Returning to the convent was a relief. The white walls were restful and cool after the opulence of color. Marra had a head full of stitches and mangled a few bits of fabric trying to duplicate them all.
Several of the novices, still thinking her a bastard daughter, wanted to know all about the palace and the christening and the princess. Marra tried to answer but found herself with very little to say. Had the men all been very dashing? She didn’t think so. Had the women all been very beautiful? She remembered the dark circles under Kania’s eyes and the tightness of her lips. Had the prince been handsome? She truly had no idea. She tried to describe him and the only word she could come up with was short.
This was nothing the novices wanted to hear, and all the other things Marra could tell them were nothing she wanted to say aloud. Eventually they gave up asking, and both parties went away mutually disappointed.
The abbess had her own questions, which Marra was also mostly unable to answer. She was interested in Prince Vorling’s fairy godmother, but much more so in the priests and clerics that had attended. “Did you see Archbishop Lydean?”
Marra spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t know. Did I?”
“A young person,” said the abbess. “The youngest ever named archbishop. They would have been with the Archimandrite, a very old man in blue robes.”
Marra vaguely remembered the old man, who had been a blaze of cerulean in the crowd. Yes, she had seen him. He had coughed and coughed and looked like a shaking bit of sky.
“Ah!” said the abbess. “We have heard his health is not good. When he dies, Lydean will take the mitre and become Archimandrite, but there will be resistance because they are so young.”
“All right,” said Marra, conscious of politics swirling around her that had little to do with princesses.
The abbess patted her hand and went away again, and Marra tackled her new stitches and weeded the garden and let the convent’s quiet settle over her like a blanket against the cold.
Six months later, a letter from the queen mentioned that Kania was pregnant again, which troubled Marra more than she would admit. It seemed very fast, and of course, the queen would not have mentioned it unless she was several months along. Marra had not really thought you could get pregnant so swiftly after giving birth, but the Sister Apothecary said that it was possible.
Months slid by, Marra expecting to be summoned at any moment for the birth and christening, until one day she counted on her fingers and realized that Kania would be eleven months pregnant at the very least. She must have lost the child, Marra thought, or perhaps there never was one.
She knew more about miscarriages now than a princess probably should. Her friendship with the Sister Apothecary had continued, and because she could read and research and wrote with a steady hand, she found herself doing small chores for the other woman. And then one day a farmhand was hauled in on a door, screaming from the pain of his broken leg, and Marra found herself holding the lamp and handing the Sister bandages, acting as a second set of hands.
Long after midnight, the Sister washed her hands in a bucket of bloody water and said, “You did well,” to Marra.
The praise warmed her down to her bones because it was true and it was not for the princess.
It was a few days later when there was a knock on her door near midnight. Marra opened the door, puzzled—no one ever knocked so late, and Our Lady of Grackles only held midnight services on the solstices and equinoxes—and saw the Sister Apothecary there, holding a cracked leather satchel. “It’s a birth,” she said shortly. “You’ve seen one, haven’t you?”
“One…?” said Marra. “Only one.”
“Then you’re ahead of the Brother Infirmarian. He hasn’t touched that end of a woman since he slid out of one. My assistant’s down with the flux and I need someone to hold a lamp.”
Marra gulped. She waited to see what she would do next, half-convinced that she would curl up in a ball and whimper, but instead she straightened up and said, “All right. Let me get on my shoes.”
* * *
The labor went very much the same way that Kania’s had, which seemed strange to Marra. Then again, peasants and princesses all shit the same and have their courses the same, so I suppose it’s no surprise that babies all come out the same way, too. Having thus accidentally anticipated a few centuries’ worth of revolutionary political thought, Marra got down to the business of boiling water and making tea.
It went more quickly than Kania’s, at least, but it was still a long, tense, tedious stretch. Marra nodded off more than once and sometimes came to with the lamp in her hand and the Sister Apothecary crouching between the mother’s legs, wondering if she was really awake or if she was having a strange sort of dream.
Dawn had passed and it was most of the way to morning when the baby emerged into the world, looked around, and burst into tears.
“You get used to it,” the Sister told the infant, and handed the child to Marra, who stared at it with intense horror. It was bloody and wrinkly and reddish gray and looked like the sort of thing you would drive back to hell with holy water. “Um,” said Marra.
“Is it … Is…” The mother was panting and could hardly breathe. “It cried. It’s alive, right?”
“Oh yes,” said Marra hurriedly. “Very alive.” She stared at it, trying to find something else to say. “Has arms and legs. And, uh … a head…”
“That’s good,” said the mother, and began giggling with high, hysterical laughter. “Oh, that’s good. You want them to have heads.”
“Lady of Grackles have mercy,” muttered the Sister Apothecary, but as she was saying this directly into the birth canal, no one but Marra heard.
Fortunately the afterbirth arrived immediately and the Sister swapped burdens with her. “Go and give that to her husband,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”
Marra bowed her head and fled.
The husband was a farmer with a young face and gnarled, ancient hands. He took the afterbirth as reverently as if it had been a child itself. “Will you help me then, sister?”
Marra swallowed. “I’m … I’m not a sister. Not all the way.”
He smiled a little. “Don’t have to be. Not for this.”
She walked with him and picked up the spade he pointed to. They buried the strange, muscleless piece of birth meat under a hickory tree, down among the roots. “Oak’s usual,” said the farmer, sitting back, as Marra patted the earth into place. “Oak’s strong. But hickory’s lucky. We’ve got two strong children already, and the third could use a little luck to make their way.”
Marra stifled a sigh, thinking of her own godmother, who had given them gifts of health and princes. A little luck might have smoothed the way for all of them.
She went with the Sister the next time she was called out as midwife, and she was called out often at night because the town midwife was old and slept soundly. Once or twice a month, there would come a tap on Marra’s door and it would be the Sister going out to tend to a woman laboring.
She was never asked to do more than hold hands and bring water, but she learned nevertheless. Among other lessons, she learned to pretend not to hear the terrible threats uttered by women in labor. Strange as it was, this set her mind at ease. Kania could not have meant what she had whispered in Marra’s ear.
It was the labor—that was all it was. When the miller was brought to her bed, she threatened to put her husband’s balls on the millstone and grind them fine if he ever so much as looked at her again.
She saw babies born and mothers die. She saw mothers have an easy birth and then the bleeding simply never stopped, until they died white and bloodless against the pillow. She saw a birthing hook and how it was used to extract babies who had not survived long enough to emerge.
It was the fifth or sixth or tenth labor, as they walked back to the convent, that Marra could no longer keep silent. “It’s so stupid!” she said.