“It didn’t survive the womb, much like your several elder brothers and sisters,” Clarissa says. “You were already hysterical, making up names for the child and drawing pictures and pretending you would be the one to nurse it.”

“You lied.” It’s more of a whisper than anything.

Clarissa stares up at me from the floor, and there’s no mistaking the pity in her eyes, but it’s not the kind sort. It’s the sort that sparks resentment. Despising.

“You were not equipped for the truth.”

Dead. My baby was born dead.

Suddenly, the air ceases allowing my lungs to take from its supply.

Maybe it thinks that because my baby is dead, I should be too.

But my baby has been dead for six years, and I have gone on living.

A thousand hopes, a million whispered memories cascade from my mind, taking form before spilling from the spaces between my fingertips.

Rose learning to ride a horse. But Rose is dead.

Theo scraping his knee on the gravel. But Theo is dead, too.

A blue-eyed boy who never existed.

A brown-haired girl who never opened her eyes.

All those windows I peered through, all those nights I spent whispering to the stars, hoping the wind would carry my voice into my child’s ears and ward off the nightmares.

All unnecessary.

My child never had to worry over nightmares.

My child is dead.

Has always been dead.

Suddenly I can breathe again, and the only scent on the wind is that of Clarissa’s pulsing blood.

“You.”

The whisper of Nox’s hands tightens around me at the word.

Clarissa doesn’t cower, though. She’s too proud for that. “I granted you a gift, child. Peace you couldn’t have ever imagined.”

A knock on the door. A letter in my hand, clasped to my chest. Someone telling me the king has offered me a position in his service.

“You. You lied to me. You told me my baby was with a family. That if I worked for the palace, if I sent you my paychecks, you’d tell me where my baby was.”

Clarissa stiffens her back. “Yes, and that got you out of bed, didn’t it? You gave up. You decided you were done with living without the child. You’d forgotten there was any life left to be had. It was going to ruin you.”

“Give up?” It’s my hallucination of Nox speaking now, his voice cracking with exasperation. “She was a child. A child who had just lost her baby. And your solution was to blackmail her?”

I realize I must have spoken his words, but Clarissa practically spits her response.

I can’t really hear her.

Not when my baby is dead my baby is dead my baby is dead rings against the inside of my skull.

Clarissa’s blood pounds in her neck, practically begging to be spilled. It smells bitter, but there’s something deep within me that knows if I sipped it, it would seep into the gaping hole within my chest, fill it for a moment before it drained into the cavity of what’s left of my soul and left me empty again.

But my baby is dead, and I can’t quite summon the energy to kill Clarissa.

So I turn to go, to pad down the rickety staircase and wander the streets of Othian until dawn, when I’ll let myself feel the sunlight on my skin once more.

But there’s something I wish to know before I die, something I don’t believe I can leave this world without knowing.

“Was it a little boy or a little girl?” I ask, thinking that perhaps I can name my baby finally.

Clarissa doesn’t respond, and at first I wonder if perhaps she didn’t hear me. But the question is burning inside of me now, except I think that maybe it’s always been burning me, not knowing.

“Clarissa.”

I’ve always used her first name; some quiet refusal to acknowledge her as anything adjacent to my mother, but the word on my tongue is different this time. It’s a command.

I turn to face her, and there’s a tremble bobbing in her throat. Her painted eyes are dead.

“I don’t remember,” she says.

“You don’t remember.”

I recognize the tremble now, and Clarissa’s fear calls out to me on the draft let in through an open vent.

Clarissa pats her skirts down, takes in a deep breath, and when she peers up at me, there’s the blaze burning in her eyes. For a moment, I think it might be regret, but when she speaks, I recognize it’s not.

“There was no time, child. You had passed out, but you could have woken any moment. There was no telling what you might have done, how you would have responded if you witnessed your child stillborn. I had to act quickly, and I told the maid where to hide the body.”

My breath quickens, the emptiness in my chest filling with something that burns. Not the burn of fire, but the burn of ice held against the bare skin, the type that threatens to numb, rot.

“You didn’t check,” I whisper. “You didn’t check to see if it was a little boy or a little girl.”

Clarissa steels herself, lifting her chin even as she’s on her knees before me. “There was no time. I had to do what was necessary to protect you.”

“To protect me.” The words fall flat, linger on my tongue like cough medicine. “And the midwife? She must have known. Must have checked.”

My voice is eerily calm. I think if it were a color, it would be the yellow glare of fog cast over the sea before a storm.

“The midwife is dead,” Clarissa says, “found in bed with one of your father’s servants. Her husband was a jealous drunk. She tried to escape town, but they found them both hanging from his rafters.”

My stomach should plummet at the horrible atrocity, but it doesn’t. All I hear is that the only person ever to see my child’s face is gone.