The midwife backs away. The child’s mother slips a finger into his mouth: the gap extends deep into his palate. As though his maker grew impatient and quit work a moment too soon. The sweat on her body turns cold; dread eclipses joy. Pregnant four times and she has not yet lost a baby, even believed herself, perhaps, blessed in that way. And now this?
The infant shrieks; an icy rain batters the roof. She tries bracing him upright with her thighs while squeezing a breast with both hands, but she can’t get his lips to form a seal. His mouth gulps; his throat trembles; he loses far more milk than he gets.
Amani, the eldest daughter, left hours ago to summon the men down from the trees; they’ll be hurrying the team home by now. The two younger daughters glance from their mother to the newborn and back again as though trying to understand if such a face is permissible. The midwife sends one to the river for water and the other to bury the afterbirth and it’s fully dark and the child is still howling when they hear the dogs, then the bells of Leaf and Needle, their oxen, as they stop outside the byre.
Grandfather and Amani come through the door aglitter in ice, their eyes wild. “He fell, the horse—” Amani says, but when she sees the baby’s face, she stops. From behind her Grandfather says, “Your husband went ahead, but the horse must have slipped in the dark, and the river, and—”
Terror fills the cottage. The newborn wails; the midwife edges toward the door, a dark and primeval fear warping her expression.
The farrier’s wife warned them that revenants had been making mischief on the mountain all winter, slipping through locked doors, sickening pregnant women and suffocating infants. The farrier’s wife said they should leave a goat tied to a tree as an offering, and pour a pot of honey in a creek for good measure, but her husband said they could not spare the goat, and she did not want to give up the honey.
Pride.
Every time she shifts, a little stroke of lightning discharges in her abdomen. With every passing heartbeat, she can sense the midwife hurrying the story from house to house. A demon born. His father dead.
Grandfather takes the crying child and unwraps him on the floor and places a knuckle between his lips and the boy falls quiet. With his other hand he nudges apart the cleft in the infant’s upper lip.
“Years ago, on the far side of the mountain, there was a man who had a split under his nose like this. A good horseman, once you forgot how ugly he was.”
He hands him back and brings the goat and cow in from the weather, then goes back into the night to unyoke the oxen, and the eyes of the animals reflect the glow of the hearth, and the daughters crowd their mother.
“Is it a jinn?”
“A fiend?”
“How will it breathe?”
“How will it eat?”
“Will Grandfather put it on the mountain to die?”
The child blinks up at them with dark, memorizing eyes.
* * *
The sleet turns to snow and she sends a prayer through the roof that if her son has some role to play in this world could he please be spared. But in the last hours before dawn she wakes to find Grandfather standing over her. Shrouded in his oxhide cape with snow on his shoulders he looks like a phantom from a woodcutter’s song, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her husband on thrones in a garden of bliss, where milk pours from stones and honey runs in streams and winter never comes, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.
* * *
Cocks crow, wheel rims crunch snow, the cottage brightens, and horror strikes her anew. Her husband drowned, the horse with him. The girls wash and pray and milk Beauty the cow and bring fodder to Leaf and Needle and cut pine twigs for the goat to chew and morning turns to afternoon but still she cannot summon the energy to rise. Frost in the blood, frost in the mind. Her son crosses the river of death now. Or now. Or now.
Before dusk, the dogs growl. She rises and limps to the doorway. A gust of wind, high on the mountain, lifts a cloud of glitter from the trees. The pressure in her breasts nears intolerable.
For a long moment nothing else happens. Then Grandfather comes down the river road on the mare with something bundled across the saddle. The dogs explode; Grandfather dismounts; her arms reach to take what he carries even as her mind says she should not.
The child is alive. His lips are gray and his cheeks are ashen but not even his tiny fingers are blackened with frost.
“I took him to the high grove.” Grandfather heaps wood onto the fire, blows the embers into flames; his hands tremble. “I set him down.”