to Brianna. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Make sure his passages are clear,” she replied. “Then wait a moment.”
Before the queen finished speaking, the child snuffled, then yawned, blinked, and glanced around the tunnel. When his gaze returned to Avner, the young scout could not help gasping. The newborn’s eyes had changed to a blue as pale and sparkling as glacier ice. With each breath the baby took, his complexion darkened and became more ruddy. His double chin vanished, his jowls tightened into a firm jawline, and his face grew thinner and more handsome. The infant’s stubby nose lengthened into a straight, bladelike appendage, and even his black hair seemed to be lightening to bronze.
“Iallanis save us!” cried the torch holder. “That child’s-”
“Breathing, you fool.” Avner cast a reproving glance at the man, who was the only other person who could have seen the transformation. “His color’s changing, that’s all.”
“Let… me see.” Brianna tried to raise her head, but even without Gryffitt’s belt holding it in place, she would have been too feeble to manage.
“Of course, Majesty.” Avner held the child up, deliberately keeping the face turned away from the queen. Although the incision across her abdomen wasn’t as gruesome as some belly wounds he had seen, Brianna had already lost enough blood to weaken even a Hartwick. The young scout feared the shock of seeing her child’s appearance change before her eyes would kill her. “He’s a handsome boy.”
“Give me,” Brianna commanded.
Although her eyes remained glazed, the queen’s smile was radiant, and Avner knew the worst of her pain was past. He held the child a moment longer, until he was certain the boy’s face had undergone the last of its mysterious changes, then nodded to Thatcher. The front rider released the queen’s arm, then took the infant and passed him to Brianna. She laid the baby on her chest, and he began to suckle immediately, clinging to her with a grasp as secure as a yearling’s.
“Now finish,” Brianna ordered. “Not much time before the firbolgs… And, Avner-”
“Yes, Majesty?”
The queen smiled beatifically, then said, “Thank you.”
With that, she returned her arm to Thatcher’s grasp and allowed the front riders to pin her to the ground once more. Avner slid a hand into Brianna’s belly and grabbed the umbilical cord-still blue and pulsing-then pulled gently. The queen gasped, more in surprise than pain. A small, membranous sack filled with pink-tinged fluid slipped from her womb. The young scout laid the pouch aside, then, as Brianna had instructed him, reached inside to make certain no part of the membrane had torn off.
Once the womb was completely empty, Avner untied a skin of blessed water that the queen had prepared and poured it over her incisions. Dark bubbles frothed up from the cuts, covering Brianna’s stomach with a thick, brown-streaked foam. The scout sat back and waited for the lather to do its cleansing work, happy he would soon be closing her up. It was disconcerting enough to see the queen naked, but after actually reaching inside her body to extract the child, he would never again look at her without being at once awestruck and embarrassed.
Avner felt almost in love with Brianna. He had become connected to her and the child on some spiritual level more profound than he could understand; when he looked at them, an alien warmth rose from deep within his heart, and he felt bound to the pair by a force far too powerful to resist. It was not an attraction the young scout welcomed. Such feelings seemed a betrayal of Tavis’s friendship, as though some part of him wanted to usurp his mentor’s place.
“Great,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll need a posting in the Eternal Blizzard to get past this.”
“What?” Brianna asked.
“I wish Tavis were here.”
“You’re… doing fine,” she said. “Tavis would be… proud.”
The dark bubbles on Brianna’s abdomen turned clear and drained off her body in pink-tinged runnels. Avner took a needle and thread from the torch holder, then began to sew the queen’s womb shut. Like all Border Scouts, one of the first things he had learned was how to mend both his comrades’ wounds and his own winter clothing, so he was no stranger to the art of stitchery. Despite his patient’s groans and a steady flow of blood seeping from the incision, he worked quickly and efficiently, pinching the wound closed with one hand and hooking the curved needle through its edges with the other.
Avner had almost finished closing the womb when Blizzard neighed madly, then began to scrape at the ground and jerk against her reins. He glanced at the mare. Her eyes were fixed on the tunnel mouth, where the enormous silhouette of a firbolg was blocking the entire portal. Although the ’kin was kneeling on one leg, he was so large he had to stoop down and turn his head sideways to peer into the mine. His shoulders were as broad as the passage was wide. With pale blue eyes gleaming from a tangled wreath of windblown hair, his shadow-cloaked face resembled some fierce woodland spirit.
Several front riders released Brianna to reach for their weapons, and the queen herself cried out in alarm.
“Don’t worry about him!” Avner gestured the front riders back to Brianna. “We’ve got to finish here.”
“But he-”
“Do as I say!” Avner pulled a stitch tight. “We’ve plenty of time.”
Avner had learned the value of cramped spaces as a child, when he had often eluded the town guard by crawling into sewers or ducking through culverts. In narrow confines, the advantage belonged to the runt. The firbolg would need to squeeze into the tunnel on his hands and knees, making it easy for the queen’s party to flee deeper into the mine and find another exit-or to turn and fight, if it came to that.