Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(65)

I slammed the vase full-force against the back of his skull. Crystalline shards fell with Dedrick to the ground. My hand hurt; the force of the blow had reopened some of my cuts. Kate was holding her hand against her neck, eyes terrified.

Dedrick was on all fours, trying to crawl over to us. His eyes were blazing with a malevolent fire. He grabbed at my skirt, and I brought my foot down hard on his left arm, the one I’d cut the last time I’d faced him. He cried out, but I’d already moved to his other side, laying him out flat with a kick to the back he’d bruised on the terrace stones.

“Come on!” I shouted, pulling Kate to the door and slamming it tight behind us.

Kate was shaking, but she brought a candelabra to me and I drove the metal shafts into the handle to jam it.

Behind the door, Dedrick was laughing softly. Almost politely. “You don’t know what’s coming,” he said. “You don’t know what will happen when I get out of here.”

Kate shrank away, and I slammed my hands against the wood. “You aren’t getting out of here, you dog. The next time you leave this room it will be in chains.”

The words surged from me, and with them, magic. What had Simon said back in Renalt, hidden away in the sanctuary? Over time, and with practice, the more instinctual and accessible magic becomes.

When I stepped back, my bloody handprint remained on the door like a promise.





?25




“The baby,” Kate said. “I think she’s coming now.” Tears were streaming down her face.

“We’re almost home,” I said. “Can you make it?”

She took a long, deep breath. “I don’t know. I think so.”

“Do you have a midwife I can fetch?”

“No,” she said, her face contorting with pain as a contraction took hold of her. “Nathaniel’s sister is a midwife, but she lives days away. She was going to come next week.” She opened her eyes. “There’s just you.”

It can’t be just me, I thought but didn’t say aloud. I’d helped Onal a few times when I was younger, but these were not normal circumstances. I also didn’t want to mention the wound on her neck. It was small, but it still hadn’t stopped bleeding.

I got her up the walk and helped settle her onto the bed. “I sent him away,” she said between contractions. “Nathaniel tried to warn me against speaking to Dedrick, and I sent him away.”

“This isn’t your fault,” I reassured her. “I’ll go to town, see if I can find a midwife or a healer.” Kate kept her sewing money in a can on the kitchen shelf, and I emptied it into my pockets.

“Please don’t go,” Kate begged, sweat standing out on her forehead. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I won’t be long,” I promised. “Everything will be fine. I swear.”



* * *



In the evening light, the windows of Sahlma’s apothecary were empty and forbidding, but I rapped on the door anyway. Three, four, five times. I paused, then three times more. “Open the door!” I shouted. “Please!” I didn’t want to be here again, but I’d left Kate in too much of a hurry, neglecting to ask her for a name or address of someone qualified who could help. Sahlma was the only one I knew of.

It was a sour face that greeted me when the door finally came ajar, but it grew sourer still when I took down my hood and she saw that it was me. “Stupid wench,” she said angrily. “You dare come back here and disturb my peace again?”

“I need your help!”

“Go away.” She tried to shut the door in my face, but I slammed my hands against it before it could meet the frame.

“Don’t!” I said frantically, pushing past her. “Hear me out! Please! I can pay.” I took out Kate’s coins and slammed them onto the counter. “I have a friend. She’s about to have a baby, but it’s too early and”—?I swallowed hard against the lump that was burning in my throat like a coal—?“she was hurt by a wicked man and now she’s bleeding and bleeding and it won’t stop. She’s going to have this baby, and soon, and she or her baby could die unless you help me.” I knew the truth of it as I said it; even with help, Kate’s chances were grim.

Nihil nunc salvet te.

“Be gone,” Sahlma said with a cough. “And take your coins and your troubles with you.”

I said through gritted teeth, “Please. What about the baby? A mother should never have to be without her child.”

It was what Zan’s mother had said to Sahlma, right before she jumped.

She reeled back as if she recognized the words, but only for a second. “Get out.”

A small, gray face peeked out at me from behind her skirts. “Who is the little boy in the cap?” I asked, gently assessing the similarities between his young, spectral face and her weathered, aged one. “He’s your son, isn’t he?”

The little boy in the cap watched me, waiting.

Sahlma’s hand lashed my face. I could feel the sting of each one of her fingers on my lips, but I kept going. “You are the way you are because of him, aren’t you? Because you lost him.”

Her hand slowly lowered. “How do you . . . ?”

“I can see him. He’s right here with us, right now as we speak.”