Page 12 of The Lustrous Dark
Shay carefully trades the baby off to Ghita. She hangs precariously over the cart as it bumps up and down, lurching forward in bursts. Despite her valiant hacking, three new vines sprout up for every one she chops down. Sweat puddles at the small of her back, gluing her tunic to her skin.
The donkey stumbles as a vine climbs up his leg. The animal bucks free, dipping their bodies low enough to sniff the leafy grass and nearly overturning them. Shay clings to the railing until the cart rights itself.
She stretches forward and caresses Jarjeer's back. “Please, Jarjeer, you must run harder.”
At her words, the animal takes off again, building to an impossible speed that blows Shay's hair to tangles. Jarjeer flies them away from the farmhouse, away from the touched one. Away from the reach of the magic she impossibly continues to wield. Only once they safely clear the gates of their medina does the animal slow to a soothing clomp. Shay and Ghita are shell-shocked, unable to utter a single word between them.
Back at their apartment, Shay waters Jarjeer before walking him back to the stables. She wonders how anything, even the influence of a powerful drug, could warp a mother's natural instinct to the point that she'd attempt to murder her child. Would her own mother have turned on her the same way if she had lived? This thought, held to the light of the worrisome rumors, hints to something Shay's loyalty to Ghita won't allow her to probe.
Although they weren't paid for tonight's birth, Shay dishes out extra coin to the stable master in compensation for the limp the bewitched vines inflicted on poor Jarjeer. She then borrows a pail of milk from the lactating goat of a neighbor who regularly borrows tomatoes from their rooftop garden. Shay hopes her foresight will please Ghita, never imagining she'll find the midwifeseated by the hearth, sleeping robe draped open, with the baby happily latched upon her swollen breast.
Shay gasps. “Are you with milk, khalti?”
“Oh yes.” Ghita blinks at her sleepily. “It's another echo passed to midwives for the unlucky cases when a baby is rendered an orphan. Surely you remember this information from your studies of maternal mortality.”
She doesn't phrase it as a question, causing Shay to doubt her own surprise. Such an important fact would not be easily forgotten, but this is their first time caring for an endangered infant.
Shay removes her leather slippers, opting to leave off her bamboo house shoes in preference of the bare feel of clay flooring under her feet. She makes her way around the uneven and loose tiles she knows by heart, unhooks a latch in the floor, and stores the goat milk inside a small cellar space to keep it cool.
But … Ghita called the child anorphan, which isn't exactly correct.
His mother seemed very much alive when they departed. Shay almost asks if the midwife also nursed her, but thinks better of it. It doesn't really matter whether she did or didn't. Shay isn't her daughter either way. She's only an apprentice. And thankful, of course, to be provided such an opportunity.
“Can I get you anything, khalti?”
“Yes, Lalla Shay, thank you,” Ghita murmurs, gently rocking the baby, his eyes drifting contentedly closed. “Some tea would be wonderful. Add a bit of morning thistle. It will aid the flow of milk.”
Shay sets a pot to boil and grabs first the jar of morning thistle and then the moon pepper she forgot to take earlier. She sniffs the nearly empty jar, the bitter scent almost comforting in its familiarity, and for the briefest moment, she wonders what would happen if she stopped taking it.
Not how it would feel to access magic, but how it would feel if the poison holding her body in its grip were to loosen its hateful fingers. If she no longer existed on the brink of exhaustion.
If she werewell.
Dismissing such foolish thoughts, she shakes the last of the leaves into her glass, enough to make up for the dose she missed. She drafts a mental reminder to forage more tomorrow.
“How did the baby survive?” Shay asks Ghita. For reasons she can't explain, it suddenly seems important she understand the answer.
“It's rare, but not unheard of,” Ghita answers distractedly. “You're proof of that.”
While that is true, it's not the same. Her throat tightens. “But my mother …”
“Touched ones don't usually give birth to boys. Did you know that?” Ghita says more decisively, then continues without waiting for a response. “I bet that has something to do with it.”
It seems a very loose correlation. It would make more sense to Shay that the mother may yet be in danger once the drugs clear her system and she inevitably crashes. “Are you sure she'll be well? The mother?”
“Not as long as she keeps using.” With a tired sigh, Ghita carries the sleeping baby to a basket lined with sheepskin, a makeshift bassinet. “But her bleeding was under control when we left her.”
They sit by the hearth, cotton-weave blankets snugged over their laps, knees tipped close together, not quite touching. Most times, the apprentice cherishes such moments, the calm quiet between them an approximation to tenderness. But tonight her mind is neither calm nor quiet. Shay doesn't understand how Ghita can be so cavalier about all this.
Shay sips her tea, the sugar and mint unable to mask the sour tang of the moon pepper on her tongue. “What kind of Shawafa did she have?”
Every woman has one, a unique magical gift buried deep inside, almost beyond reach. There was a time, known as the Time of Women, when Shawafa was considered as natural as any other aspect of life. But now is the Time of Miracles. Or, as Shay secretly thinks of it, the Time of Men, for there are noticeably no female rulers. Of course, nothing in any history book Shay has read suggests there ever were, but sometimes she thinks, with all that power, there must have been.
Nowadays, only Snow activates women's Shawafa, and it does so temporarily. The classification of magic types isn't readily available information, but Shay has gathered some details from secondhand accounts, whispers of the ancient magic it awakened, the cycles it stole away. If the moon pepper that suppresses magic is a poison, then the Snow that awakens it is a plague.
“Hadiqmin.” Ghita peers at the steam rising from her glass as if she might scry the future in its unfurling tendrils.
“The ability to control plants?”
