The Birth

The storm came to the Void on the sixth day, if it was a day, and it came from inside her.

She had known it was close. The child had grown quiet in the hours before, the way a pot grows quiet before it boils, and the ache low in her back had gone from a murmur to a hand. She had walked with it. She had walked the pale shore with one palm against the stone wall of a ridge and the other under her belly, stopping every few paces to breathe, while the Hollowkin drifted along behind her at a respectful distance like a funeral that had lost its way. At the third turn Obsyra had said, quite calmly, Now, and had risen, and the whole mountainside had seemed to rise with her.

"Where?" said Solaia.

My cave.

"You have a cave?"

Every dragon has a cave. The golden eye gleamed. Mine is only a little further than it was last time.

It was not a cave. It was a wound in the world's skin, a great ragged cleft in the pale cliff with a floor of black glass and a roof lost in dark. The air inside was warm. She had not been warm for what felt like a month, and the heat of it struck her like a blow, and she sank onto the glass with a gasp and heard the first thunder break over the shore behind her.

It was not weather. There was no sky in the Void to make it. It was the Void itself, tightening, feeling the shape of what was about to be born in it. The seeds of light outside the cleft went swirling and wild. The black overhead rippled. A long rolling groan went through the stone, and the Hollowkin, who had followed as far as the mouth of the cleft, shrank back as one body and bowed their heads.

"It knows," whispered Solaia.

It has never had one, said Obsyra. A child born between. It does not know what to do with it. The great head came down. Nor do I. But I am here.

…

It hurt more than the lightning.

She would think this afterwards with a kind of stunned wonder. She had been chained to a column and struck with red fire until her bones sang, and she had thought she knew the limits of pain. She had not known anything. This was a vast, slow, merciless tide that came up from the roots of her spine and broke across her whole body, and left her gasping, and gathered again before she had finished gasping. It had no malice. It was simply enormous.

"I can't," she said, somewhere in the second hour, to nobody. "I can't. I can't do this."

You are doing it, said the child.

"I'm not. I'm dying."

You are not. You are very loud.

She laughed. It turned into a sob, and the sob into a scream, and the scream shook dust from the roof of the cave. Obsyra's wing had come down over her back like a great black canopy, and she had both hands wound in the leathery edge of it, and she hung there, trembling, with her forehead pressed to the dragon's cool shoulder.

Breathe, little one.

"I am breathing!"

Then breathe differently.

"I'll kill you."

Many have tried. A low chuckle that shook the glass. None have been this entertaining.

She would have struck her if she could. She settled for a long, ragged, furious laugh, and rode the next wave on it, and the next. Somewhere behind her, in the shadow of the cave mouth, Gron had come in. He lay curled against the wall in his dull-gray hide with his huge head turned away, his eyes shut tight, in the grave delicacy of a male creature who has been told by a thousand years of instinct that this is none of his business. But he had left his tail curled around her feet. She could feel it, warm and solid, braced against the stone.

Mother, said Gron faintly. I have never been so frightened in my life.

"You're frightened?"

Terrified.

"I'm the one—" Another wave. She screamed through it. "I'm the one doing it!"

Yes, said Gron. That is why.

…

The storm broke at the third hour.

She felt it break. It was as though the whole Void had held its breath and now loosed it, and the roof of the cave lit white, and a sound like the splitting of the world went through her teeth. The seeds of light outside went mad. They poured into the mouth of the cleft in a golden river, a swarm of tiny worlds, each with its own fragment of a sky, and they hung in the air above her in a spinning cloud. Their light fell on her face. She saw, in a flash, a hundred other lives: a woman weeping at a window, a boy catching a fish, a soldier kneeling in snow. She saw them all go still, and lean, and watch.

They want to see, said Obsyra.

"Tell them to go away."

They cannot. It is the first time a thing has been born here that was not made of loss. The old dragon's voice trembled. Let them look. It will do them good.

"Obsyra."

Yes, little one.

"I'm—" She did not have a word for it. A great vast white pressure rose in her, terrible and glorious, and the last of her breath went out in a cry that was half a prayer, half a curse, half a name. She did not know what name. It tore out of her as the child tore out of her, in a rush of blood and fire and light, and for a moment the whole cleft was the white of a star.

And then it was quiet.

She lay on the warm glass, panting, with the sweat running into her eyes. Her hands had gone slack. The thunder had fallen to a distant murmur, as though the Void, having done its worst, had decided to be gentle. A very small sound came out of the dark: a snuffle, a hiccup, a thin high indignant squeal.

"Oh," said Solaia.

It was all she could say.

…

They put him in her arms.

It was Obsyra who did it, with a wing-tip as delicate as a hand, drawing the tiny bundle out of the folds of the torn gown and laying it against her breast. He weighed nothing. He was slick and red and furious, with a fuzz of damp black hair stuck to his skull, and his small fists were clenched, and his whole face was screwed up like a fig. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. He was not beautiful at all. He looked exactly like a boiled shrimp with opinions.

"Hello," she whispered.

The shrimp drew breath, and opened its mouth, and screamed.

She wept. She wept with her whole body, the great shaking helpless weeping of a woman who has been brave for too long, with the tears sliding into her hair and her arms locked round the squalling bundle as though the world might try to take it back. Obsyra's huge face hung over her, silent. Gron had turned his head at last, and his golden eyes were wet, and shining. Out at the mouth of the cave, the Hollowkin knelt in a row, and the small one in the tattered smock had crept forward and was standing at the very edge of the light, watching with its pressed-wax face tilted up.

"Look at him," she whispered. "Look at him. Oh, look at you."

He has the Aldren jaw, said Gron, very quietly.

"Don't."

Sorry.

"No. It's—" She laughed, shakily. "It's true. It's terrible. He's already scowling."

She bent over him. The scream had stopped, as screams do, at some invisible point, and the bundle had gone still against her. The fists unclenched. She saw the lashes first, long and wet and black. They lifted. She saw the eyes.

They were violet.

Not the soft violet of her mother's line. A deep, burning, living violet, like the heart of a fire seen through glass, and they were the shape of Obsyra's: wide, slanted, ancient. They held hers. They did not blink. And at the very center of each, where the pupil should have been round and black, there was a narrow vertical slit the color of ash.

Gray ash. Pale gray, like the eyes of a man.

She knew those eyes.

She knew them so well that her whole body went quiet around the knowledge. She knew the set of them under the brow. She knew the way they looked, steadily, at a thing he did not understand, until he understood it. She knew a name, a whole name, that belonged to the man who had looked at her so, and she reached for it with a shaking hand, and the place where it should have been was a blank white door.

"Whose eyes are those?" she said aloud.

Yours, said Obsyra gently. And his.

"Whose?"

You know.

She opened her mouth.

Do not force it. The great head dipped. It will come. Or it will not. But he will not forget you, little one, because the child carries the thing that you cannot. He is your memory now. Give him time.

The baby yawned, a huge pink toothless yawn, and turned his face into her breast. He was warm. He smelled of iron and milk and the rain after a fire. Under her palm, she could feel the tiny heart going, fast and stubborn, and under that, faint and deep, something like another heartbeat, slower, older, as though a second creature lay folded inside the first.

Gold, thought Solaia. And dark. And fire.

She pressed her lips to the damp black hair.

"Veyran," she said.

She did not know where it came from. It was a name in the Sovereign Tongue, from a corner of her mind she had not opened since the night of the fall. It meant the one who stays. It meant the door that does not close. It sounded like both a wish and a promise.

The baby sighed.

And in the cave, in the quiet, in the warm black dark beyond the lightning, she heard him speak his first word. It was not a word in any human tongue. It was low and sweet and slow, and every dragon in the cave heard it, and the stone rang with it like a bell. It was a word the Queens of the Sky had used in lullabies. It meant mother.

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. I'm here."

She held him, and the seeds of light drifted down around her, turning, turning, and one by one they went out.