Work Text:
9:14 Dragon
Denerim Alienage, Denerim, Ferelden
The last day and night had lasted an eternity. Cyrion had watched the sun set and rise and set again through the house’s south-facing front window. Tomald and Lindra had come by with food and drink at some point, but Lindra had her own young son to see to. After they had gone, Elder Valendrian had come. Sitting next to Cyrion as an entire candle burned down, Valendrian had said several prayers as the midwife and at least four other women had rushed in and out of the bedroom. Valendrian had witnessed the kettles of boiling water, the handfuls of dire herbs that must have cost three families a week’s wages to purchase from the apothecaries. He had seen the bloodstained sheets and cloths, the pale, drawn faces. He had heard the women muttering. And Adaia screaming . . . screaming. Then worse, falling dangerously silent as other voices rose.
Cyrion felt he would never forget the elder’s quiet support, but at last, he too, had needed to go. There were others who needed him. Valendrian was a leader of men, not a healer of the body. “I can’t tell you what to do here, Cyrion,” he’d said quietly. “If you need me tomorrow, I will come.”
The hearth fire cast light on the blades of Adaia’s knives, thrust innocently in the basket next to their walking sticks, half-shadowed by their ill-weather cloaks hung above. Cyrion had been so terrified of those weapons once. Adaia was as wild and fearless as she was lovely. He had loved his wife from the moment he met her, a few days before their wedding, but she had frightened him too. He had been certain he would lose her to the shem. She bridled at each unfairness, and the nobles and wealthy merchants that sought their servants in the alienage were not patient. Cyrion had feared the day a human killed his wife, but he had believed her strong enough to withstand anything else. He had never believed he might make the decision that would kill her.
In the early hours of the morning on the second day, the midwife came to him. Her hands and sleeves were dark with blood to the elbows. There were streaks of it across her forehead where she had wiped her sweat away. But cradled in her arms was a bundle wrapped in rough homespun, and from inside it, a small, wet fist was waving.
“It’s alive,” Cyrion said. His voice was rough and hoarse. It sounded foreign to him, flat, and he cleared his throat and stood. His legs shook, and he braced himself on the table.
“They both are,” Finna said. The woman, in her early forties, seemed to have aged a decade over the past two days. “For now, in any event. Adaia may still leave us. I have only ever heard rumors of women surviving this procedure. Blood loss may take her in a matter of hours. Infection could take her later. It will be weeks before she is out of danger, and she may never safely carry again or bear you another child.”
Cyrion closed his eyes. “Did I do right?” he whispered.
Strong hands clasped his, warm and strong, but so sticky with his wife’s blood that Cyrion was almost sick. But as they moved his arms into position around a little figure, Cyrion’s eyes opened and looked down into the red, scrunched face of a person—his child—wrinkling up to cry at the shift.
“Oh, don’t, dear one, don’t,” Cyrion said, instinctively, adjusting the child to a more secure position in his arms and extending his finger to the tiny, waving fist. Fingers, some of them no longer than his largest fingernail, wrapped him up with surprising strength, but it did not stop the indignant wail of the disturbed child. The sound was plaintive and pathetic, but so undeniably alive that Cyrion couldn’t help the sob that rose in his throat.
“If you had not asked us to do this, Cyrion, you would have lost them both,” Finna said firmly. “Your little girl there will live now. We’ll all pull together and do what we can for her mother. If the Maker grants it, Adaia will pull through as well. That would be a blessing indeed. Maybe half a miracle. But in any case, He’s not left you alone today, and that’s a kindness.”
The door opened again, and one of Finna’s assistants came in with another bucket of water. The woman grunted her approval, plunged both hands in, and began to scrub. “There’s soap, Finna,” Cyrion told her. “On the shelf by the door.”
“Bring her back here, and we’ll wash your daughter too,” Finna said. To her assistant, she said, “We’ll need more water. At least two more buckets. We’ll want to get Mistress Adaia cleaned up as well.”
“Yes’m,” the girl said, leaving the house again to return to the river.
The child in Cyrion’s arms kept up her complaint, jerking his finger to and fro in her small fist. Carefully, worried he might drop her, he walked over to Finna and the bucket. She had found the rag bin, and was using one of the cleaning rags to clean herself more thoroughly, making use of the soap as she did so. The water in the bucket had turned pink, but it was still cleaner than the alternative.
Cyrion gave Finna the child, who washed her capably and completely without ceremony, heedless as the girl’s crying grew ever louder and more insistent.
“What does she want? How can we help her?” Cyrion asked.
Finna shook her head. “She’s only frightened and upset. She’ll be cold too. The really young ones are always cold. Wrap her in blankets, give her a soft, warm place to rest, speak softly to her, and she’ll calm down soon enough. She’ll be hungry, but you’ll be needing a wet nurse to help with that. Kyra Chaslin, three streets over, down by the river, just had her fourth. She’ll have milk to share if you could wrestle up a bit of coin. None of the young ones are old enough yet to work, and Willem and Kyra will have a heavy burden for a few years yet.”
“Of course,” Cyrion agreed. “If you could go to her, Finna, or send someone . . .”
“As soon as Aynrie returns from the river, I’ll send word,” Finna promised. “I’ll need cloth and pin and a blanket for her, Cyrion,” she added, shifting subjects without so much as a warning.
“Of course,” Cyrion said again, crossing to the chest under the window where Adaia had so lovingly folded all the things for the child. He found what Finna wanted. He would have handed them to her, but she insisted he practice securing the cloth around the child’s bottom, working the pin so it did not harm her, and folding her blankets around her. He followed her instructions dutifully, trying not to think of what he would do if Adaia left him—tomorrow morning or the next day—and he was left to do these tasks alone.
He felt numb, still half-paralyzed with fear for Adaia, but unspeakably grateful for his daughter, who did indeed begin to quiet after he had held and rocked her in the blankets for a few minutes. Aynrie returned with more water and was dispatched on her errand to Mistress Chaslin, and Finna left him to return to Adaia, to see how she was and try to clean her up as much as possible—for, as she said, for whatever reason, in her experience, cleanliness was always the enemy of infection and disease.
Cyrion settled on the same chair he had sat in for two days, still rocking his body softly from his hips, but now gazing at his daughter’s face instead of out the window. The gray morning had turned golden, and the sun’s dawning rays shone even over the leaking thatch roofs of the Denerim alienage, falling soft upon the child’s face. There was something of Adaia in its shape, he thought, in the golden sheen to the soft fuzz over the child’s head that served her by way of hair. But in the straightness of his daughter’s little nose, the lightness of her skin, and the set of her mouth, he saw more of himself than of his wife.
“Don’t grow up like me, child,” Cyrion told his daughter. “You can do better than that.” If he lost Adaia, he could not fathom how he would bear it if one day he could not see her in their daughter at all.
Before she had returned to Adaia, Finna had asked what they had planned to name the child, but the truth was, she had no name as of yet. Adaia had been against imposing a name upon a child that it did not fit. She had vowed that once they met their tiny son or daughter, they would know what to call the child. Now, Cyrion did not want to name the child without her. It would be admitting, somehow, that he believed Adaia would not recover.
He had believed it, an hour ago. He had believed it for long, hopeless hours last night. Else why would he have made the decision he had, when Finna told him she’d only rumors of mothers surviving when the babe was cut out of them, that every time she had been led to this extreme herself and other midwives and physicians she knew had done it, the mother had died? But now that Finna reported Adaia held on, hope had fought its way back into Cyrion’s heart.
“Your mother is a warrior, little one,” Cyrion whispered to his daughter. “The wildest rogue you’ll ever know or hear of. You should live to see her rage against injustice, witness how she protects and champions her friends and neighbors. She terrifies me, and I adore her. Yet if she lives through this, it will be the bravest battle she’s ever fought. Like the battle you fought to join us.”
Cyrion bent to kiss his daughter’s forehead, impossibly soft. Perhaps, he thought, there was more of Adaia in his girl than was visible at first glance. It pleased him to think so. It would be an honor and a pleasure to see her shake the earth before her with her ferocity as she grew. Her lips were pushing in and out, as if to nurse, her little pink tongue poking out. Cyrion hoped Mistress Chaslin arrived soon, even if it meant he would have to leave his girl in her sole care for the next several weeks straight to earn the coin to pay her for sharing her milk. He would do what he had to, endure what he must. Even if . . . but Cyrion shook his head, resolved. He wouldn’t allow thought or word of defeat pass now, not when he could still hear Finna talking softly to Adaia in the bedroom in a way she would never talk to a dead woman.
Adaia would survive the procedure he’d obliged her to face, when all had seemed lost, and from now on, Mistress Finna could boast of her survival to all those midwives and physicians she knew. His brave wife would live to help him raise their brave girl. And she would help him choose their daughter’s name, as they had spoken of before.