The Binding

F
or Shannon Andrews
,

who was the first to ask for this story.

T
hank you
.

1
.

This is torture.

Someone once told me that fear of the unknown is a waste of energy, that reality never lives up to the horror that we expect. I wish I believed it. That would mean the hard part is almost over. But as I sit here waiting for the future to knock at the door, every minute that passes only brings with it more certainty that the worst is yet to come.

I’ve been in this cold, lonely cabin with my newborn daughter for a week, watching for signs of abnormality in her. Each day sets me more on edge. There’s nothing to do here but wait, and watch. I’ve cleaned the kitchen, the washbasin, the fireplace and the wood floors a dozen times already, checked on the horse and seen to his needs. When I tried to read a book, the words meant nothing, and so I gave up on that days ago. But the wait is almost over. The Woods-witch will come tonight, though I don’t know exactly what she will do to my child. What I’ve paid her to do, God help me. My chest tightens with panic every time I think of it, and I consider taking my child and riding far away.

The baby cries and a chill rushes through my limbs, propelled by my racing heart, but she’s only wet.

She watches me, calm and curious, as I change her. My husband would tell me not to fuss, to let her be, but he’s not here. I hold her close until she’s asleep again. Watching her deep, peaceful breathing, I can’t help but be calmed.

And I can’t help but remember the last one.

The lost one.

After my son and my first two daughters were born normal and healthy, I thought we'd escaped the curse that plagued the people of Darmid. In spite of centuries of work to rid our land of it, the magic here is often too strong for a young body to survive. Three pregnancies, three children alive at their naming days. . . . I should have known that our luck couldn't hold out forever. When so many families have babies only to lose them a few weeks or a month later, did we really think that God smiled on us so much that we'd be spared?

At least if we were fools, we weren't alone in it. Children are everything here, a resource too rare to be taken lightly. A pregnancy is news that brings a tentative sort of joy, but I knew in my heart that this child would be as perfect as the first three.

She almost was. The birth was easier than the others had been, and barely two hours after the midwife arrived at our home I held a screaming, red-faced infant in my arms. The midwife expressed cautious optimism.

“So far she looks strong as any I’ve seen, Mrs. Greenwood,” she said as she cleaned the newborn’s wrinkled skin. She wrapped the baby in a soft blanket and handed her back, and I unwrapped her to count tiny fingers and perfect toes.

“No sign of strangeness,” she added. “You just let me or the doctor know if anything unusual happens. Anything at all.”

I just nodded, too lost in the miracle of new life to wonder what her instructions hinted at.

It was my son who first noticed it. Three weeks after the baby's birth he came to me, nose wrinkled, asking "Why's the baby buzzin'?"

I followed him to the nursery, holding my long skirt up as I stepped over the wheeled wooden horse he’d left on the floor. Everything seemed normal. The white curtains danced in the breeze that came through the open window, and hoofbeats clattered over the cobblestone street outside. The room smelled of clean laundry and freshly-bathed baby, and my new daughter slept in the white-washed cradle that had kept her brother and sisters safe through their infancies. I touched her. She stirred, sucked her fat lower lip into her mouth, and soothed herself back to sleep.

“No more stories, Ashe,” I whispered, and ushered him out of the room.

“Not tellin’ stories,” he muttered, but went on his way.

A few days later, I understood that he hadn’t been joking. There was nothing physically wrong with her, but when I held the baby, the hair on my arms stood on end. It reminded me of the air during a lightning storm, frightening and exhilarating. I called my husband into the room and passed her to him.

He frowned, held her closer to his face, closed his eyes. “She looks, feels, and smells like a baby. Nothing unusual about her. Are you feeling well, Lucilla? You look tired.”

I smiled and took her back. “No. It’s just silly nerves, I suppose. My imagination’s running wild.”

He placed an arm around my shoulders and leaned in to kiss the baby’s head, then my cheek. “It’s probably to be expected after what happened to the Sterns family last week. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen here. She’s fine. She’s safe. She’s normal.”

I wanted to believe him, but still the sensation persisted. When I mentioned it to the midwife on her next visit, her lips compressed into a tight line.

"The magic may be acting on her," she said.

My heart froze. No one talked about it after they lost children. Was this how it began?

"Speak to the doctor," the midwife advised me. "He might have some idea how to protect her."

Fool that I was, I listened.

I took the baby to the doctor’s office the next day, and the nurse ushered us straight into a small room in the back. The doctor instructed me to undress the baby and set her on the table for the examination. He wore thick cotton gloves, and touched her only when absolutely necessary. No smile for his bright-eyed patient, and not a word.

“You feel it?” he asked, and pushed his tiny, round glasses up his nose.

“I do. My husband didn’t. What does it mean?”

He pursed his fat lips and stepped away from the examination table. “It’s like that. People who have been affected by it tend to feel magic. Mothers become sensitive to it when it’s in their babies, as do those of us who encounter it frequently.” He rested a hand on my arm. “You did nothing wrong. It may have been affecting her even before birth. Some just aren’t strong enough to fight it. I’m sorry.”

My breath caught in my throat. “So there’s nothing you can do?”

“She’ll fight it off, or she won’t. I’ll have the nurse come by to check up on things.” He didn’t say there was no hope, but the implication was there in his hurry to leave and the finality with which he closed the door, leaving me alone with my afflicted child.

She gazed up at me as I dressed her and wrapped her in her blanket. She arched her back, objecting to being bundled up, and one arm popped free. A startled look crossed her face as she caught sight of the flailing limb.

She's perfect,
I thought as I re-wrapped her and held her close, as though my arms could protect her from the world.
They're wrong
.

I prayed for my child, and wept over her as she lay in her cradle at home. Her eyelashes were already long enough to rest on her round cheeks when she slept, and in the days that followed I spent every spare moment watching them flutter as she dreamed. She seemed so contented, so perfectly healthy and vibrant. But still that energy came off of her, wild and terrifying, and unnoticed by everyone but me and my son.

A nurse I had never met before came a week later, sent by our doctor. "You look tired," she said as I opened the door. It was late evening then, and she was correct. After a day with the children, I was beyond exhausted and ready to collapse.

My husband looked up from the book he was reading. The light from the tall oil lamp on the desk turned his thinning hair into a halo. "Go to bed, Lucilla," he said. "I'll show the nurse out when she comes back down.” The children were in bed, and the baby had just drifted off. I needed to rest while I could. I thanked them both, and left the nurse to her job.

I was dozing when she knocked at the bedroom door.

"Ma'am?"

I opened my eyes. "Is the baby all right? Did you examine her?”

There was genuine sorrow in the nurse's eyes. Whatever I came to believe after, I still hold onto that.

"I did,” she said. “And I’m sorry. You should enjoy what time you have left with her, but you need to start letting go." I sat up and reached for my slippers, but the nurse shook her head. "The little one is resting," she said. "She needs her sleep. See her when she wakes for a feeding." And she left.

Would it have made any difference if I'd fought off the fog of exhaustion and gone right away? Probably not. I think it was all over before the nurse came to me.

The baby didn't cry for her late feeding, and when I woke my breasts were over-heavy and leaking. I ran to the nursery and looked into the cradle. She could have been sleeping. She looked so peaceful in the moonlight that streamed through the window.

I brushed my hand over the soft fuzz that covered her head. The hairs on my arms lay still.

This was why they told us not to become too attached to our babies. This was why we didn't name them until six months after birth, why we weren't supposed to let them become real people in our hearts until the danger was past. I don't know any mother who has managed it. I certainly hadn't. I grieved for that child, barely leaving my bed for weeks, happiest when I was asleep with her blanket tucked beneath my cheek where I could still smell her.

I still grieve.

I can't pinpoint the moment when the suspicion first came to me, the thought that the nurse had killed her. When I mentioned it to the doctor, he told me it was understandable that in my fragile emotional state I would look for someone to blame for this tragedy, but that the nurse was not responsible. It was magic that had killed my baby, and nothing else. He ordered me a medicine to calm my nerves and urged me to rest, recover, and try to forget.

When I went back a year later, still grieving, he cautioned me against trying for another baby and wrote a different prescription, this one to prevent pregnancy. I suspected that it was already too late for that, but something kept me from telling him that I'd been feeling sick again. I hadn’t told anyone.

"Once this happens in a family, it's likely to happen again," he said. "I might tell another woman to go ahead and try, but I think it would be too dangerous for your mental state. I won't tell you what to do." He tapped his pencil on the desk, then made a note in my file. “If you have a baby, I'll be sure to have the nurse come back to look it over as soon as possible after the birth."

The nurse.

There was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go. It was all out of my control, and always had been. Or so I thought.

The wind howling outside the windows interrupts my memories and brings me back to the present, to the cabin in the woods.

Why am I here now? Because of the trial. I lied to my husband and my community, I suffered through childbirth in this horrible place, I wait in fear because of a young woman in chains, one whose face and name I will never forget. I hope it will be worth it. Maybe this was a stupid plan, but it was my only hope.

The new baby’s eyelids flutter, and gooseflesh breaks out on my arms. A tear slips down my cheek, and I tremble as the sun sets, as the hour grows closer.
It's the only way
, I remind myself, and I kiss the crown of my daughter's head. If she survives, she’ll be my fourth child by official reckoning, but fifth in my heart. I won’t lose this one.

"It's the only way," I repeat aloud, and the baby opens her eyes.

2
.

My husband is a magistrate, but I’d never been to a trial before. I was always busy with my own work at the glass shop, and later with the children as they came along. But it’s not often that a magic user is brought to trial in Lowdell. When the magic hunters captured one a week after my last appointment with the doctor, the news was on everyone’s lips. My sister was visiting from Ardare, and she convinced me to go along with her and watch from the back of the room.

I'll admit that I was curious. The only people who could control magic were ones who had sold their souls to the devil. We grew up with that knowledge, squealing over scary stories about witches and shuddering at tales of the wicked, soulless Sorcerers who peopled Tyrea, the land beyond the mountains.

It didn't seem to me that it was a price worth paying, and I wanted to see what kind of person would actually attempt it.

They said her name was Serena. She sat on a hard chair next to the bench where my husband would sit, head down, tangled brown hair hanging into her eyes. She wore a shapeless, cream-colored dress of the type always worn by female prisoners making a court appearance. Shackles made of blue metal covered her pallid skin from her wrists to half-way up her forearms, and she looked like she hadn't slept or bathed in a month. When she lifted her face, I expected to see misery there. Instead, I found a spark of defiance that chilled me.

The details of the start of the trial are barely worth remembering. She was accused. Witnesses were called. She laughed when a handsome young man claimed he'd heard her performing the Devil's Rites. She shed a few silent tears when a woman said that she'd heard her calling a pack of wild dogs away from the sheep they were attacking, speaking in a foreign-sounding language. There were more, five witnesses in all. No one accused her of hurting a person or property, but it didn't matter. The magic was enough.

Then she spoke for herself, and that part I'll never forget.

"There's nothing I can say that will change any of your minds about what I am.” Her voice scratched past cracked lips. "If I thought it would matter, I'd tell you that there is truth in what some of these people have said, but not the whole truth. I'd tell you that Mister Jounes is lying, that he's the only devil who's offered me anything recently. He threatened me with this false testimony, and offered me certain terms under which he would withhold it. I refused him, and here we sit. But you will believe him, because he's not what I am.

"I would tell you that it's true, I called off those dogs." Murmurs flowed through the crowd until a sharp look from my husband silenced them. "The sheep belonged to the woman who has testified against me today. I saved her livelihood and hoped that the strength of our friendship would ensure her silence. It did not.

"The only other thing I wish to say is this, that what I am is not what you think. I was born with the abilities I have."