Out of the Darkness

“Good,” Krasta said. It all sounded simple and straightforward.

It didn’t turn out to be that way, of course. It turned out to be boring and painful and exhausting. She discovered exactly why the process was called labor. Sweat plastered her hair to her forehead. It seemed to go on forever, and to hurt more and more as it continued.

At one point, Krasta started cursing every man she’d ever lain with, and cursing Kudirka, too. The midwife took it in stride. “It’s a good sign, honey,” she said. “It means you’ll be ready to do your pushing pretty soon.”

“There’s more?” Krasta groaned. She’d been going through this for an eternity-it was getting dark outside, and she’d started in the morning. Kudirka only nodded. Then she went to the bedchamber and spoke to someone. Krasta paid little attention till Merkela came in. No matter how far gone she was, that registered. “Get out of here!” she squawked.

“No,” the peasant woman answered. “I am going to see this baby before you have the chance to do anything with it or to it. If it’s blond, it is. If it’s not… I will know that, too.”

Krasta cursed her as savagely as she knew how. She had no inhibitions left, none whatever. Merkela gave back as good as she got till Kudirka nudged her. Even she respected the midwife, and fell silent.

“I have to shit,” Krasta said. “I have to shit more than I ever had to shit in my whole life.”

“That’s the baby,” Kudirka said. “Go ahead and push it out.”

Saying that was one thing; doing it turned out to be something else again. Krasta felt as if she were trying to pass a boulder, not a turd. And then, to her disgust, she did pass a turd. Without any fuss, Merkela disposed of the sheet on which it lay. It must come of growing up on a farm, Krasta thought. She knows all about turds.

Then she stopped thinking altogether, stopped everything except struggling to force the baby out of her. She hardly heard Kudirka’s encouragement. The world, everything but her labor, seemed very far away. She took a deep breath, then let out an explosive noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal.

“That’s it!” the midwife said. “Do that twice more, three times at the most, and you’ll have yourself a baby.”

Krasta didn’t know how many times she made that desperate effort. She was beyond caring by then. At last, though, just when she seemed certain to split in two, everything suddenly got easier. “The baby’s head is out,” Merkela said.

“A couple of more pushes and it’s done,” Kudirka added. “The head is the big part. Everything else will be easy.”

For a miracle, she was right. She guided out the baby’s shoulders and torso and legs. She and Merkela tied off the umbilical cord. Merkela cut it with a pair of shears. Krasta hardly noticed that. She was busy passing the afterbirth, a disgusting bit of business no one had told her about, and one that cost her the undersheet on her bed.

“You have a boy,” Merkela said. She held the squalling baby in the crook of her arm with practiced ease. Not so long before, her son by Skarnu had been so tiny.

Through a haze of exhaustion, Krasta said, “I’ll name him Valnu, for his father.”

Kudirka said nothing at all. Merkela laughed and laughed. The wolfish quality in the peasant woman’s mirth made Krasta shiver no matter how weary she was. Merkela held the baby under her nose, so close her eyes almost crossed. “You were an Algarvian’s whore. I don’t care who else you might have spread your legs for, but you were an Algarvian’s whore, and by what comes out of your own twat you prove what went into it.”

As newborns often are, Krasta’s baby son was born almost bald. But the fine fuzz on his head was of a strawberry tinge no purely Valmieran baby’s head would have had. It was, in fact, nearly identical in color to the hair of Bauska’s bastard half-breed daughter, Brindza.

Laughing still, Merkela said, “If you’re going to name it for its father, you stinking slut, you can call it Lurcanio.”

The weariness Krasta knew then had nothing to do with the ordeal she’d just been through. She’d spent so much time and effort trying to convince everyone, including herself, that the child she was carrying was indeed Valnu’s. She’d- mostly-made herself believe it. She’d made everyone else wonder. And now, to be betrayed by something as trivial as a few strands of hair on the baby’s oddly cone-shaped head (she presumed that would change, even if the brat’s wretched hair color never did) … It all seemed most unfair, as did anything that didn’t go just the way she wished it would have.

“I-” she began.

“Shut up.” Merkela’s voice was flat and hard and vicious, the voice of a wildcat seeing prey it had long stalked at last helpless before it. She gave the baby to Kudirka, then grabbed the scissors she’d used to cut the cord. “I’ve waited too cursed long for this, by the powers above, but now you get what’s coming to you.” She grabbed a shock of Krasta’s hair and hacked it off not a finger’s breadth from her scalp.

“Powers below eat you, you can’t-” Krasta said.

Merkela slapped her in the face. Only Lurcanio had ever dared do that to her before. “Shut up, I told you,” Merkela snapped. She closed the shears and aimed them at one of Krasta’s eyes. “What I’m doing is the least of what you deserve- the least, do you hear me? You can take it, or I’ll give you plenty more. I’d love to, do you hear me? You don’t know how much I’d love to.” The shears jerked closer.

Krasta closed her eyes and flinched. She couldn’t help herself. At any other time, she would have fought, regardless of whether she had a weapon of her own. Exhausted as she’d never been exhausted, sick in spirit as well, she kept her eyes closed and let Merkela do as she would. At last, though, the hateful snip-snip of the shears made her exclaim, “Futter you!”

“A Valmieran futters me,” Merkela retorted. Snip-snip. “I didn’t have a stinking redhead leave silver on the dresser every time he stuck it in.” Snip-snip.

It wasn’t like that. But Krasta didn’t say it. What point? Merkela wouldn’t have believed her, and wouldn’t have cared even if she had believed her. At last, it was over. Kudirka set the baby-the half-Algarvian bastard, just like Bauska’s- on Krasta’s breast. It rooted and began to suck. Krasta didn’t burst into tears. She was too worn for that. But, one after another, they trickled down her cheeks.

No one had ever formally released Skarnu from his service in the Valmieran army. And, unlike most of his countrymen, he’d never given up the fight against the Algarvians. And so, when he proposed to Merkela that he wed her while wearing a captain’s uniform, she nodded. “That’s how I first saw you, you know, coming toward the farmhouse with Raunu at your side,” she said.

Remembering what he’d gone through during his kingdom’s inglorious collapse almost five years before, he answered, “I hope I’ll be cleaner at the ceremony than I was then.”

Merkela laughed. Laughter came easy for her now that she’d finally proved right about Krasta. It was as if she’d won a brand-new victory against the Algarvians long after they’d left Priekule. And so, in a way, she had. Skarnu could have felt victorious about his own sister, too. He didn’t. All he felt was sad. Krasta had made the wrong choice, and now she was paying for it. Hundreds, thousands, of women across Valmiera and Jelgava had paid as much. A good many men who’d collaborated with the redheads had paid or would pay far more.

“Tomorrow,” Merkela murmured. She laid a fond hand on Skarnu’s arm. “It still hardly feels real. It feels like something out of one of the fairy tales my grandmother would tell me when I was a little girl.”

“You had better get used to it, milady,” Skarnu said solemnly, “for it’s the truth.” That he was marrying at all still struck him as surprising. That he was marrying a commoner would have seemed treason to his class before the war.

Little Gedominu, who was toddling around the bedchamber they shared, fell down. The damage, obviously, was anywhere from minimal to imaginary, but he wailed, “Mama!” and started to cry anyway.

Merkela scooped him up. “It’s all right,” she said. After a moment or two in her arms, it was all right, too. Skarnu wished his own hurts were so easily fixed. That thought had hardly crossed his mind when Merkela flicked one of those hurts. She ruffled Gedominu’s fine, golden hair and murmured, “You look the way you’re supposed to. That’s more than anybody can say about your nasty little cousin.”

Skarnu sighed. He wished Krasta’s baby had looked like a proper Valmieran. That would have taken the taint of scandal off the whole family. As things were, he sighed and said, “It’s not the baby’s fault.”

“It certainly isn’t,” Merkela agreed. “It’s her fault.” She still didn’t want to call Krasta Skarnu’s sister. Ever since they’d first learned Krasta was keeping company with a redhead, they-and Merkela especially-had denied Skarnu even had a sister. That was harder now that they were living in the same