BEFORE

SHE GIVES BIRTH in mud and mire.

She squats and strains under the fog-shrouded bower of a gnarled cottongum. Vines choke the massive tree, dragging its limbs to the mossy hillocks and draping leaves into the boggy waters of a slow-moving stream. To her side, a trunk as wide as a horse twists around and around, as if the tree were seeking to escape these drowned lands.

She sweats and pants, her legs wide under her. Overhead, her hands remain clamped to a vine. As she hangs there, thorns pierce her palms, but the pain is naught compared to the final contraction that rips her wider and pushes the babe from her womb. She stifles her scream, lest the hunters should hear her cries.

Still, a moan escapes her, wordless from her lack of a tongue. As a pleasure serf of Azantiia, she was never allowed the luxury of speech.

With one last push, she feels the release. The child spills from her and drops to the wet mud underfoot. She slips off the vine. Impaled thorns rip her palms open. She slumps to the mud with the babe between her thighs. The child is still tied to her by a twisted bloody cord.

She sobs with wracking heaves and picks up the skinning knife near the base of the cottongum. The hunting blade is not her own, neither is the blood that already stains it. The knife was thrust into her hands by her savior, by a man who broke a vow to help her escape the castle keep. After sailing across the Bay of Promise, under the glowering eye of a winter’s sun, pursued by the king’s legion, they had made landfall along the treacherous coast of Mýr. Its shoreline was less land and more a blurring where the blue sea met the brackish waters lined by a drowned mangrove forest. Once the skiff could traverse no farther into the swamps, her rescuer had sent her off on foot, while he poled the skiff away, intending to lead her pursuers elsewhere.

Alone now, she slices his blade through the thick cord, freeing the babe from her body and from her past. She had thought herself emptied, but her belly convulses again. She gasps as blood and tissue flow out, washing over the babe. Fearing the child would drown with its first breath, she wipes the baby’s face clean. Its eyes remain closed to this harsh world. Her torn palms smear more blood. Still, she reveals little pursed lips—too blue, nearly black in the shadows.

Breathe now, little one …

She rubs and prays.

One prayer is answered when the child sucks in its first breath, stirring, only slightly, but enough. Her other prayer is ignored when she discovers her child is a girl.

No …

She picks up the knife again. She lowers the blade to the baby’s throat.

Better this …

Her hand trembles. She leans down and kisses a brow furrowing toward a first cry at this harsh world. She prays, both as apology and explanation. Be free from me. From my past. From my shame. From those who would take you.

Before she can act, the Mother Below punishes her for daring to forsake the gift granted to her womb. Her stomach clenches again. Hot blood pours out between her thighs. The pain is at first fiery—then turns to a dreadful cold. And still the flow continues, pouring her life into the mud.

She reads the truth in the spreading stain.

Having been raised among the pleasure serfs, she had assisted midwives with other girls who had found themselves with child, despite the teas of Bastard’s Herb. Over the passing two decades, she had witnessed births in all their myriad forms: some joyous, others fearful, most with resignation. All had involved tears. There had been blood, shite, torn flesh, babes born backward, others deformed by the teas, or bodies broken by their own mothers in attempts to end the child’s life before it was born. When she was very young, she had reviled the latter. She had not known then what it meant to be a child born under the whip, to be eventually broken under the heaving throes of a master.

She eventually learned the hard and necessary lessons.

She stares down at the knife at her daughter’s throat.

By now, blood pools heavily under the babe. The scent draws flies and suckers. As she stares down into eyes just now peeking open, the forest grows hushed, as if awed. Birdsong falls silent, leaving only the hum and whine of insects. A new noise intrudes. A heavy splash to her right.

She stirs her cooling flesh enough to turn her head. Even this small movement closes the darkness tighter around her. From the sluggish current of the swamp, a reptilian beast thrashes onto shore. Claws gouge the muck, dragging its massive length, led by a snout edged by sharp teeth. Though eyeless, it aims unerringly through the reeds and moss, drawn by her blood as surely as the biting flies.

No …

Her instinct to protect overwhelms the bitter lessons of her past. She lifts the blade from her daughter’s neck and threatens the approaching beast. But she knows she can inflict no more than a pinprick—if even that. The reptilian hunter is twice her length, ten times her weight. She senses its age, reads the centuries in the thick growth of emerald moss fringing its black scales.

Despite its age, it barrels faster toward her, blind to the knife and all its uselessness. It carries with it the reek of carrion and brackish waters. The moss across its back and flanks glows faintly in the forest shadows.

Still, she kneels over her child. She is too weak even to stand. Her arm quakes to hold up the dagger. Darkness continues to pinch her world smaller and smaller.

She girds herself for the heavy strike to come, as she did many nights in the perfumed beds of her masters. Her body was never her own.

Anger flares through her. Even this fire had been forbidden to her in the past. In this last moment, she takes hold of that flame and screams the last of her strength away. She closes her eyes and cries to the heavens, at the beast, at herself, at a child that would never get to live.

For the first time in her life, she is truly heard.

A piercing cry rings forth from the skies. The screech is less heard with her ears than with her entire body. The scream cuts through her skin, sharp enough to reach bone. The force lifts the hairs over her body. She opens her eyes and sees the reptilian beast slide to a stop in the mud, coming to rest no more than an arm’s length from her. Panicked, the beast twists and writhes to turn its massive bulk, to return to the safety and succor of black water.

Before it can, branches shatter overhead. A shadow dives through the canopy and crashes into the beast. Sickle-shaped claws cleave through hard scale. Bones break under the impact of a creature as large as a hay cart. Leathery wings snap outward, striking her broadside, knocking her from her child.

She is flung far and crashes into the twisted trunk of a tree. She collapses amidst the tangle of its roots. From her side, she watches those heavy wings beat once, lifting the creature back into the air. The reptilian beast is carried aloft. Impaled claws rip it into halves and fling its centuries-old body back into the dark waters.

Then the winged creature lands in the mud.

It swings toward her, revealing its malignant splendor. It holds high its leathery wings, thin enough at the edges to see the sparkle of patchy sunlight through them. It keeps its head low, close to the ground. Large tufted ears swivel toward her. Its long slitted nostrils fan open wider, rippling, testing the air. It hisses at her and raises a furred ridge along its short neck and arched back.

She knows this beast, all of Azantiia knows them, the terror of the swamps, the dreaded Mýr bats, the poisonous denizens of the shrouded volcanic mountain—The Fist—at the heart of these drowned lands. Stories abound of these creatures—though few had ever lived to tell a tale of such an encounter. No hunter had ever returned with such elusive, dangerous prey. Not even their bones had ever made it into one of the castle’s bestiaries.

Copyright © 2021 by James Czajkowski