Though the child is dying, Atiana is powerless to prevent it.
The woman picks up the child and holds her against her bared breast, but the child will have nothing to do with it. The mother holds the babe tight and rocks her, shushes at her ear, but it helps not at all.
Mother, she calls. Mother, please hear me.
There is no response. She tries to reach Saphia, but she is asleep and will remain so for hours, perhaps even a day or more.
Currents swirl around the darkening babe. She is tainted blue still, and a tinge of green remains, but she is fading to midnight, the color of the stout brick walls or the thick pine beams running along the ceiling.
Pressure builds around Atiana. She feels tight, crowded. She is new to the currents of the dark. She knows this. But she knows that this should not be. The aether, though it stands between the worlds, is not bounded in such ways. Adhiya’s presence can be seen, but it cannot be felt. The same is true of Erahm. What then, could be pressing in on her so?
The pressure becomes worse. She feels constricted, choked, feels as though the breath is being pressed from her slowly but surely.
And then, as the light from the babe fades altogether, the feeling is gone.
She is unable to focus on these feelings, for she is too caught up with the emotions that are clear on the face of the mother.
Though she may not realize it yet, she holds a dead child. It is all Atiana can do not to call out. She might try to touch the woman, to give her some indication of what has happened, but before she can the woman realizes. She shakes the babe-not violently, but enough to wake a sleeping child. She begins to cry, and she shakes her daughter harder. She holds her up, listening for signs of life.
Then she leans her head back and unleashes her pain to the fates. She hugs the babe to her chest, tenderly yet fiercely, her whole body wracking from the realization.
Atiana feels ashamed that she cannot share in the woman’s grief. She watches for a long time, wishing she could have helped in some small way, but in the end she can no longer stomach the limitations of the aether, and she pulls away.
When Atiana woke, it was not like waking after a full night’s sleep, nor was it like stirring from a lazy daydream-it was more like those dreams she had had as a child where she was standing at the edge of the tall black cliffs near Vostroma’s palotza, staring down at the churning sea, her stomach bubbling with a mixture of excitement and fear. She was convinced in those dreams she could fly, though it would still take her long minutes to summon the courage to leap into the air like the wide-winged gulls flying far below her. Her stomach would lift as she plummeted, and she would wake with a gut-churning jolt to find herself sitting stock upright, breathing deeply in the cold air of the bedroom she shared with her sisters.
So it was now as she sat upright in the drowning chamber, frigid water splashing around her. She fully expected to find herself in the darkness of Galostina, but of course she did not. She was somewhere else entirely.
The light of the nearby fire was low, yet she was forced to clench her eyes in order to bear it. It took Atiana long moments-her eyes tearing and blinking involuntarily-until she realized Victania was sitting on a chair close to the fireplace. She was watching Atiana, silent, her face devoid of emotion.
And then the past came rushing back. The Matra’s summons. Her request. Atiana’s eventual capitulation.
Already her time in the dark was fading, a dream that only moment ago had been reality. As she had been taught, she began reliving the moments backwards, so that one link in the chain would reveal the next, and the next. It worked to a degree, but she was unable to remember everything. There was something crucial missing. Something terribly disturbing.
Her eyes began to acclimate.
“Do you require help?” Victania asked, her voice echoing against the harsh stone walls.
It was insulting, what Victania had just done. She knew as well as any that those who had just surfaced from the dark required help. Her question was an attempt to make Atiana feel small.
Atiana shook her head while struggling to gain her feet. The water dripped noisily from her arms and hair and breasts as she steadied herself on the basin’s stone walls. Her legs could hardly support her weight and her arms were little better. She stepped out onto the granite floor, and her knee buckled. She fell to the floor, her head crashing hard against the stone.
Victania was at her side in a moment, helping her to her feet. As Atiana steadied herself, Victania held out a handtowel, a brief look of regret on her face. When Atiana did not accept it, she motioned with it toward Atiana’s head. “You’re bleeding.”
Atiana took it, wincing as she pressed it against the lump that was already forming. Victania, using a large white cloth, scrubbed the goat’s fat economically from Atiana’s naked frame. Then she helped Atiana into a thick woolen robe.
It was warm-almost too warm after the bottomless cold of the water. Atiana’s skin began to prickle, but she let it, for it was a welcome tether to reality.
Victania motioned to the Matra’s padded chair, then made her way to the hearth, where a kettle hung from an iron hook. Using a thick woolen mitt, she poured steaming tea into the lone cup that waited on a wooden table. She raised one eyebrow when she realized Atiana hadn’t moved to take the offered seat. “She gave her permission if that’s what you’re worried about.”
It felt presumptuous to even consider taking Saphia’s chair, but she didn’t have it in her to do battle in her weakened state, so she sat and accepted the tea that Victania offered her.
Victania resumed her seat. She sat rigidly upright, as if it pained her to lean back in the chair. Atiana wondered if there were any position that would offer her comfort. She looked haunted from the wasting. Saphia might seem frail, but there was a silent strength to her, while Victania looked as if she were being eaten from the inside, as if her inner structure was now hollow and the next thing to go would be her thin and crumbling shell. One small bout with a cold, Atiana thought, and she would not be long for this world. She would have felt sorry if Victania didn’t lord herself over Atiana at every opportunity.
“You were gone quite a long time,” Victania said.
Atiana sipped from the sweet tea. The warmth of the liquid trailed down into her gut. It was too much, too soon, and her stomach rebelled. “How long?” She asked, setting the cup down.
“You’ve been under for well over a day.”
Atiana shook her head. It didn’t seem possible. “More than a day?”
“ Da. A passable length of time.” Was there a bit of envy in her voice? “What did you find?”
Atiana opened her mouth to speak, but she found that she could remember nothing. Her memories had already been muddled the moment she woke, but the shock of finding Victania here, the pressure of being questioned after her awakening, had caused her to forget.
“I don’t remember,” she admitted.
Victania took her in, from her bare feet to her head, a prim look of disgust on her face. “Think.”
She tried. She recalled the last few moments in the aether, as well as a strong feeling of discomfort, of grief, but the more she tried to pin the memories down, the more focused she became on the simple act of wakening.
“My mother, the Matra, asked you here to take the dark. Did they teach you so little-”
“Stop,” Atiana said. That one word, mother, had brought about the glimmer of memories.
“-the first thing you do-”
“Silence!”
Atiana glanced around the room, struggling to hold on to the faint memory of a mother holding her child. “There was a babe”-her words were practically a whisper-“in Volgorod.”
Victania watched carefully, but held her tongue.
Atiana shivered. Her eyes watered. She had not known the woman, but the aether made things seem more personal and emotional than they would have been under the light of the sun. She had felt, not that she was the woman, but that she had as much at stake in that child as the mother did. It was personal, and stepping out from under the aether’s spell had done nothing to lessen the feelings.
She told Victania the story, slowly, for the words came in fits and starts, and she feared if she spoke too quickly, it would all come out in one tearful gout. When she was done, she was finally able to meet Victania’s eyes. There was no shock in Victania’s expression, no sense that anything Atiana had said was new information.
“You know of this…” Atiana said softly.
“It has been happening for months.”
“To babes?”
“ Nyet. To the old, to the sick. It was only a matter of time before the young were affected too. Children will be next. And then…”
Victania didn’t have to finish. They both knew what was at stake. The blight had started by affecting the health of their crops, their game. Why wouldn’t it move on to the very people that inhabited the islands?
“Does my mother know this?”
“Of course.”
“Then why hasn’t she told me?”
“Because this news cannot be spread. The people look to us for protection.
There are already weekly disturbances in Volgorod, and scattered incidents in Tuyal and Erotsk and Izhny. How long do you think it would be before there are riots in the streets? How long before they march on Radiskoye to demand that we shelter them?”
Not long at all, Atiana thought, but it still hurt to be marked as an untrustworthy by her own mother. Then again, she had never shown the least bit of interest in taking the dark, nor in matters of politics-why would Mother trust her with the information?
Why would Saphia?
It was a clear sign of just how desperate things had become when the Matra of Khalakovo had been forced into depending on Atiana for the protection of her Duchy.
“There must be something we can do,” Atiana said.
Victania shook her head. “There is nothing, nothing save coming here to lend us your strength, to continue to give the Matra her needed rest during these troubled times.”