[Content warning: blood, mild body/pregnancy-related unpleasantness]
Filigereth does not remember falling asleep. She had laid down, she knows, and then she stands on the sea-cliff, her back to her siblings’ graves – and now her mother’s. Someone else is here, a presence she senses like the faintest of breaths prickling the back of her neck.
“I am betrothed.”
Her mother says nothing.
“He is of a good family. They have lands, status. It is what you wanted.”
Silence.
“Did you care whether I returned?”
No answer.
“Why did you try again?”
“Because of you.”
“Could I have ever been enough of a daughter that you did not need a son?”
The silence is all the answer she needs.
The pain begins below her navel, slightly off-center, spreads around her waist and across her lower back. It grows stronger and then stops and begins again more insistently, now rolling downwards from its origin as though her body could expel its very self.
Blood runs down the inside of her leg, dark at first and then the fresh, vivid red of a new wound. She feels it reach the point of her ankle, a beaded droplet forming which falls to the withered grass. Then more, and more, too much blood to staunch with both hands. She looks to her mother, a creeping, paralyzing fear settling in where the pain originated.
Celeireth smiles.
“Do you love him enough for this?”
She had not noticed before that her mother’s dress is stained the same as hers — blood-soaked from the waist down. She holds an infant in her arms, tiny and purple and covered with darkened blood and viscera and something else. When he screams, she reads in her mother’s eyes a final triumph. Son-of-departed-spirit. She named him, not my father. She knew what was about to happen.
Filigereth goes to answer and a rolling wave of pain too great for her to speak or breathe or even cry out crashes against her, first the same pressure and then one sharper and more immediate. If the first was like deep, rushing water, this new pain is fire, the inside of her body tearing itself in two.
Do you love him, songbird?
The crushing pain obliterates all else.
She wakes to a darkening stain dragged across crumpled bedding, the first scattered, brown spots of an all-too-familiar ordeal. Across the house, Manion wails, and the sound fills her with an inexplicable dread.
