between her hands like a wedding bouquet.
“We will tend this place,” she said. “And plant fennel all around it for protection.”
She tore the flower in half and handed one of the pieces to me. I grabbed it, opened my palm. The petals fanned out, an intense red against my pale skin.
“Now,” she said, looking at me directly, her expression purposeful. “Eat it.”
“Why?” I looked up at her.
“To honor him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He was a powerful man. Though you didn’t mean to, you took his life, and now you must honor him, take his strength into you. We both must.”
I looked down, feeling suddenly faint. I stuffed the flower into my mouth. Its tang extended out like fingers, making me shiver with pleasure. I felt something drip from my lips, and without thinking wiped my chin with the back of my hand.
A strange, woozy feeling went through me, as I stood in the liquid sunlight and saw Mathena cupping the flower in her palms and drinking it in. For a moment I was sure we were underwater, that the birds passing overhead were fish, the trees’ spears reaching for the surface.
I looked down, and my hands were stained red.
We walked to the river, and bent down to wash our hands and arms in it, splash the water on our faces. Every water droplet like a diamond, suspended in the air and on our skin.
I don’t know if it was because of the flower we ate or not, but I felt better that spring. I was filled with the pleasure of moving my fists into the earth, burying seeds within it, knowing that those seeds would grow into the lush fruits and herbs the summer would bring. It was arduous work, especially with my expanding belly, but I reveled in the exhaustion that blotted out everything else. We planted the seeds we’d gathered the autumn before, and we saved scraps of food to turn back into the earth. Mathena bent over the garden, thinning the vegetables, while I did less taxing work in the kitchen, cooking our meals and brewing teas for the garden with the skins of onions, cucumbers, and quince, the ends of carrots and cabbage and wild celery, feathers and bones that I’d burnt down to ash. The earth was thirsty, starving it seemed. Every afternoon I’d tromp through the garden, pour in the compost tea, and add in the droppings of our horse, piles of leaves, anything we could find, while overhead the sun beat down and the world came to life all around us.
Our garden grew more bountifully than it ever had. We ate great piles of spinach topped with vinegar, oil, and salt, and I boiled delicious stews of potherbs and meat while bread baked in the oven. It was far too much bounty for two women, even with a child growing inside me, and so we gave out food by the basketful to the ladies who came to see us, often in the evening hours, when their own work was done.
One morning I woke and found spots of blood on my nightgown and the sheets under me. I dressed and carried the linens to the river, let the blood wash out in the clear water.
Over the course of the morning, I realized that my baby seemed unusually still. Mathena was off hunting with Brune, and so I sent up a quick prayer to Artemis and kept at my tasks. At midafternoon I was standing over the fire, inhaling the scent of boiling beets and porrettes, when the cramping came, so strongly that the room began to spin around me. I dropped the spoon I was using, which clattered on the hard floor.
Something was horribly wrong.
I crumpled to the floor, doubling over and holding my belly.
“Mathena!” I cried.
As the cramping began to subside, I reached under my skirts, to the center of my body. When I pulled my hand away, it was covered in blood.
I forced myself up, and reached for a cloth to wad up and press between my legs.
Another wave of pain moved through me and I bent over again, grasping the back of the couch. Sweat poured down my face as I slumped back to the floor, twisted to my side, and pressed my face into the cool dirt.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, moaning and crying as the pain assaulted me and retreated, and then came back again.
I could feel him leaving me, this child I loved too much already, and it might as well have been my heart slipping from my chest. My body was coming apart, my insides wrenching themselves. I was like bread dipped in water, unloosening. It was so real to me that I am sure, even now, that there was a whole child there, screaming and flailing and looking up at me, something deeply wrong with it, it was all wrong, though I know it was my own being screaming like that as the makings of my child fell from me and left me scraped out and bare.
When Mathena found me, the blood and tissue had seeped through my gown, staining it bright red.
I had dreamt him, I knew his face, his bright eyes.
I was on the floor, balled up, my legs knotted together around that ruined dress drenched in blood. Too exhausted to speak.
She lifted me into her arms, carried me outside, into the fresh air, onto the grass.
I was sobbing, talking gibberish, and Mathena just sang and soothed me and cleaned me the best she could, and finally, when I had exhausted myself, she pulled the dress from my body, and took it away.
“Shhhh,” she said, moving her hand along my forehead, smoothing back my hair.
She washed me gently as if I myself were a child—and I suppose I was—cleaning me and putting me back together, the way she’d always done, as far back as I could remember.
Later, much later, she would tell me that it was a boy, as I’d known it would be. “It is better that he slipped away,” she would say then, “rather than live the life it would have lived. He was not . . . shaped the way children should be shaped.”
The day my son died, Mathena took my soiled dress, along with all that was wrapped inside it, and placed it on the fire. As it burned, she whispered spells, prayers, and sprinkled the fire with potions and oils. I was not conscious enough to know what was happening, but I could feel it, smell the scent of the burning, the anguish of what was left of my son disappearing from this earth.
She buried his ashes at the edge of the garden.
For several days, I slipped in and out of a dream state, and in my dreams my son came to life. I could hold him and smell his milky scent, I could walk up the steps of the palace and present the child to the king. And in my dreams, the court recognized him and took him to soft beds, to places where he’d never be cold, where he’d grow strong and ferocious and never die. Imagine! Being able to move through time as if it were water, and change the course of things, prevent the coming of grief. I dreamed of Josef standing over him, saying, “My son.”
“My son.”
Sometimes I’d dream that I was holding him in my arms, his soft soft skin folding into mine, the smell of him infusing everything, entering me, my whole body, every cell of it filled with love and relief and a crazy new happiness, and then I would wake up, the whole world going flat when I remembered he was dead.
And then one by one I’d see the stone walls of our cottage, the fire dying in the hearth, Mathena curled up next to me for warmth, my hair blanketing us both.
I’m surprised it didn’t choke us to death.
When I finally rose from the bed and rejoined the waking world, I begged Mathena to give me that ancient potion that would make me forget: forget my lost child, forget the prince who was now king, forget his wife the queen and the child who would be born when my own child had died. I longed to go back to the time when all I knew was the woods around us.
“You gave it to me once,” I said. “The forgetting potion. Please do it again. Let me start over the way I did before.”
But she refused. “Better things await you,” she said, as we opened the shutters and stared out at the melting world. Because finally, too late, the world began to warm. “You need only to be patient.”
I stared at her blankly. The word had no meaning to me when my anguish swallowed me whole, when all I could see was grief unfurling in front of me.
I began to think that if she wouldn’t perform the spell, I could find it and do it myself. I started poring over
