Page 126 of Better in Black
The Queen would not eat. She would not drink.
“Please, my lady,” I urged her. “For the health of the child, you must nourish yourself!”
But she cared not for her son or herself. She was starved, blank-eyed, her bones protruding. I was in terror for the child, who surely starved within her, deprived not just of nutrients but of her caring, her anticipation of his birth. She never rested her hands on her belly now, never hummed to the child or sang to it or spoke of it if she could avoid the topic.
I remembered Nerissa, who believed she had nothing left to live for, even as her children lived on.
“You will not feel this way forever,” I promised the Queen, as I begged her to drink just a little broth, to eat a single candied petal. And this was true, for either her despair would end or her life would. “Everything will be different once the child is born.”
She looked at me in disgust and turned away.
I could not force her to keep the child alive, or herself alive. I could do nothing but hope.
—
Screams cut the air in my Queen’s chambers like knives. So much blood, and my Queen, writhing and sobbing, pain whipping through her like an electric current, her body bucking, eyes rolling back in her head, as the child fought its way from the womb.
It was too early.
It was too bloody.
It was because she was undernourished, I thought, and because she had slept no more than she’d eaten.
Surely it was not because Sebastian’s spawn could only be born in suffering, and would bring only suffering to the world. I tried to put the thought aside. It was not a healer’s thought.
I ministered to my lady, I rubbed her brow with cooling herbs and soothed her screams, and once I had wrenched the baby from her womb, I suctioned its lungs and staunched her bleeding and did what little I could to prevent their lives from leaking away.
It took one full night and one full day.
At moonrise, the baby let out a single cry. He was a tiny, sickly creature, weighing no more than a bundle of sticks and hay. His little eyes were still squeezed shut, had yet to take in the new world, but the sound was clear and loud and determined.
I will live,that cry declared.
I swaddled him in velvet—purple, for royalty—and held him out to my Queen. His hair had dried; it was soft and fair, and his eyelashes were long. A pretty baby, sure to tempt any mother.
But she turned away.
The baby let out a single cry and after that was silent. I set him gently in his cradle. I stroked his tiny hand, his soft cheek. I settled the velvet blanket around him.
He opened his eyes then, and I felt a weight slip from my shoulders.
He may have been Sebastian Morgenstern’s son, but his eyes were not black. They were a bright, beautiful green.
—
“You may call him Ash,” the Queen decided, when I insisted the boy needed a name. “Because that is all that remains.”
Of her kingdom, I knew she meant.
Of her pride.
Of her heart.
—
Ash was a perfect baby, but a weak and quiet one. In fact he’d made not a single sound, after that first cry. His mother would not leave her bed, would not look at the baby, much less hold him. She lay propped against her cushions, her hair a scarlet tangle, her green eyes glittering with fury. She was not angry at me, I knew, but at the fate that had taken the father of her child from her at the same time that it had shamed her people. She simmered with rage like a pot on the boil, and some of that rage had spilled out upon her son.
“You must feed the babe,” I told her, summoning my courage. “Otherwise he will surely die.”
