I can't go into labor now!
Another wave buckled her knees to the turf. This should start slower. All the books said it should start slower, with minutes or even hours between the cramps. Labor can go on for days.
But she'd never given birth before. Because of the hybrid curse, few witches ever quickened, and none she'd trusted with her plans. She'd studied human books.
And she'd rushed the pregnancy.
She wobbled to her feet, grunting with the effort. Her Power drew into itself, into the ungainly balloon lump of her belly, and ignored her. The voice of the stream called to her. It offered cool solace for her sweat and the heat flashing through her body. And the forest opened a way, passing her to stagger downhill, step by step. She paused as the next wave surged through her belly and she moaned with the cramping pain of it.
It passed through darkness and left her head spinning. She knelt in a clearing, in sunlight on soft grass, gathering the fragments of her thoughts together. Grass, in Dougal's forest? I've never seen this place before. The only grass was on the crest, a clear field of fire around his walls.
It was a trap. It had to be a trap. The forest had fought her for hours -- for days, it seemed. It had never been a safe place for strangers, under Dougal's hand or for generations out of time. Now it turned gentle and offered her a soft bed for birthing?
She felt the jaws of the trap closing around her. It forced her to her feet, and she wobbled on, cradling her belly in both hands, each step a focus and an effort. Water. She needed water -- cool, cleansing, reviving water. That would clear her head.
Another cramp surged through her womb, and she dropped onto all fours, hands and knees splashing into cold. The stream tugged at her, swift and wet up to her elbows and her thighs. She didn't ask how she'd come to it, just lowered her face into it and drank and ducked her head and let the soothing cool flow down her neck. She burned with a fever centered behind her navel, pulsing with the ripples of each contraction.
Power. That was Power she felt, and she sucked on it and used it, heedless of the baby, dragging her zombie-stiff body back to the stream's edge and out on thick soft moss. The cramp passed, and she flopped on her side, so limp that she felt boneless.
Cold wet wool clammy around her thighs and calves, pressure in her bowels and bladder, mindless frenzy stripping off her slacks and stockings and underwear to squat awkward on the moss, fouling her own legs. Instinct sent her crawling back into the stream to wash and huddle, half-naked, in the icy water as another cramp rolled from her breasts all the way down to her knees.
Soothing water flowed around her legs, her hips, easing the cramps and washing mess away. She splashed it on her belly, up under her sweater on her damp hot aching breasts, cupped it and tossed it in her face and on her neck and soaked it into her hair. She felt it draining Power from her, from her belly and from the child there, and knew the forest's trap. It would draw her weakness in and suck the baby from her womb and drown both of them, pull their bones down into Dougal's sinkhole and the black caverns that drained the base of the waterfall.
This brat may die, but not for someone else's purpose.
Back to the streamside, crawling, whimpering like a beaten dog, climbing the bank suddenly steep and greasy against her, again drawing Power from the baby to sink her fingers and toes into moss and mud, reverting to an animal as each cramp stripped away more of her mind and will. She forced herself into a single core, diamond hard and diamond bright, survival at whatever price.
Strength flowed from hate and focused on Maureen. That redheaded bitch had formed a trap, lied and lured and schemed with the dragon and the forest. Must draw her to this place, draw her to gloat in triumph, turn that triumph into defeat through one last twist of Power only hinted at in legend. The bitch would never think of it, never believe and expect it even if she knew. No mother would do that.
A black shadow formed under the trees, sleek and flowing and deadly. Dougal's mutated leopard. Cáitlin had seen it haunting the forest. Seen it acting as Maureen's pet, a set of eyes and ears and fangs to do the forest's bidding. It sat on its haunches and watched, cool, detached, grooming one paw with a fraction of its attention.
Another pang surged through her belly, blanking all thought, and she panted against the wrenching pain. Tears and sweat stung her eyes to blurring, and when she could see again a fox waited, ears alert, on the far side of the clearing from the leopard, looking to sneak scraps from the big cat's kill. Ravens croaked down into the clearing, rattling their feathers into place after they swooped to land in the surrounding branches. All of the predators and scavengers gathered, smelling the birth, smelling the chance of a feast with both mother and child weakened beyond fighting. They saw an easy meal.
But she kept a few surprises in reserve.
Time vanished and became eternity, and the sun moved by ratcheted jumps across the sky between one contraction and the next. And then one scream and the next. Her universe shrank to her belly and the dilating gap between her legs. With each contraction, Power swelled to the flood and then shrank away like the tides, but it ignored her and she couldn't touch it.
A wave took her squatting, screaming through clenched teeth, and she fell forward on her hands and knees again and forced her jaws
