“What do you mean, he isn’t coming?” his voice was so low that the walls of the cottage seemed to hum with its vibration. The young man who owned it towered over a small, bronze-haired girl, who stuttered and stumbled over the grim message she had so dreaded delivering.
“He said, that his regular patients need him; ones whose heads have not been turned away from medicine and science, in favour of fortune telling and magic, I think it was… and … he asked me, has she not trained any of her barbaric little witchlings to help her.”
The air around the man grew suddenly thick and soupy. The shadows on his face deepened though there he had not moved and there was not a cloud in the sky. Pebbles on the pathway at their feet danced and skittered quite of their own accord.
“You didn’t mention that you were Lora’s only apprentice, did you, Ren?’
‘No,’ Ren said, forcing calm into her voice, ‘his housekeeper slammed the door in my face before I could get another word out, Mr Brodigan.’
A harsh cry from within made them both start. The young man’s face turned from red to white. He ushered the girl inside, casting a final, dark look at the horizon, before ducking under the lintel himself. He paused to draw a chain across the door and close a series of heavy iron bolts. He then made a complicated sign with his hand in mid-air before hurrying after the girl.
‘Gratitude,’ he spat, ‘for every day we risk our necks guarding their bloody city and their bloody wall -’ he stopped short on the threshold of the bedroom. ‘The doctor’s not coming Lora.’
His wife was propped against a stack of crumpled pillows, her face red and shining, her body swollen with pregnancy and heaving with the first tremors of the baby’s arrival.
“Good,” she struggled to sit up, glaring at Alec over the mound of her belly, “because he wasn’t setting foot in my house unless it was over my CORPSE!” the last word came as a shout as screwed up her face against the contraction that wracked her body. She shut her eyes until the pain ebbed, sucking in breath with a long hiss. “The vulture. The tapeworm. Making a fortune off people’s misery. We’ll do without, Alec, like we’ve always done.”
“Lora, you can’t do this alone.”
“I’m not alone,’ she gave him a pained smile. “I have Ren, and I have you.”
“Lora,” and there was a quiver in his voice now, “the most qualified person in the room is eight years old!”
“All the same, Dectora’s not waiting another minute!”
Lora’s body suddenly arched backwards and a scream ripped through her. She collapsed back upon the pile of pillows with a rattling gasp. “It’s now, Alec, or not at all.”
Ren hurried to the bedside with a cup of something that issued an evil smelling steam as it passed under Alec’s nose. It was proffered to Lora who downed it without hesitation. She gagged as she passed the cup back and then resumed her troubled breathing. But after less than a minute, the drug seemed to take effect and her face cleared into a placid smile. She stretched her limbs, suddenly seeming comfortable, almost languid. Alec marvelled inwardly at the potency of those plants she grew.
“Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” she said hazily.
Ren had moved to the foot of the bed. Alec made to join her, but she held up a free, bloody hand that stopped him dead in his tracks. “Hold her hand,” said the girl firmly, “and make her push.”
“So soon?”
“NOW!”
But Lora didn’t need telling. She had already braced herself against the bed, her chin pressed to her rabidly working chest, her fists knotted to whiteness in the blankets. Alec knelt beside his wife, peeling strands her dark, sweat-drenched hair from her neck and forehead as she ground her teeth and grunted with effort. Her nails carved deep crescent moons into his hands.
