Mistress of the Empire. Janny Wurts

her sharpness. ‘I am fine.’

      Yet she had no appetite at breakfast. Aware of Hokanu’s eyes on her, she made light conversation and ignored the burning tingle that, for a moment, coursed like a flash fire down her leg. She had pinched a nerve from sitting, she insisted to herself. The slave who had served as her taster seemed healthy as he carried out the trays, and when Jican arrived with his slates, she buried herself in trade reports, grateful, finally, that the mishap over the cramp before dawn seemed to have banished Hokanu’s distance. He checked in on her twice, as he donned his armor for his morning spar with Lujan and again as he returned for his bath.

      Three hours later, the pain began in earnest. The healers hurried to attend the Lady as she was carried, gasping, to her bed. Hokanu left a half-written letter to his father to rush to her side. He stayed, his hand twined with hers, and flawlessly kept his composure, that his fear not add to her distress. But herbal remedies and massage gave no relief. Mara’s body contorted in spasms, wringing wet from the cramps and pains. The healer with his hands on her abdomen nodded gravely to his helper.

      ‘It is time?’ Hokanu asked.

      He received a wordless affirmative as the healer continued his ministrations, and the assistant whirled to send Mara’s runner flying to summon the midwife.

      ‘But so early?’ Hokanu demanded. ‘Are you sure nothing is amiss?’

      The healer glanced up in harried exasperation. His bow was a perfunctory nod. ‘It happens, Lord Consort. Now, please, leave your Lady to her labor, and send in her maids. They will know better than you what she needs for her comfort. If you cannot stay still or find a diversion, you may ask the cooks to prepare hot water.’

      Hokanu ignored the healer’s orders. He bent over, kissed his wife’s cheek, and murmured in her ear, ‘My brave Lady, the gods must surely know how I treasure you. They will keep you safe, and make your labor light, or heaven will answer to me for their failing. My mother always said that babes of Shinzawai blood were in a great rush to be born. This one of ours seems no different.’ Mara returned his kindness with a squeeze of her hand, before his fingers were torn from hers by servants who, at the healer’s barked directive, firmly pushed the consort of the Acoma out of his own quarters.

      Hokanu watched his wife to the last instant as the screens were dragged closed. Then, abandoned to himself in the hallway, he considered calling for wine. He instantly changed his mind as he recalled Mara’s telling him once that her brutish first husband had drunk himself into a stupor upon the occasion of Ayaki’s birth. Nacoya had needed to slap the oaf sober to deliver the happy news of a son.

      Celebration was called for, certainly, but Hokanu would not cause Mara an instant of unhappy memory by arriving at her side with the smell of spirits on his breath. So he paced, unable to think of any appropriate diversion. He could not help listening avidly, to identify each noise that emerged from behind the closed screens. The rush of hurried steps told him nothing, and he worried, by the quiet, what Mara might be enduring. He cursed to himself and raged inwardly that the mysteries of childbirth held no place for him. Then his lips twitched in a half-smile as he decided that this ugly, twisting frustration of not knowing must be very near what a wife felt when her husband charged off into battle.

      In time, his vigil was disrupted as Lujan, Saric, Incomo, and Keyoke, arrived in a group from the great hall, where Mara had not appeared for morning council. One look at Hokanu’s distraught manner, and Incomo grasped what no servant had taken time to inform them of. ‘How is Lady Mara?’ he asked.

      Hokanu said, ‘They say the baby is coming.’

      Keyoke’s face went wooden to mask worry, and Lujan shook his head. ‘It is early.’

      ‘But these things happen,’ Incomo hastened to reassure. ‘Babies do not birth by any fast rule. My eldest boy was born at eight months. He grew healthy and strong, and never seemed the worse.’

      But Saric stayed too still. He did not intervene with his usual quip to lighten the mood when the others grew edgy with concern. He watched Hokanu with dark careful eyes, and said nothing at all, his thoughts brooding darkly upon the trader who had worn fine gold as if it were worthless.

      Hours went by. Neglected duty did not call Mara’s councilors from their wait. They held together, retiring in unstated support of Hokanu to the pleasant chamber set aside for the Lady’s meditation. Occasionally Keyoke or Lujan would dispatch a servant with an order for the garrison, or messages would come from Jican for Saric to answer, but as the day grew hot, and servants brought the noon meal at Hokanu’s request, none seemed eager to eat. News of Mara’s condition did not improve, and as the afternoon wore on toward evening, even Incomo ran out of platitudes.

      Fact could no longer be denied: Mara’s labor was proving very difficult. Several times low groans and cries echoed down the hallway, but more often Mara’s loved ones heard only silence. Servants came in careful quiet and lit the lamps at evening. Jican arrived, chalk dust unscrubbed from his hands, belatedly admitting that there remained no more account scrolls to balance.

      Hokanu was about to offer companionable sympathy when Mara’s scream cut the air like a blade.

      He tensed, then spun without a word and sprinted off down the corridor. The entrance to his Lady’s chamber lay half opened; had it not, he would have smashed the screen. Beyond, lit to clarity by the brilliance of lamps, two midwives held his wife as she convulsed. The fine white skin of her wrists and shoulders was reddened from hours of such torment.

      Hokanu dragged a sick breath of fear. He saw the healer bent on his knees at the foot of the sleeping pallet, his hands running red with her blood. Panic jolted him from concentration as he glanced up to ask his assistant for cold rags, and he saw who stood above him in the room.

      ‘Master, you should not be here!’

      ‘I will be no place else,’ Hokanu cracked back in the tone he would have used to order troops. ‘Explain what has gone amiss. At once!’

      ‘I …’ The healer hesitated, then abandoned attempt at speech as the Lady’s body arched up in what seemed a spasm of agony.

      Hokanu raced at once to Mara. He shouldered a straining midwife aside, caught her twisting, thrashing wrist, and bent his face over hers. ‘I am here. Be at peace. All will be well, my life as surety.’

      She wrenched out a nod between spasms. Her features were contorted in pain, the flesh ashen and running with perspiration. Hokanu held her eyes with his own, as much to reassure her as to keep from acknowledging damage he could do nothing about. The healer and midwives must be trusted to do their jobs, though his beloved Lady seemed awash in her own blood. The bedclothes pushed up around her groin were soaked in crimson. Hokanu had seen but had not yet permitted himself to admit the presence of what the sobbing servants had been too slow to cover up: the tiny blue figure that lay limp as rags near her feet. If it had ever been a child, it was now only a torn bit of flesh, kicked and bruised and lifeless.

      Anger coursed through him, that no one had dared to tell him when it happened, that his son, and Mara’s, was born dead.

      The spasm passed. Mara fell limp in his grasp, and he tenderly gathered her into his arms. She was so depleted that she lay there, eyes closed, gasping for breath and beyond hearing. Swallowing pain like a hot coal, Hokanu turned baleful eyes toward the healer. ‘My wife?’

      The servant quietly shook his head. In a whisper, he said, ‘Send your fastest runner to Sulan-Qu, my Lord. Seek a priest of Hantukama, for’ – sorrow slowed him as he ended – ‘there is nothing more I can do. Your wife is dying.’

       • Chapter Seven • Culprit

      The runner swerved.

      Only half mindful of the fact that he had narrowly missed being run down, Arakasi stopped cold in the roadway. The sun stood high overhead, too close to noon for an Acoma messenger to be moving in such haste unless his errand