“Well, over the top,” I muttered under my breath, and slid my hand inside.
There was very little room to maneuver, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was feeling. I closed my eyes to concentrate better, though, and groped cautiously. There were smooth expanses, and bumpy bits. The smooth parts would be body and the bumps legs or head. It was legs I wanted—forelegs, to be specific. Gradually I became accustomed to the feel of things, and the necessity for keeping quite still when a contraction came on; the amazingly powerful muscles of the uterus clamped down on my hand and arm like a vise, grinding my own bones very painfully until the constriction eased, and I could resume my groping.
At last, my fumbling fingers encountered something I was sure of.
“I’ve got my fingers in its nose!” I cried triumphantly. “I’ve found the head!”
“Good lass, good! Dinna let go!” Alec crouched anxiously alongside, patting the mare reassuringly as another contraction set in. I gritted my teeth and leaned my forehead against the shining rump as my wrist was crushed by the force. It eased, though, and I kept my grip. Feeling cautiously upward, I found the curve of eyesocket and brow, and the small ridge of the folded ear. Waiting through one more contraction, I followed the curve of the neck down to the shoulder.
“It’s got its head turned back on its shoulder,” I reported. “The head’s pointing the right way, at least.”
“Good.” Jamie, at the horse’s head, ran his hand soothingly down the sweating chestnut neck. “Likely the legs will be folded under the chest. See can you get a hand on one knee.”
So it went on, feeling, fumbling, up to my shoulder in the warm darkness of the horse, feeling the awful force of the birth pangs and their grateful easing, struggling blindly to reach my goal. I felt rather as though I were giving birth myself, and bloody hard work it was, too.
At last I had my hand on a hoof; I could feel the rounded surface, and the sharp edge of the yet-unused curve. Following the anxious, often contradictory instructions of my guides as best I could, I alternately pulled and pushed, easing the unwieldy mass of the foal around, bringing one foot forward, pushing another back, sweating and groaning along with the mare.
And then suddenly everything worked. A contraction eased, and all at once, everything slid smoothly into place. I waited, not moving, for the next contraction. It came, and a small wet nose popped suddenly out, pushing my hand out with it. The tiny nostrils flared briefly, as though interested in this new sensation, then the nose vanished.
“Next one will do it!” Alec was almost dancing in ecstasy, his arthritic form capering up and down in the hay. “Come on, Losgann. Come on, my sweet wee froggie!”
As though in answer, there was a convulsive grunt from the mare. Her hindquarters flexed sharply and the foal slid smoothly onto the clean hay in a slither of knobbly legs and big ears.
I sat back on the hay, grinning idiotically. I was covered with soap and slime and blood, exhausted and aching, and smelt strongly of the less pleasant aspects of horse. I was euphoric.
I sat watching as Willy and the one-handed Roderick tended the new arrival, wiping him down with wisps of straw. And cheered with the rest when Losgann turned and licked him, butting him gently and nosing him to stand at last on his huge, wobbly feet.
“A damn good job, lassie! Damn good!” Alec was exuberant, pumping my unslimed hand in congratulation. Suddenly realizing that I was swaying on my perch, and much less than presentable, he turned and barked at one of the lads to bring some water. Then he circled behind me and set his horny old hands on my shoulders. With an amazingly deft and gentle touch, he pressed and stroked, easing the strain in my shoulders, relaxing the knots in my neck.
“There, lassie,” he said at last. “Hard work, no?” He smiled down at me, then beamed adoringly at the new colt.
“Bonny laddie,” he crooned. “Who’s a sweet lad, then?”
Jamie helped me to clean up and change. My fingers were too stiff to manage the buttons of my bodice, and I knew my entire arm would be blue with bruising by morning, but I felt thoroughly peaceful and contented.
* * *
The rain seemed to have lasted forever, so that when a day finally dawned bright and fair, I squinted in the daylight like a newly emerged mole.
“Your skin is so fine I can see the blood moving beneath it,” Jamie said, tracing the path of a sunbeam across my bare stomach. “I could follow the veins from your hand to your heart.” He drew his finger gently up my wrist to the bend of the elbow, up the inner side of my upper arm, and across the slope below my collarbone.
“That’s the subclavian vein,” I remarked, looking down my nose at the path of his tracking finger.
“Is it? Oh, aye, because it’s below your clavicle. Tell me some more.” The finger moved slowly downward. “I like to hear the Latin names for things; I never dreamed it would be so pleasant to make love to a physician.”
“That,” I said primly, “is an areola, and you know it, because I told you last week.”
“So ye did,” he murmured. “And there’s another one, fancy that.” The bright head dipped to let his tongue replace the finger, then traveled lower.
“Umbilicus,” I said with a short gasp.
“Um,” he said, muffled lips stretching in a smile against my transparent skin. “And what’s this, then?”
“You tell me,” I said, clutching his head. But he was incapable of speech.
Later I lounged in my surgery chair, basking dreamily in memories of awaking in a bed of sunbeams, sheets tumbled in blinding shoals of white like the sands of a beach. One hand rested on my breast, and I toyed idly with the nipple, enjoying the feel of it rising against my palm beneath the thin calico of my bodice.
“Enjoying yourself?”
The sarcastic voice from the door brought me upright so quickly that I bumped my head on a shelf.
“Oh,” I said, rather grumpily. “Geilie. Who else? What are you doing here?”
She glided into the surgery, moving as though on wheels. I knew she had feet; I’d seen them. What I couldn’t figure out was where she put them when she walked.
“I came to bring Mrs. Fitz some saffron from Spain; she was wanting it against the Duke’s coming.”
“More spices?” I said, beginning to recover my good humor. “If the man eats half the things she’s fixing for him, they’ll need to roll him home.”
“They could do that now. He’s a wee round ball of a fellow, I’ve heard.” Dismissing the Duke and his physique, she asked whether I’d like to join her for an expedition to the nearby foothills.
“I’m needing a bit of moss,” she explained. She waved her long, boneless hands gracefully to and fro. “Makes a wonderful lotion for the hands, boiled in milk with a bit of sheep’s wool.”
I cast a look up at my slit window, where the dust motes were going mad in the golden light. A faint scent of ripe fruit and fresh-cut hay floated on the breeze.
“Why not?”
Waiting as I gathered my baskets and bottles together, Geilie strolled about my surgery, picking things up and putting them down at random. She stopped at a small table and picked up the object that lay there, frowning.
“What’s this?”
I stopped what I was doing, and came to stand beside her. She was holding a small bundle of dried plants, tied with three twisted threads; black, white, and red.
“Jamie says it’s an ill-wish.”
“He’s right. Where did ye come to get it?”
I told her about the finding of the small bundle in my bed.
“I went and found it under the window next day, where Jamie threw it. I meant to bring it round to your house and ask if you knew anything about it, but I forgot.”
She stood tapping a fingernail thoughtfully against her front teeth, shaking her head.
“No, I canna say that I do. But there might be a way of finding out who left it for ye.”
“Really?”
“Aye. Come to my house in the morning tomorrow, and I’ll tell ye then.”
Refusing to say more, she whirled about in a swirl of green cloak, leaving me to follow as I would.
She led me well up into the foothills, galloping when there was road enough to do so, walking when there wasn’t. An hour’s ride from the village, she stopped near a small brook, overhung by willows.
We forded the brook and wandered up into the foothills, gathering such late summer plants as still lingered, together with the ripening berries of early autumn and the thick yellow shelf fungus that sprouted from the trunks of trees in the small shady glens.
Geilie’s figure disappeared into the bracken above me, as I paused to scrape a bit of aspen bark into my basket. The globules of dried sap on the papery bark looked like frozen drops of blood, the deep crimson refulgent with trapped sunlight.
A sound startled me out of my reverie, and I looked up the hill, in the direction it seemed to come from.
I heard the sound again; a high-pitched, mewling cry. It seemed to come from above, from a rocky notch near the crest of the hill. I set my basket down and began to climb.
“Geilie!” I shouted. “Come up here! Someone’s left a baby!”
The sound of scrabbling and muttered imprecations preceded her up the hill, as she fought her way through the entangling bushes on the slope. Her fair face was flushed and cross and she had twigs in her hair.
“What in God’s name—” she began, and then darted forward. “Christ’s blood! Put it down!” She hastily snatched the baby from my arms, then laid it back where I had found it, in a small depression in the rock. The smooth, bowlshaped hollow was less than a yard across. At one side of the hollow was a shallow wooden bowl, half-full of fresh milk, and at the baby’s feet was a small bouquet of wildflowers, tied with a bit of red twine.
“But it’s sick!” I protested, stooping toward the child again. “Who would leave a sick child up here by itself?”
The baby was plainly very ill; the small pinched face was greenish, with dark hollows under the eyes, and the little fists waved weakly under the blanket. The child had hung slack in my arms when I picked it up; I wondered that it had had the strength to cry.
“Its parents,” Geilie said briefly, restraining me with a hand on my arm. “Leave it. Let’s get out of here.”
“Its parents?” I said indignantly. “But—”
“It’s a changeling,” she said impatiently. “Leave it and come. Now!”
Dragging me with her, she dodged back into the undergrowth. Protesting, I followed her down the slope until we arrived, breathless and red faced, at the bottom, where I forced her to stop.
“What is this?” I demanded. “We can’t just abandon a sick child, out in the open like that. And what do you mean, it’s a changeling?”
“A changeling,” she said impatiently. “Surely you know what a changeling is? When the fairies steal a human child away, they leave one of their own in its place. You know it’s a changeling because it cries and fusses all the time and doesn’t thrive or grow.”
“Of course I know what it is,” I said. “But you don’t believe that nonsense, do you?”
She shot me a sudden strange look, full of wary suspicion. Then the lines of her face relaxed into their normal expression of half-amused cynicism.
“No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But the folk here do.” She glanced nervously up the slope, but no further sound came from the rocky notch. “The family will be somewhere near about. Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, I allowed her to tow me away in the direction of the village.
“Why did they put it up there?” I asked, sitting on a rock to remove my stockings before wading across a small stream. “Do they hope the Wee Folk will come and cure it?” I was still bothered about the child; it seemed desperately ill. I didn’t know what was wrong with it, but perhaps I could help.
Maybe I could leave Geilie in the village, then come back for the child. It would have to be soon, though; I glanced up at the eastern sky, where soft grey rain clouds were swiftly darkening into purple dusk. A pink glow still showed to the west, but there could be no more than half an hour’s light left.
Geilie looped the twisted withy handle of her basket over her neck, picked up her skirt and stepped into the stream, shivering at the cold water.
“No,” she said. “Or rather, yes. That’s one of the fairies’ hills, and it’s dangerous to sleep there. If ye leave a changeling out overnight in such a place, the Folk will come and take it back, and leave the human child they’ve stolen in its place.”
“But they won’t, because it isn’t a changeling,” I said, sucking in my breath at the touch of the melted snow water. “It’s only a sick child. It might very well not survive a night in the open!”
“It won’t,” she said briefly. “It will be dead by morning. And I hope to God no one saw us near it.”
I stopped abruptly in the midst of putting on my shoes.
“Dead! Geilie, I’m going back for it. I can’t leave it there.” I turned and started back across the stream.
She caught me from behind and pushed me flat on my face into the shallow water. Floundering and gasping, I managed to rise to my knees, sloshing water in all directions. Geilie stood calf-deep in the stream, skirts soaked, glaring down at me.
“You bloody pig-headed English ass!” she shouted at me. “There’s nothing ye can do! Do ye hear me? Nothing! That child’s as good as dead! I’ll not stand here and let ye risk your own life and mine for some crack-brained notion of yours!” Snorting and grumbling under her breath, she reached down and got me under the arms with both hands, lugging me to my feet.
“Claire,” she said urgently, shaking me by the arms. “Listen to me. If ye go near that child and it dies—and it will, believe me, I’ve seen them like that—then the family will blame you for it. Do ye no see the danger of it? Don’t ye know what they say about you in the village?”
I stood shivering in the cold breeze of sunset, torn between her obvious panic for my safety, and the thought of a helpless child, slowly dying alone in the dark, with wildflowers at its feet.
“No,” I said, shaking the wet hair out of my face. “Geilie, no, I can’t. I’ll be careful, I promise, but I have to go.” I pulled myself out of her grasp and turned toward the far bank, stumbling and splashing in the uncertain shadows of the streambed.
There was a muffled cry of exasperation from behind me, then a frenzied sploshing in the opposite direction. Well, at least she wouldn’t hamper me further.
It was growing dark fast, and I pushed through the bushes and weeds as quickly as I could. I wasn’t sure that I could find the right hill if it grew dark before I reached it; there were several nearby, all about the same height. And fairies or not, the thought of wandering about alone out here in the dark was not one I cared for. The question of how I was going to make it back to the Castle with a sick baby was something I would deal with when the time came.
I found the hill, finally, by spotting the stand of young larches I remembered at the base. It was nearly full dark by this time, a moonless night, and I stumbled and fell frequently. The larches stood huddled together, talking quietly in the evening breeze with clicks and creaks and rustling sighs.
