Sennet

The storm came out of the east.

It had been gathering all the afternoon behind the smoke, a long bruised wall of cloud lying low over the estuary, and nobody had looked at it. They were looking at the fire. But as the skiff shot out from the shingle into the open river, a cold wind struck them on the starboard bow, and the black water rose up in a ridge, and the whole sky seemed to tilt and roll.

Ixara felt it in her teeth.

She lay in the stern-sheets on a pile of oilskins, with her head in Garrick's lap and her knees drawn up, and stared at the clouds. They were moving very fast. Between the heaped black billows of the cloud, streaks of green and violet shone, lit from below by the burning city. Lightning flickered once, soundless, across the east. Then the first rain struck, not drops, but handfuls of gravel flung into her face, and the skiff plunged into a trough and shipped a sea over the bow.

"Bail!" bawled Pike.

"I am bailing!" shouted Jory.

"Bail faster, boy!"

Two lightermen worked the oars: a lean silent man called Dick, with a face like a hatchet, and a younger one she had not caught the name of, who rowed with his eyes shut and his lips moving. The skiff was twenty feet long, built for ferrying coal between barges, never for the open Thames in a gale. It bucked and slewed under them. Spray burst over the gunwales. Garrick had his arm round her, braced against the thwart, and she felt his whole body straining to hold her still.

"The Albatross," he said in her ear. "She's a half mile downstream. We'll make her. Hold on."

"Garrick."

"I'm here."

"It is coming."

"I know."

"No. You do not. It is coming."

The pain struck her like a hammer.

…

She had thought she knew pain.

She had sat through births on Corvane. She had held the hands of laboring women, and stroked their hair, and sung, and told them with the calm assurance of a priestess that it would pass, that the Mother was with them, that every woman since the beginning of time had borne it. She had believed it. She had never doubted it.

She had not known that it could be like this.

It was a thing with a mind. It rose in her like a great dark animal, from somewhere below the bones, and seized her in its jaws and shook her. She heard herself scream. She heard it from a long way off, hoarse and raw, torn out of her by the roots. The skiff pitched. The lightning flashed. Garrick's face, white and rain-streaked and frantic, swam above her, and his voice was calling something she could not make out.

"—breathe, love, breathe, you must breathe—"

"I cannot—"

"You can."

"It is too much!"

"It is not. It's exactly enough." That was Pike. She saw him now, crouched on the bottom boards between her knees, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled and his silvering hair plastered to his skull. His face was set and grave and entirely calm. His hands were on her. "Ixara, look at me. Look at me. I've done this a hundred times. You're doing it perfectly. It's quick, that's all, and I need you to listen."

"Pike—"

"Don't push yet. Not yet. Breathe through it. In, and out. In, and out. That's it."

She breathed.

It broke over her like surf. She rode it, and it passed, and in the sudden hollow silence she heard the wind in the rigging of some far-off ship, and the slap of the waves, and Jory, in a thin high voice, chanting a rhyme under his breath. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.

"Where is the light?" she whispered.

"What?"

"Hold up the lantern."

"I can't, it'll blow out—"

"Please."

Jory held the lantern up. It was a small battered dark-lantern, with a shutter, and he propped it on the thwart behind Pike's shoulder and screened it with his coat. A tiny yellow flame wavered inside the horn. It lit her hands, spread on her belly. And she saw, to her wonder, that the pale tracery of the marks was awake.

They shone.

Not brightly. Not like the vault. A faint soft blue, a shimmer like moonlight on a pond, rising from her wrists and throat and the great curve of her belly. They ran in slow ripples, from the navel outward, as if something beneath her skin were turning in its sleep.

"It's not the stone," she murmured. "It is not the Heart. It is her."

"What?" said Garrick.

"It is her, Garrick. The child. She is doing it herself."

…

Time passed.

She could not have said how much. The storm grew. The sky closed down. The rain turned to hail, and rattled on the oilskins like shot. The skiff climbed a wave and fell off its crest with a bang that shook her spine. Dick swore steadily, in a flat monotone, and the young lighterman wept as he rowed. Somewhere, a long way off, a cannon spoke. A rocket rose, hung, and burst in red stars above the river.

She was crying. She was singing. She was clutching Garrick's hand so hard that she heard the bones creak. She felt the wound in his shoulder, wet and warm against her cheek, and thought distantly, he is bleeding, he is going to faint, and held on harder. She thought of her mother. She thought of the green hut under the great teyu tree, and the smell of woodsmoke and rain, and the old women crowding round the door.

Mother.

Mother, I am here.

Help me.

"Now," said Pike. "Now, Ixara. Now."

She pushed.

…

It was the longest minute of her life.

She bore down with all her strength, with her teeth bared and her back arched and her heels braced against the splintering boards. The pain went white. The world went white. She heard a high keening sound, and knew it was herself, and did not care. She heard Garrick saying her name. She heard Pike shout "That's it, that's it, again!" and she pushed again, and the lightning split the sky.

And then, all at once, the pain stopped.

It simply ceased. There was a great slithering rush, a sensation of release so enormous that she thought she would faint, and a warmth between her thighs, and a silence.

A terrible silence.

She lay gasping, with her head back on Garrick's arm and her eyes shut. She heard the wind. She heard the hail. She heard Pike, very low, saying something to himself. He sounded afraid.

"Pike?" she said. "Pike. What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Why does she not cry?"

"Wait."

"Pike, why does she not cry? A child cries. They always cry. You have to make them—"

"Wait."

She opened her eyes.

Pike knelt in the bottom of the skiff with the baby in his two hands.

She was so small. Smaller than anything Ixara had ever seen. A tiny bundle of wet dark skin, slick with blood, with a thatch of black hair plastered to her skull, and limbs no longer than a man's finger. She lay in his palms as if in a cup. Her chest was moving. Her mouth was open. But she made no sound.

"She's breathing," said Pike hoarsely. "She's alive. Her color is good. She is perfectly well. But she doesn't..."

He turned the baby over, and gently patted her back. He rubbed her feet. He cleared the little mouth with his finger. Nothing. The child lay quiet, and blinked.

She blinked.

Ixara saw it.

The baby's eyes were open.

They were open wide, and they were looking. They were not the blind, clouded, unfocused eyes of a newborn. They were bright. They were clear. They moved slowly across Pike's face, and the lantern, and the tossing sky, and the faces bent over her, with an attention so grave and so deliberate that it was almost frightening. One was gray, the color of rain on stone. The other was green, the green of a leaf just unfurled.

"God in heaven," whispered Pike.

"Give her to me."

"Ixara—"

"Give her to me."

He laid her on her mother's breast.

…

She weighed nothing.

That was Ixara's first thought. She weighed no more than a bird, and yet when she lay on Ixara's chest she seemed to fill her entire body, to fill the whole boat, the whole river, the night. She was warm as a coal. Her tiny hand curled round Ixara's finger and held, with a grip like a vise. Her black hair smelled of rain and blood and something sweet, like new bread.

Her eyes were fixed on Ixara's face.

"Hello," said Ixara.

The baby did not cry. She did not smile. She only looked, with those two strange eyes, steady and ancient, and Ixara felt, quite distinctly, a touch upon her mind, like the brush of a feather against the inside of her skull. A greeting. A warmth. A great calm cool spreading wonder, and under it, so faint that she almost missed it, a single word.

Mama.

She began to weep.

"It's a girl," said Pike, rather unsteadily. He had sat back on his heels and was wiping his hands on his shirt. "A healthy girl. Perhaps five pounds. Perfectly formed. Premature by any reckoning I know, and she has a grip like a bosun." He gave a short, shaky laugh. "I have never seen anything like it in my life."

"A girl," said Garrick.

He had not spoken since Pike said push. He sat in the stern with his back against the transom, his arm round Ixara, and his face, in the lantern-light, was the face of a man who has been struck by lightning and has not yet fallen down. His lips were parted. His gray eyes, wide and dazed, were fixed on the baby as though on a star that had descended.

"Garrick," said Ixara softly.

"Yes."

"Do you want to hold her?"

"I..."

"Come. She will not break."

"I don't know how."

"Nobody does." She smiled through her tears. "Put your hand under her head. There."

He reached out.

His hand was shaking so badly that he could not control it. He tried twice and drew it back. He wiped it on his coat, which was soaked, and tried again. Then, very slowly, with infinite care, as if she were made of spun glass, he slid his palm beneath the baby's head, and cradled her skull, and touched, with the tip of one finger, the tiny curl of her fist.

The baby looked at him.

She turned her head, in the dark. Those two strange eyes, gray and green, came round to his face, and settled there, and stayed. And Ixara, who lay close enough to see everything, saw the change come over him.

It started in the eyes. They widened, and widened, and his lips parted. His whole body went rigid, as though a current were passing through it. He made a small sound, a catch, a gasp, a breath drawn in and not let go. He stared. He did not blink. His pupils, in the lantern-glow, dilated until the gray was swallowed up.

"Garrick?"

He did not answer.

"Garrick, what is it? What do you see?"

"She's..." His voice was a whisper. "She's looking at me."

"Yes."

"No. She's looking through me."

Ixara held her breath.

"I can feel it," he said. His face had gone slack with wonder. "It's like... it's as though somebody has opened every door in the house. All at once. She's in there." A shudder ran through him. "She sees it. She sees all of it. The ship. The dais. The mountain. She sees..."

His mouth worked.

"She sees my father," he said. "In the library. With the door shut. I was nine years old, on the stairs, with my hands over my ears. She sees my mother's grave. She sees— oh, God. She sees Odette, on the dock at Bristol, with the apple in her hand. She sees Brandt." His voice cracked. "She sees him on the stair with his arms out. She sees me tell him that I forgave him."

Tears ran down his face.

He did not seem to notice. They fell from his chin onto the blanket, onto the baby's tiny fist, one after another, and he knelt in the stern of a storm-tossed skiff with his hand beneath his daughter's head and his whole life flowing out of him in a silent river.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know you would see."

The baby watched him.

And then, very slowly, with immense gravity, she raised her free hand. She reached out. She laid her tiny palm flat against his wet cheek.

Garrick Wynmore, Seventh Viscount, thirty-three years old, a man who had not wept at his mother's funeral or his father's, who had not wept in the hold or on the stair or in the cell, bowed his head over his daughter and sobbed.

It was an awful sound. It tore out of him in great ragged heaves, as if something had been broken open that had been shut for twenty years. He shook with it. Ixara put her free arm round his neck and held him, and the baby lay between them, patting his cheek with a small cool hand, with the patience of an old, old woman comforting a child.

Pike turned his face away. Jory, in the bow, had stopped bailing. Dick shipped his oar and sat with his eyes on the sky. And the storm blew over them, and the rain streamed down, and for a long time, in all that roaring black water, there was no sound but a man's weeping, and a woman's low voice murmuring in a language none of them knew.

…

At last he lifted his head.

His face was swollen and ravaged. He wiped it with the back of his hand. He looked at the baby, and at Ixara, and gave a shaky, helpless laugh.

"She does that to everyone?"

"I do not know," said Ixara. "She has only just been born."

"What is she?"

"I do not know that, either."

"What shall we call her?"

She looked down.

The child lay quiet on her breast, with her eyes half closed. The lantern-light fell on her small dark face, the wide brow, the thin straight nose, the soft, solemn, determined mouth. On Garrick's side she had the line of the jaw. On Ixara's, she had the curve of the cheek. She had the stillness of both of them. She lay like a seed in the palm of a hand, waiting.

Ixara thought of a green hill in the dusk, and a lone tree standing on it in the wind. A tree that had stood for a thousand years, and was not lonely. She thought of a man's voice, low in the dark of an English bedchamber, telling the name of a tree to a woman who lay in his arms.

Sennet.

"Sennet," she said.

Garrick looked up.

"I told you," she whispered. "In the dark. I told you the name of the tree that stands alone on the hill."

"I remember."

"I did not know, then. I did not know why I said it." Her eyes filled. "But I think I did. I think she was already there."

"Sennet," said Garrick.

He said it softly, trying it, as one tries a new key. The baby opened her eyes. She turned her head. For the first time, her lips moved, and she made a small, clear, sweet sound, not a cry, not a coo, but a tiny, bright, definite syllable, like the first note of a bird at dawn.

"She likes it," said Pike, in a choked voice.

"She likes everything," said Jory, from the bow. "Don't she?"

Ixara laughed. It hurt. It hurt everywhere. She laughed until the tears ran down her face and Sennet's hand curled on her breast, and the wind seemed to soften, and the rain thinned, and through a rent in the clouds, miraculously, a single star came out.

She looked up at it.

She looked at her husband. She did not think the word husband until it was out of her head, and then she let it stand. She looked at the man who had stolen her people's heart and saved her daughter's life; who had killed and wept and begged; who had carried her out of a fire with a ball in his shoulder and had sat in a ruined boat holding a newborn's head as if she were the world.

"Garrick," she said.

"Yes, love?"

"She knows everything about you."

He swallowed.

"I know," he said.

"Everything. Every shame. Every lie." She smiled, trembling. "And she is looking at you like that."

He bent his head. He kissed the baby's forehead, very gently, and then Ixara's, and then he laid his cheek against the damp hair at her temple and stayed there, with his eyes shut, for a long time.

Out on the river the storm was passing. Ahead, a mile off through the dwindling rain, the black bulk of the Albatross rode at anchor with her lanterns lit. Dick took up his oar. The skiff swung round and headed for the ship's side, and the wind drove them on.