The Neighbor's Baby

Chapter 15:

Margaret packed in eleven minutes.

I counted, because counting was something to do with my hands. She went around that cottage like a woman half her age and she put things in a sack — the dried herbs off the beams, the little mortar, three jars off the shelf, a knife, a flint, bread, the tin from the shelf, the first page of my mother's letter.

"The letter goes in your coat," she said. "Not the sack. Your coat. If we get separated you keep it on you."

"We're not getting separated."

"Your coat, Jane."

I put it in my coat.

She took the boots out of the chest in the little room and put them on the floor in front of me. The good leather ones. The ones she'd bought off a trader in the fourth year and guessed the size a little big.

"Put them on."

"Margaret—"

"You've been walking in wet boots for three days and your feet are a mess. Put them on and don't argue with me."

I put them on.

They fit. Not perfect — a little loose in the heel — but they fit, and the leather came up over my ankles and held them, and I stood in the middle of that cottage in a pair of boots a woman had bought for me nineteen years before I ever needed them, and my eyes went hot.

"They fit," I said.

"Course they fit. I know how to size a boot." She wiped her face with her sleeve and turned away. "Get the lamp. We're going out the back."

"His tracks were at the front."

"His tracks were at the front yesterday. Tonight we go out the back and we go through the garden and we don't take the path." She pulled the shutter back an inch and looked out. "It's full dark. There's no moon. That's good for us and it's good for him, so we move fast and we don't stop and we don't talk."

We went out the back.

The garden was cold and the fence at the back had a gap in it where two rails had come loose, and Margaret had clearly done this before, because she went straight to it and pulled the rails back and held them while I crawled through.

Then the trees.

I don't want to talk about the trees. I'd walked through them once and it had nearly killed me and this time I had boots and a full stomach and an old woman beside me and it was still the worst hour I've ever spent. Roots. Deadfall. A branch that came out of nowhere and hit me in the mouth. Margaret's hand on my elbow the whole time, steady, guiding, and her breath getting worse with every step.

"Margaret."

"Don't."

"Your hip—"

"My hip's fine."

"Margaret, you're limping—"

"Jane." She stopped. Right there in the dark with her hand on a trunk. "If I stop now I don't start again. So I'm not stopping. And I'm not talking about my hip. And if you say one more word about my hip I'm going to leave you in these woods and let Cole Maddox have you."

I shut up.

---

The village came up on us from the side.

Not the road. Margaret took us around, through the trees on the north side, and we came out above the lane and there was the smithy and the Avery house and the lamps.

My house was down that lane. Three doors down and to the left. The window would be dark because I'd blown out the lamp when I left it.

"Come on," Margaret said.

We went down the bank and through the yards, keeping to the hedges, and we got to Mrs. Avery's back door and Margaret knocked on it — two, then one, then two.

The door opened.

Mrs. Avery stood there with a lamp in her hand and her face grey and her hair down for the night.

"You're alive," she said.

"Not for much longer if we stand in this yard." Margaret pushed past her. "Get the door shut."

I got the door shut.

The Avery kitchen was warm and full of the smell of onions and there was a fire in the grate and a cat on the chair and Mrs. Avery stood there holding her lamp and looking at us like we were two ghosts.

"I sent Ray," she said.

"He found us."

"Is he—"

"He's gone. He's on his horse and he's gone and he won't come back here." Margaret sat down in the chair with the cat and the cat got out of her way. "Ella. Where's your husband?"

"At his brother's. He went to fetch him two days ago when the man first came." Mrs. Avery put the lamp down. "He's not back yet. It's just me and the baby."

"Baby," I said.

"My daughter's girl. She's been sick this week and my daughter's in the next territory with her husband and she left the baby with me and she's —" Mrs. Avery's voice did something. "She's been crying since sundown. She won't stop. I've tried everything."

As if on cue, the crying came through the wall.

Thin and high and steady. Not a hungry cry. Not a tired cry. The other kind. The kind that comes in waves with no breath in between.

"How long," Margaret said.

"Since sundown."

"How long's that?"

"Four hours."

Margaret's head came up.

"Four hours," she said. "Is she hot?"

"She's burning up, Margaret. She's been burning up since yesterday and nothing I do takes it down and I don't know what to—"

"Jane."

I looked at Margaret.

Margaret looked at me.

And then she did a thing I didn't expect — she stood up out of the chair and she crossed the kitchen and she put her hands on my shoulders.

"Jane. Listen to me. That baby in there's been sick four hours and it's not getting better and there's no healer in this village and there's no time to fetch one." Her hands were tight. "You've got the gift. It's in your hands. You've had it since before you were born and it's been sitting in you quiet and you've been too tired and too cold and too scared to feel it."

"Margaret, I can't even—"

"You don't need your wolf for this." Her voice was hard. "I know what you can't do. I'm telling you what you can. Go in there and put your hands on that child."

Mrs. Avery said, "Margaret, what are you—"

"Hush, Ella."

I went through the door.

The room was small and hot and the lamp was turned down and there was a cradle by the wall, and the crying was coming out of it, and I stood over that cradle and looked down.

A baby. Six months, maybe. Red in the face from hours of it. Her little fists up by her head and her mouth open and her whole body working at the crying.

I put my hands on her.

I didn't think about it. That's the thing. I didn't decide. I reached into the cradle and I put one hand on the baby's chest, flat, and the other under her head to hold her steady, and I felt the heat coming off her like a stove.

And then something in me opened.

It started in my chest at the place where the rope broke and it went down my arms and out through my palms and it was warm. Not hot. Warm like bathwater. And my hands lit up — faint, faint, a pale glow like a lamp with the wick turned all the way down, and it ran down the back of my fingers and into that baby's skin.

The crying stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. The baby's mouth closed and her fists came down and her whole body went loose in the cradle the way a body goes loose when a thing has finally let go of it.

I could feel it leaving her. The heat. Going out of her chest and up into my hands and away, and there was a pull somewhere deep in me like a drain opening, and it hurt, and I didn't care, and I kept my hands there.

The baby opened her eyes.

Brown eyes. Wet lashes. She looked up at me and made a small sound — not a cry, just a sound — and her hand came up and closed on my finger.

I stood there in the lamplight with my finger in a baby's fist and my hands glowing and something in me pouring out through my palms, and I heard myself say, out loud, quiet, "There you are."

Mrs. Avery made a noise behind me.

"Ella," Margaret said, low. "Get the door."

Mrs. Avery went and got the door.

---

I stood over the cradle for a long time.

The glow faded out of my hands. The pull in my chest slowed and stopped and I lifted my hands away and the baby stayed asleep, breathing easy, her face gone from red to pink, her little chest going up and down.

"She's cool," Mrs. Avery said. She put the back of her hand on the baby's forehead. "Margaret. Margaret, she's cool. Four hours and she's cool."

"That she is," Margaret said.

I turned around.

Margaret was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and her face doing something I couldn't read. It wasn't pride. It wasn't relief. It was the look she'd had the first morning, sitting in the chair beside the bed, counting.

"What," I said.

"Come out of there. Sit down."

"What."

"Jane. Sit down."

I sat down in the kitchen.

The fire was going. The cat was back on the chair and Margaret had moved it and it was sulking by the hearth. Mrs. Avery was in the back room with the baby, standing over the cradle, and I could hear her saying something soft, over and over.

Margaret sat down across from me.

"Your hands," she said.

"They glowed."

"Your hands glowed," she said. "Just like your mother's did."

I sat there.

The fire popped.

"Just like your mother's," Margaret said again.

And this time I heard it.

"Margaret," I said. "On the first night. When I was on your floor and you were putting the blanket on me. You said that."

"I did."

"You said just like your mother and I asked you what you meant and you wouldn't answer me."

"I did."

"Why?" My hands were flat on the table. "Why wouldn't you tell me? Why did I have to lie in your bed for three days and find out from a letter—"

"Because I had to see it." Margaret's voice was flat and hard and it cut me off. "Because I couldn't tell you what you were until I saw you do it. Not because I didn't trust your mother's letter. Because you wouldn't have believed me."

I sat back.

"You were a girl who'd been told she was a girl who couldn't shift," Margaret said. "You've been told that all your life. You were told it in that hall in front of three hundred people and you'd started to believe it, and if I'd stood you in that cottage on the first morning and told you that you were a healer with a gift out of your mother's blood, you'd have said I was a mad old woman and you'd have been right to."

The fire cracked.

"You had to see it in your own hands," Margaret said. "There's no arguing with your own hands."

I put my face in my hands.

The pull in my chest had stopped but there was something left over — a tiredness, deep, in the bones, the way your legs feel after a long climb. I sat there and it came over me like a blanket and I had to work to keep my head up.

"Jane," Margaret said. "Jane, look at me."

"I'm fine."

"You're grey."

"I'm fine—"

"Jane."

I lifted my head.

Margaret's face had changed. Her mouth was open a little and she was looking at me like she'd just seen the ground move.

"Your eyes," she said.

"What about my eyes."

"I don't know. They went—" She stopped.

The knock came on the front door.

We all went still.

Mrs. Avery came out of the back room with the baby in her arms. The baby stayed asleep.

"Nobody knows I'm here," I said.

"I know," Margaret said.

The knock came again. Three times. Slow. Polite.

And then a voice through the door — low, easy, unhurried, the same voice that had said she'll tire herself out.

"Mrs. Avery. I see a light in your kitchen and a horse in your stable that wasn't there this afternoon. I'm not going to make a fuss in the street. But I've been polite three days and I'm about done being polite."

Mrs. Avery's arms tightened around the baby.

"Don't answer it," Margaret said.

"I have to answer it." Mrs. Avery's voice was shaking. "Margaret, he'll break it down and then every house in this lane hears it and then the whole village—"

"Then you don't answer it," I said.

I stood up.

Margaret said, "Jane."

I walked into the front room and I stood in the middle of it with the lamp on the table and the fire behind me and the door in front of me, and I could see the shape of him through the glass, tall, patient, standing on a doorstep in the dark.

"I know you're in there," he called. "I can smell it. You've got the gift in your hands and it's leaking out of you like a broken bucket. You did something in that back room tonight and I felt it from the lane."

I put my hand on the bar.

"Jane," Margaret said, behind me. "Don't."

I lifted the bar.

I opened the door.

He was standing on the step in the dark with his hands in his coat pockets and the scar up the side of his neck catching the lamplight, and he looked at me with those eyes Ray had said were not right and he smiled.

"There she is," he said.

"You've got thirty seconds," I said. "Say what you came to say."

Cole Maddox took his time.

He looked at me. He looked past me at Margaret. He looked at the fire and the chairs and the cat and he breathed in through his nose, slow, like a man at a bakery.

"I'll be quick then," he said. "I came to tell you a thing you should know, and then I'll go, and then you can make your choice with a clear head."

"What thing."

"Your mother," he said.

The room went cold.

"Your mother was not killed by the pack. She wasn't murdered. She was a healer and she knew a healer's price and she chose the price." He took one hand out of his pocket. "I know this because I was there. I sat with her the night before she did it and I asked her not to. And she looked at me and she said the same thing I'm going to say to you now: a wolf with the gift doesn't get to keep it and grow old."

Margaret made a sound behind me.

"That's the truth of it," Cole Maddox said. "And it's the truth nobody in this village will ever tell you. Come with me and I'll tell you the rest of it. Stay here and you can keep on being told pretty things by an old woman who's been hiding in a cottage for nineteen years."

He looked at me.

"Your mother didn't die for you," he said. "She died for a sixteen-year-old girl in a back room somewhere and she gave up her whole life to do it. That's the woman you've been crying about. And I'm the only one who'll tell you the truth about her."

"Go home," I said.

He smiled.

"You don't know where home is yet," he said. "But I'll give you three days. Then I'll come back, and this time I won't be polite, and it won't be me that has to decide." He stepped back off the step and put his hand back in his pocket. "Let her think it over. She'll come out when she's ready. They always do."

Behind him, at the end of the lane, a door slammed.

He turned and walked down the dark lane with his hands in his coat pockets and he did not hurry and he did not look back, and I stood in the open doorway with the cold coming in and my hands shaking and my mother's letter in my coat.

Margaret came up behind me and put her hand flat on my back.

"Jane."

"Don't," I said. "Don't tell me he's lying. Because I don't know. I don't know anything."

Chapter (15) Ends.