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Frigid wind whistled through the old window and Baghra wished the child would stop feeding already so she could cover herself and find even a slight amount of warmth in her coat. The skin of her breast, the part that wasn’t covered by the boy’s greedy mouth, was raised in goosebumps and the cold made it sensitive in a way that made the experience even more unpleasant. She wished to rip him away from her, but experience taught her that would just trigger incessant screaming and howling until he was red in the face.
That, she learned, was the only time that child looked remotely human. Red-cheeked like the children running around the villages they crossed as shadows, rosy-lipped, puffy and swollen, fleshy.
Any other time, like now, he had a skin of birch and ebony hair. That was how she knew she had got it right this time. He was not one of those fleshy babies she had egested before. She felt the power coursing through him, mirror to hers, with just her fingertips. He was hers, he was her.
She stared out the window for a few more minutes, waiting for him to be done, watching the dark silhouettes of the snow-covered trees. Although food was the hardest to find at that time, and no shelter was ever warm enough, winter was safe. hunters reluctant to go out in the snow, Grishas more willing to welcome one more body to keep themselves warm, two more hands to gather wood for fires. Daytime stopped short and left the stage to her realm of shadows. The harsh weather would prove good for the child’s constitution, his body only knowing the freezing cold and the violent wind thus far.
At last he stopped his suckling and his head tipped back, heavy with milk-induced drowsiness. Pale grey irises barely visible beneath his eyelids. He would start falling asleep but soon would jolt awake to cough and whine and spit out some milk, then settle again. She didn’t understand why he did that, he was Grisha and thus could not be sick. Perhaps she simply ignored a secret of motherhood. It mattered little.
She covered herself with a shiver, holding him closer so they would share what little heat they both had. The hunting hut only had a ratty blanket in it and it proved more useful on the ground to sleep on and avoid, to some extent, the rotten floor’s humidity. She laid the child down on it, just as he started his coughing, rejecting pallid milk down his similarly shaded chin. She wiped his face off with her sleeve and lay next to him, muscles tense from bracing herself from the cold. Her black hair spilled all over the blanket and the child reached out to get a handful of it. She let him as she closed her eyes, her own hand on his back so he wouldn’t roll away.
They’d move again tomorrow, following the traces of a Grisha camp she suspected might be near. There would be warmth tomorrow, maybe. For now, anyone entering the hut might have believed to have stumbled upon two cadavers, white figures nestled in the shadows.