Bone swallowed hard but Arrow didn’t make a move to continue so she picked the story back up.
“She was screaming, her pain reaching across the room to us and there was Blade demanding we help her. Twelve years old and we had no idea what was going on. ‘Feel her stomach,’ Blade insisted and so I did. It was…”
“The girl screaming in the dark was pregnant and her pain was coming from the fact that she was in the middle of birth. Her hands were so small and she was tiny but her belly was huge,” Arrow said, her voice reminding Bone of her need to kill.
It rose, choking her until Dmitry grabbed her hand and held it in his.
“Blade demanded I help her but I didn’t know what to do. I had no knowledge, only a memory from when my mother worked as a midwife. I could smell her blood and other fluids but the blood called to the demon inside me,” Bone admitted. “She kept screaming. Arrow told her to be quiet and just like that the girl shut up. Her wails ceased and we were left with the eeriest silence. We could not see and there was no light.”
Bone would have thought her dealings with Nameless would have eased this somewhat but once again she was there, in that room, in that darkness. Dmitry squeezed her hand. He’d become her new anchor.
“Arrow took her head and held her. I felt my way to her legs. She was wet with blood and I remember her voice, so pure, so sweet. ‘I need to push,’ she told us. So I told her to push and she did—over and over and over, time after time until she said she couldn’t push any more. “You will die, child, if you do not push,” Arrow said to her. So she pushed some more and I pulled and then there was a child, so tiny, like a baby doll falling into my hands. I had never held a baby doll before.
“She yelled again that she needed to push so Arrow told her to push. The first baby wasn’t crying though—it was silent. It didn’t move, and it wasn’t breathing. I had—,” she almost could not contain the pain that overwhelmed her then. Finally, the past eased its hold on her throat and she continued. “I had broken its neck pulling it from her.”
“Goddamn it, Bone. Do not—”
She squeezed Dmitry’s hand but did not look at him. She had to finish. “I took my T-shirt off and wrapped the baby in it and put it on the floor. The girl kept pushing and then there was another baby and this one,” her voice broke. “This one cried and I wiped its face because it was gasping for breath. Arrow took her shirt off and I wrapped the second child in hers. The girl went silent.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. She didn’t look at her sisters. She didn’t look at the men. Her mind was wrapped in the horror of that night.
“’I am dying,’ the girl whispered and Blade was there then, telling her to hold on. The girl said nothing for a while and the baby continued to cry. I picked it up, held it against my chest, it was cold and needed my warmth. I sang Ninka’s lullaby and eventually the baby quieted. Then the girl demanded we save the first child. But it was dead. I remember thinking I was just as Joseph said I’d be—nothing more than a killer.
“I told her the child was gone and she cried, loud, harsh sobs and I knew then, this was her punishment. I asked who the father was and she said simply, ‘Joseph is the father of us all.’ She was shavur. I gave the baby I hadn’t killed to Blade and then I ran to where Grant was and begged his help. It was the first and only time Grant never questioned us. He knew we had someone to save.”
Arrow slammed her hands on the table but did not get up. “Grant took the child, Bone and I buried the other one beside Ninka in the boneyard, but we never saw the mother. Blade was left with her and when she returned that night to our barracks, all she said was, ‘She is gone from me.’”
“The boy you speak of…” Dmitry said in a dead voice.
“He is ours,” she and her sisters said as one.
“I saw her in Arequipa,” Dmitry said into the silence.
“And?” Rand asked.
“She looks like my father,” he said harshly. “She looks like me.”
“We do know her but we call her Nameless,” Bone bit out, her voice threatening to desert her. “In Arequipa she told me her given name was Ninka.”
Arrow and Bullet both stood, chairs slamming into the walls behind them. Bone searched their gazes and nodded.
“She is gone from us,” her sisters said at the same time.
Bone closed her eyes.
“There is something else I have not told you,” Dmitry murmured.
“Sisters,” Bone whispered, as insight swift and fierce pounded through her mind.
Each time Dmitry had spoken of his siblings he’d spoken of sisters, plural.
“What are you saying, Bone?” Arrow asked.
Bone looked at Rand, Adam, Bullet, Arrow, and then Dmitry. His face was lined with pain. “Tell them,” she urged.