I ONCE LOOKED at wings and saw beauty. The beauty in a swallow’s elegant dive, the flutter of a butterfly, the predatory grace of an owl.
Now—I prayed never to see wings.
Too often, I did.
I saw the brutality of them. The terrible destruction they inflicted upon soft flesh and too-young lives. I saw them before I saw them—in the way the young women screamed, bled, labored far too long. And died.
They all died.
Malarie Evander would die too.
I watched them go in a violence of blood and torn flesh and screams that had once made me vomit. Now I met it with grim indifference and the knowledge that I would not save the soul of the young girl beneath my hands.
No tinctures or sutures or prayers would undo the horrific violence of those wings. But I tried to ease their pain and fear. That was all I could do. Because I couldn’t save them. Only watch them die. And I was so tired of watching them die.
Malarie screamed.
Sixteen hours of her screaming. Begging me. Begging the gods. I wished those wings would take her already.
Rynn took another cold soaked cloth and draped it over Malarie’s forehead. I placed another along her sweat-slicked chest. The fire rising in her blood warmed the rags before the chill could settle.
“Malarie,” I said, a hand at the back of her neck. “I have more nepenthe for you.”
Her head moved in what would have been a nod if she’d had the strength. It was just enough that I knew she heard me from wherever she drifted. If the Veil had any more mercy than I could offer, it would dull her more than the nepenthe.
She swallowed the tincture before the next contraction ripped a scream from her throat that carried more than sound but blood. Rynn was already there with a cloth when the ribbon of red spilled over the corner of Malarie’s cracked lips.
“Ssh,” Rynn cooed, more comfort than actual command. She often spoke to the girls. Never false promises or hope. Just presence, assurance that in this—their suffering and dying—they were not alone.
She had a much softer, kinder voice than mine. I let her speak when the time called for it. Sometimes she would speak more than soothe—when the girls were still coherent enough, still early enough in the labor that they thought there was still the possibility that they would defy the stars and be the one to live.
Rynn hummed, brushed her fingers through Malarie’s dark brown hair, thinned by sweat and knotted by her writhing.
Another contraction rolled through her, spine arching just slightly now, fingers clawing at the damp bedsheets, a barely-there sound breaking from those pink lips. The swell of her belly rippled with the force within, limbs and wings shifting and stretching for release.
I shifted the blanket over her legs. “Malarie, I’m going to see if you’re ready.” I knew she was. I knew she couldn’t hear me. I knew she wouldn’t push even though I inserted my fingers and felt that fiery heat through the glove and measured and knew it was time if this had been any mortal birth.
It wasn’t. And wouldn’t be. So I gave a small nod to Rynn, who continued to brush Malarie’s hair and hum a tune that belonged only to these women.
When the baby came with its broad shoulders and its toughened scaled skin and those wings covered in its mother’s blood—I was grateful Malarie was already dead.
Rynn and I moved through the structured motions that followed. The cleaning and washing and tending to mother and baby. It felt just as wrong to wash the blood Malarie had bled off as it was to leave it. So I washed her legs and beneath her, sutured what had been torn as if she’d lived, cleaned her fingers where she’d grabbed at herself desperately and drawn blood. Sheets were changed, hair brushed and braided, ruined clothes exchanged for a soft dress.
Somewhere behind me I heard Rynn in her own ritual with the baby, washing wings and counting fingers and toes, swaddling it and humming to it as if it had not just claimed the life of the one who had carried it.
Long ago I’d stopped trying to remind myself that it was not the baby who deserved my hate but the dragon who lain with a mortal woman and cursed her to this. But there was no dragon here for me to turn my anger on.
There never was.
Women who were properly mated did not birth in a small room in a small home, in filth and darkness and cold. They birthed in one of the Houses, died in a bed of silk, wrapped in fur and warmth from a hearth, with their names etched somewhere in gold on the lands and their bodies preserved in the House’s catacombs.
Malarie Evander had not been chosen.
A dragon had taken her, as many dragons do.
She would not be buried with a name etched in gold or even stone. The village undertaker would cart her away with the others that had perished in the night. If her family had enough coin, maybe she would have her own grave. But I knew, knew like I’d known she carried wings and would bleed and die, I knew she would be one of the many who disappeared into a mass grave.
And the baby—they would be taken to the Spires, where all illegitimate children of dragons go, raised within the cathedrals and stone walls and open sky as warriors of Halareth.
I wrote Malarie Evander’s name in the small notebook I carried into all these homes, wrote it amongst the others I remembered when I came to add another one.
Hollie Neenan.
Victoria Dempsey.
Sofia Prendergast.
Leah Hough.
Malarie Evander.
For the first time in hours, I acknowledged the sky. Pale and blue. And the horse-drawn carriage that would take the dragonborne child to the Spires.
The gray-clad postilion waited for the small slip of paper in my hand. So obscene in its simplicity. A paper of simple fact. The child’s gender, weight, height, dragonborne presentation, and the mother’s name. It would go where I imagined all these clean little slips went. Someplace buried and forgotten, like the inside of the postilion’s jacket.
I walked until I couldn’t see the silhouette of the carriage or feel that metallic air of the house at my back anymore or hear that baby’s wails.
The grass sloped down toward the river’s edge before it became sand and ocean, the earth soft and forgiving and opening to the endless horizon of the coast. I let that openness swallow all of me. Let the salty air breathe something close to calm into me. Let the sun burn red against my closed eyelids and the sound of the ocean drown out the echoes of Malarie’s screams and that nameless child whose wails carried even here.
Then, I cleaned. I cleaned the blood from my gray pants and shirt, taking them off and dunking them into the river. The motion was more for something to give my hands to do than intention. I had no washboard, no soap, no means of truly cleaning my clothes other than the cold river water sloshing over my hands and it pulling all of my focus to the motion and the water that turned red enough to remind me of Malarie.
I welcomed the sound of footsteps approaching. The familiar drag of Rynn’s heel against the grass. Her hand and the red apple in it appeared in my periphery.
“For you,” she said.
I didn’t want it. Never did. Rynn didn’t mind taking the offerings of a dead mother even if the offerings were for us. I just scrubbed Malarie’s blood harder from my shirt sleeve.
Rynn tucked the apple into her bag.
We sat in a silence punctuated by water and the friction of fabric between my hands. I stared at the stain, now just a smear of brown, and submerged the shirt again.
“Oh!” Rynn clapped. “Did you hear about Aiken and Rebecca?”
I had. Rynn had told me about the salacious couple earlier in the week. But I needed her to tell me again just as much as she needed to fill this silence.
The retold story floated somewhere in my awareness between the grating of my cleaning and Malarie’s screams and the carriage that finally rolled past. I scrubbed harder with the intent to erase more than the stain from my shirt.
When Rynn’s voice no longer buzzed in the back of my head, I forced myself to see more than the six inches in front of me.
Black and silver sails flashed against the dull sky. Its black hull stood out like a smear against the blue of the water. The calm ocean didn’t make the ship fight its way into the harbor like most, allowing it easy passage to the docks. I wished the current put up more of a fight. One day, I wanted to see one of those House ships smashed to nothing against the jetty.
“Think they’re here to enjoy our sandy beaches?” Rynn said with the click of her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
It was only one ship. It should’ve been a relief. A fleet of House ships hadn’t docked as they did during the mating season.
But even one ship was enough to make my stomach knot.
These House ships didn’t come to visit.
Dragons came to take.
So I didn’t go home. And Rynn didn’t ask.
The path along the western cliffs had been worn down by my boots alone. Most in Sabletide weren’t daring or reckless enough to traverse the narrow ridges or trust that the notoriously unforgiving current of the west shore wouldn’t sweep up the cliff face and take them.
After so many years, it hardly occurred to me anymore that I could fall.
I followed the path as I always did. Carefully. Slowly. But familiarly. When the cliff face opened to a narrow archway of rock, I slipped inside. Dark filled my sight. I didn’t wait for my vision to adjust, simply walked the ten steps forward, hand on the wall to guide me, and then–
Light.
Pockets of it streamed down through fissures in the cliff. Salt and filament swirled lazily within the beams. And along the walls–vines. Thick black vines like poisonous veins stretched along the cavern. From them dangled small onyx buds, petals closed over like sleeping eyes against the light. The air hung heavy with the smell of ocean and sharp greenery. But at night, under darkness and moonlight, when the etevlorn petals blinked open to reveal their liquid black eyes, they stunk of death.
I removed the small switchblade from my boot and brought it to the base of a large bloom, careful to avoid the silvered thorns along the stems. With a slice of the blade, the bud fell. Then another and another. I plucked the etevlorn buds from the ground and placed them within an inner pocket of my bag.
The calculations came without real thought. Five full grown buds of etevlorn would fill a thimble with its nectar. It wasn’t a full moon, but the blooms were large enough that their potency should be near close to a bloom plucked on a full moon, and I’d wager their centers black enough.
A thimble would do.
I sheathed the blade, closed my bag, and walked from the cliffs with enough etevlorn to kill a dragon.
