The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,127

one day.

Then the red veil of Tybalt’s memories slammed down over me, and the condition of my own body ceased to be quite as important. It wasn’t like I could feel it anymore.

There’s too much blood.

The baby is coming early—Anne said this evening that she hadn’t felt any kicking in over a day, and she was worried—and now the baby is coming, and there’s too much blood. I’ve never seen a human give birth before, but this can’t be normal. Cait Sidhe women bleed in birthing, and when they do it on two legs, they’re built in so many respects like their mortal counterparts. Surely I would know if there were meant to be this much blood. Surely someone would have told me.

Anne is bleeding, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been a healer. The local King of Cats has one at his disposal, but he’ll not give them leave to come to me, may the night-haunts steal the eyes from his skull and leave him lost in his own lands forevermore. The King and Queen of Tremont have already turned me away. None of them will help a human woman deliver herself of a changeling child. The Divided Courts see me as a beast; the Court of Cats sees her as a burden. No one will save her. No one will save either one of them, and there’s too much blood, and Anne can’t stand much more of this—

I sat up with a gasp, air flooding back into my floundering lungs, tingles spreading through my body as it seemed to wake up all around me. The room I was in was small, with a low ceiling and bare wooden walls. It looked more like the hold of a ship than anything else although it wasn’t moving, and there was no smell of saltwater in the air.

What there was was the strong smell of blood, my own and someone else’s, mingled with the musk and pennyroyal scent of Tybalt’s magic. I turned my head. He was sitting on the floor next to my makeshift bed, a strip of canvas wrapped around his wrist, a look of strained terror on his face.

“Pray reassure me that I’ve remained awake long enough to see your recovery, and not lost consciousness from blood loss, only to dream a better ending to our tale than the one reality offers,” he said, in a wan voice.

“You’re awake.” I slid off the pile of canvas and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, not pausing to think about what I was doing. This was not the time for careful contemplation. This was the time to reassure my fiancé, who looked like he was on the verge of throwing up, blacking out, or possibly both. “I’m awake. We’re awake. I promise, we’re awake.”

“Oh, thank Oberon.” He buried his face against my shoulder, letting out a shuddering gasp that became, somewhere toward the end, more of a sob. “Thank Oberon, thank Maeve, thank all the lords and ladies of the Courts that came before us. You can’t do that to me, October. You cannot. I forbid it.”

I might normally have taken umbrage at the idea that he could forbid me to do anything. Under the circumstances, I kept holding on as tightly as I could, breathing in, letting the scent of his skin and his hair and his magic fill my nose until I could almost ignore the smell of blood that underscored everything around us.

“I’m okay,” I whispered. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m here and I’m awake and I’m okay. I swear to you, I’m okay.”

Tybalt pulled away, far enough to rest his forehead against my own and look into my eyes. His pupils were narrowed to slits, despite the dimness of the room around us, making him look alien and terrified at the same time—both accurate descriptions, in their own way.

“When I pulled the knife from your back, it carried a piece of your spine with it,” he said. “Bone never meant to see the light, brought into the open. You stopped moving, stopped breathing. I thought . . .” He shuddered, like a horse that had been ridden too hard before being stabled by a careless owner. “I thought you were leaving me. Please, October, I beg. Don’t leave me so soon. I know you cling to your mortality out of love for your father and concern for yourself, and I know it means you may leave me, one day, whether you will it