The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [60]
The first few days and nights, the boy had cried constantly.
This had only recently stopped.
When her milk finally started to flow, it trickled reluctantly, from cracked and bleeding nipples.
Now the boy would not react at all.
These were the bad signs.
Tina did not want to dwell on them, not here, not in the gloom of Bedenham House. . . .
When Cadman stood in the doorway, shoving the muslin aside, he held his hat in both hands. “Ready?”
She stood.
Because her baby boy was so tiny, so light, the walk through the streets of Nowy Solum, toward the centrum, was not as arduous as it might have been. Not physically, at least. They passed people going about their daily struggles, crowds shopping at Kirk Gate, a huge gathering in Grey Close Square (though she could not hear the bare-chested, shouting orator), passed wealthy families from North End, in fancy clothes, walking the promenade by the river. Did children of the rich, Tina wondered, ever get tested? Maybe melancholy was a product of being poor, the essence of a tired and wanting womb.
Palatinate officers pounded on a Torchmere Street door. She turned away, hiding her bundle, cheeks gone hot.
Coming into the centrum, where Jesthe rose above the sagging rooftops and vanished into clouds, Tina saw a teenaged kholic, a young boy with a beautiful face, leaking black fluid from his nose, obviously crazed or high or both. He was heading straight at her. She stopped, shocked by an urgency that struck her like a slap. The boy would tell her something, maybe advice concerning the trial he had obviously failed, or foresight about her own son. This kholic was himself the son of a woman who had made this same walk, years ago, and who had been filled with the same dread that filled her now.
He looked directly at her.
There was a moment of panic. Never before had Tina seen the eyes of a kholic, not directly, not for this long. Blazing from the black mask, the gaze was intense. She felt the torment and anger, and she needed more than anything to hear what the kholic had to say, to learn his story, as if this might be the only way to save her own child from the palatinate’s mark.
At the last second, the teen veered into the crowd.
During the rush she felt, she considered chasing the boy, but that would be madness; her son had an appointment to keep, to be at Bedenham House before the afternoon expired. . . .
Across the floor from where she sat, in his cot awaiting judgment, her child now made a mewling sound. Could she grab him, leave here, leave the city?
Escape to where?
Cadman, at her back, said, “Get a move on, Tina. Shake a leg. I have to be back at the mill in an hour.”
The encounter with the kholic had thrown what little resolve Tina had managed to muster. Her abdomen still ached from the labour and anxiety. She was bringing her lovely boy on what could very well be a one-way trip. She stopped again. She could not get the image of the kholic’s face out of her head.
Cobali suddenly spiralled around her feet, racing in circles, looking up at her, exposing their little teeth. The creatures were crude and foul and Cadman stepped forward, trying to kick at the pests, but they were too fast for his clumsy feet.
Used for many purposes—physicker licenses, applications of all sorts, signings, official leechings—Bedenham House was long and low at the foot of Jesthe, just opposite the Garden. The roof was red and sagging. Through wide openings each end, all citizens passed. Bedenham House looked unassuming, yet sitting in it now, waiting, the place filled Tina with foreboding.
Above the south doorway, the crest of Jesthe—a fish gutted on a platter—indicated the palatinate’s faith. As an adult, Tina had twice previously been inside this building, once to get her marriage document approved and another time to purchase a permit to sell two chickens at Soaper’s and Candles—birds she inherited from an uncle who had recently died. Money from the sale of the chickens had gone to a back-alley physicker,