To Take What Is Rightfully Ours

Chapter 27. Taking Over The Birthing Room

Trigger Warning: traumatic childbirth.

***

Haisa always kept one ear out to monitor what was happening in the Red Keep in case her services were needed. Technically Daemon paid her only to treat his immediate family but she was a healer nonetheless and ever since she moved to the Red Keep, she had her hands full with the servants and the guards who needed medical attention and did not want to deal with maesters. In case of an emergency, the royal family would have to take precedence, of course, but other than that she was free to do whatever she wanted and she liked keeping herself busy.

So Haisa figured she was one of the first people to know when the Queen fell and went into labor a month earlier than was expected. She was not invited to attend her birth, of course. She might be Daemon and Rhaenyra's trusted healer but she was no royal maester or a midwife.

Speaking of midwives...

'What do you mean she doesn't have any?' Haisa asked one of the maids that she was friends with.

'The maester tends to Her Majesty and her maids are expected to help her,' the woman said.

'But no midwife?'

'No midwife.'

If you ask Haisa, it was a disaster waiting to happen. However knowledgeable the maester might be, no one knows more about the process of giving birth than a midwife. And if the child was coming earlier than expected and with such a difficult pregnancy, having a midwife at least on call was essential to the survival of both the woman and her baby. But the maester didn't seem to share her opinion on that matter.

'They want to cut her!' Bianca exclaimed, rushing into her mother's room. Haisa sent her daughter to eavesdrop because at the age of three and twelve, no one paid the girls much attention and they turned out to be perfect spies.

Haisa's eyes widened, 'They what?!'

'The- I heard maesters- talking that-' Bianca said, trying to catch her breath. 'That if the child doesn't come in the next few hours, they will have to cut her up or they both die!'

Even though Haisa didn't know the exact techniques maesters used, something told her that the Queen was not going to survive it. She had been exchanging letters with Dragontemple for months now and she was aware that the nuns there knew how to extract a child from the womb without killing the mother in the process and she even requested the materials to teach herself that, but to her understanding such a technique was not a public knowledge. Which meant the maesters were planning on butchering the Queen. How was this not a treason?

'Mum? Where are you going?' Bianca inquired when Haisa suddenly got up and headed to the exit.

'I need to see Prince Daemon and Princess Rhaenyra,' she answered before walking out. She didn't know whether or not they would want to try to help or intervene somehow (the bad blood between the Queen and the Princess was public knowledge) but she felt like they at least had a right to know about what was going on.

***

'Well, that's... unfortunate,' was the first thing Rhaenyra said when Haisa told them about the Queen's struggles with giving birth.

Daemon and Diane, who had been spending the evening trying to play a card game from Essos with only remembering half of the rules (Rhaenyra found watching it all unfold rather entertaining), looked at each other. They always did that when something important happened, and the princess figured it was their way of making sure they were on the same page. Which was a good thing if Rhaenyra thought about it. After all, if there was a need for blood to be spilled it was better for Daemon and Diane to be in agreement on whose blood to spill.