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I swear it.” Deonara bent and kissed Aliciane’s pale cheek. “Set your mind at rest, breda; think only of this little one who comes to our arms. I will love her too.”
Held tenderly in the arms of her child’s father, of the woman who had sworn to welcome her child as her own, Aliciane knew that she should be comforted. Yet, as lightning flared on the heights and rumbled around the walls of the castle, she felt terror all through and pervading her. Is it the child’s terror or mine ? Her mind swam into darkness under the soothing of the leronis , under the flooding reassurances of Mikhail, pouring out love and tenderness. Is it for me or only for the child ? It no longer seemed to matter; she could see no further. Always before, she had had some faint sense of what would come after, but now it seemed there was nothing in the world but her own fear, the child’s fear, the formless, wordless rage. It seemed to her that the rage focused with the thunder, that the birth pains tearing her were brightening and darkening as the lightning came and went… thunder crashing not on the heights outside but in and around her own violated body… terror, rage, fury expending itself within her… the lightning bringing fury and pain. She struggled for breath and cried out and her mind sank, almost with relief, into dark, and silence, and nothingness…
“Ai! She is a little fury,” the midwife said, gingerly holding the struggling child. “You must calm her, domna , before I cut her life from her mother’s, or she will struggle and bleed overmuch - but she is strong, a hearty little woman!”
Margali bent over the shrieking infant. The face was dark red, contorted into a furious scream of rage; the eyes, squinted almost shut, were a blazing blue. The round little head was covered with thick red fuzz. Margali laid her slender hands along the naked body of the child, crooning softly to her. Under the touch the baby calmed a little and stopped fighting; and the midwife was able to sever the umbilical cord and tie it. But when the woman took the infant and wrapped her in a warmed blanket, she began to shriek again and struggle and the woman laid her down, drawing back a shocked hand.
“Ai! Evanda have mercy, she is one of those ! Well, when she is grown, the little maiden need not fear rape, if she can strike already with laran . I have never heard of this in a babe so young!”
“You frightened her,” Margali said, smiling; but as she took the child, her smile slid off. Like all of Deonara’s women, she had loved the gentle Aliciane. “Poor child, to lose so loving a mother, so soon!”
Mikhail of Aldaran knelt, his face drawn with anguish, beside the body of the woman he had loved. “Aliciane! Aliciane, my beloved,” he mourned. Then he raised his face, in bitterness. Deonara had taken the wrapped infant from Margali and was holding it, with the fierce hunger of thwarted motherhood, to her meager breast.
“You are not ill content, are you, Deonara - that none will vie with you to mother this child?”
“That is not worthy of you, Mikhail,” Deonara said, holding Aliciane’s child close. “I loved Aliciane well, my lord; would you have me cast aside her child, or can I best show my love by rearing her as tenderly as if she were my own? Take her, then, my husband, until you find another love.” Try as she would, Lady Aldaran could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “She is your only living child. And if already she has laran , she will need much care to rear her. My poor babes never lived even this long.” She put the child into Dom Mikhail’s arms, and he stood looking down, with infinite tenderness and grief, at his only child.
Mayra’s curse rang in his mind: You will take no other to your bed… your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree . As if his own dismay communicated itself to the infant in his arms she began to struggle again and shriek in the blanket. Beyond the window the storm raged.
Dom