The Book Eaters(64)
And afterward, when her newborn son lay in her arms and opened his swollen eyes wide, her heart cracked open all over again as if she’d learned nothing at all the first time around.
“A boy,” said the closest aunt, and murmurs of disappointment chased the announcement.
A mere three aunts lived at the villa, out of some forty adults. Devon knew none of their names and had exchanged not a word with any of them till now. They’d attended her birth anyway, because that was what women were expected to do for each other.
“A boy! Amazing!” Jarrow had mostly flitted around the edges of the room, kept out of the way by irritated aunts. “How do you feel, Dev?” He sounded twelve, and excited joy rendered his features childish.
“I … I feel…” Devon looked down at the squirming bundle cradled against her chest as the aunts fussed around her, taking away the placenta and mopping up the mess.
The mantra, she thought. Don’t care, don’t bond, think only of Salem—
It didn’t work. The rehearsed words fell away; she was attached. Again. To another tiny creature who would snuff out her spirit when she lost him to the Families, only this time things were harder because he was a boy—horror!—and might grow up to be something worse than a bride: a knight, or even a husband. Or both. A hurter of women and a hunter of princesses. And still she would adore him, hopelessly; pine for his loss, endlessly.
For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.
Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.
And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.
That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.
And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.
“Dev?” Jarrow said again, recalling her to the moment.
She burst into tears.
Spooked by the noise, her newborn opened his mouth wide and began to wail. From out of his mouth flopped a tubelike tongue, curling and uncurling weakly.
“Oh, no.” The blond aunt covered her mouth with both hands, like a distressed Victorian heroine.
The others peered over, faces immediately paling. A heated discussion broke out between the other two; something about who would have to inform “the men” and how long they should wait.
Vision blurred with tears, Devon found herself trying to tuck her crying son’s tongue back into his mouth, as if she could tuck away in him the things other people found awful and hide them out of sight. The tubular tongue curled around her finger like a warm spaghetti strand and he settled at once, soothed by suckling like any other child. She remained immobile, tears evaporating as the aunts argued behind her.
“Shit,” Jarrow said. “Matley’s going to bloody flip, when he gets back.” But he looked worried rather than disgusted, and she was grateful for that.
“Can you blame him? What a waste,” said the oldest of the women. “I’d best let the knights know. Another one for their dragon pens. Poor little monster.”
“I don’t care what Matley or anyone else thinks,” Devon said, and was met by shocked faces. “My son is beautiful.”
“This child will grow up to consume minds,” said one of the women who’d been arguing. “Our concern is not with how he looks, but what he will grow into!”
“I thought we didn’t care about humans,” Devon snapped. “Why are you bothered if he eats a few? And he hasn’t eaten anyone yet. He’s only a baby!”
“Eventually, he’ll wean off that milk and grow into his hunger,” said the first aunt, nostrils flaring. “Dragons do not care what they eat, or who, so long as they do. Your son would eat you, given half the chance.”
“Redemption—”
“Cures the need, not the want,” said the older woman. “He will crave minds all his life no matter how much Redemption you give him. Dragons are never safe, can never be trusted. Only managed.”
“He’s still beautiful,” Devon said. “He’s still mine.” The baby fussed again, no longer conned by suckling a mere finger, and she eased him to a breast. All the things she learned to do from having Salem. “What is his name? Did Matley pick one?” He didn’t latch the way Salem did, and the sensation was odd, but she could get used to it.
“It doesn’t get an Easterbrook name.”
Devon twisted her neck around to the sight of Matley, who had stalked in silently and now stood behind her. He wore white slacks and a white shirt, painfully searing as ever in that shadowed room.