Nox actually smiles at that. “But you know how attractive I find money-grubbing wenches.”
When the Umbra comes for me, at first I think perhaps it’s to punish me for my sins.
The moment in the Naenden colonnade didn’t cleanse me of my shame entirely. Only made it manageable. Something I could grasp onto and use. I’m not sure the parasite recognized that my shame was still there.
I still hear Ellie’s screams at night. I wake to Nox murmuring my name, holding me in his arms until I stir from my nightmares. The nightmares in which Ellie’s baby doesn’t survive.
But the guilt is manageable, and I’ve found I can channel it into more useful endeavors than self-sabotage.
Still, I’m not entirely surprised when the Umbra comes to hand me my sentence.
The cloaked assassin is accompanied by a human woman, one who looks familiar though I can’t quite place her. The type of familiar that reminds me of a fever dream.
I don’t entirely feel that I deserve the Umbra’s mercy, but I won’t go down without a fight. Not with what it would do to Nox if I died.
I have found I am worth quite a lot to the ones I love, and I’m not willing for them to suffer over me any longer.
That, and I’ll protect the baby inside me with my life.
I tell the Umbra as much, and brace for a fight, but the figure only shakes his head and nods toward the human woman.
She curtsies to me, which I find strange. I haven’t been curtsied to in a long while, not since my father was still alive and working as an ambassador for the king.
“Miss Blaise,” she says, and her eyes go glassy at my name. Her voice tightens, and she apologizes, clutching at her chest. “It’s just, it’s just so nice to see you doing so well. With a family of your own and all,” she says, nodding toward the glow coming from our cottage window, as well as the swell of my belly.
I frown because this woman seems so familiar, and still I can hardly place her. “I’m sorry, but might you remind me how I know you?”
She smiles. A hearty, wholesome smile that wrinkles her entire face. “Your stepmother hired me. I was the midwife who assisted with your child’s birth. I’m so sorry for your loss—that horrible day I’ll never forget.” She wipes her watering eyes with her sleeve, and I find I’m not breathing. My head swims, roaring with white noise, but the Umbra nods at her to continue. “When your stepmother saw that the child had already passed on, she told me to—” The woman’s words seem caught in her throat, and fury threatens to well in me, but the Umbra catches my shoulder and squeezes gently. “Well, I didn’t think the baby deserved what your stepmother intended, but I knew your stepmother would kill me if she found out I disobeyed her orders, and I…”
“A little boy or a little girl?” I find my lips asking, though I can’t recall telling them to.
The midwife blinks, and she gives me a reassuring, if pained, smile. “A little girl. You had a daughter, Miss Blaise.”
I try to choke back a sob, and fail.
“Rose,” I say, sucking in a breath even as my eyes burn.
The midwife smiles. “Yes. She looked like a Rose. I…” She pauses, as if not sure what she’s about to say is appropriate. “I paint, on the side. Always have. Helps me process life. I painted your daughter—Rose—many times over the years. Her beautiful face has been in my memory all this time. I brought some of the paintings, if you’d like them.”
I can’t quite find the words, so I just nod my head, mouth slightly ajar.
She pulls a small portrait from her satchel. I take it in my hands and stare at my daughter for a long while.
Eventually, I learn that the midwife faked her own death after Rose’s birth. She knew Clarissa knew nothing of her disobedience. But she also knew of Clarissa’s paranoia that someone would spread the gossip that Blaise had been with child.
As it turns out, the midwife wasn’t the adulteress Clarissa had claimed her to be. Clarissa had made that part of the story up. She’d lied to the midwife’s husband, who was known for being a jealous drunk, in the hopes that he would finish the midwife off in a drunken rage.
Instead, the husband had killed himself.
The midwife had found him hanging from the rafters and, wise to Clarissa’s schemes, had used the opportunity to fake her own murder.
Her brother was the coroner, and as she and her husband had no other family, no one questioned when the coroner claimed to have found both of them dead.
With the help of her brother, the midwife ran, starting life anew in a small village of Mystral.
Where she now paints portraits of my little Rose.
When she finishes her story, I hardly know what to say.
So I invite her in for tea.
She stays for a long while.
EPILOGUE
THE OLD MAGIC
The Old Magic finds the holidays to be quite the ordeal, especially Winter Solstice when everyone and their cousin’s sister decides whatever climate they live in is not a preferable way to spend the holiday. Asha and Kiran, of course, believe that a Winter Solstice is not a Winter Solstice without snow, despite the Old Magic reminding both of them that they always hate the snow as soon as the first flake melts upon their skin, burning their hands frozen.
Since Kiran’s Flame died with Azrael, the Old Magic supposes the poor male doesn’t have a manner in which to warm himself.
Ellie and Evander are the opposite. They suffer the displeasure of snow multiple months out of the year, and by the time Solstice comes around, they want nothing more than to escape to somewhere with a warmer climate.
This almost always results in at least one person complaining about the weather, no matter where the group decides to meet for the Solstice that particular year.
Of course, on the years they meet in Naenden, everyone complains about the weather.
The children are also an ordeal.
