Chapter 226: Premature Childbirth

Chapter 226: Chapter 226: Premature Childbirth

Martha was halfway down the porch steps when the second wave of mana passed through the house.

It was gentler than the first, a rolling after-pulse like the tide drawing back, but it found her all the same. She stopped with one hand on the railing and her lantern swinging from the other. Her face went very still.

"Arthur," she said, in a voice so calm that it frightened him more than a scream would have.

He was at her side before the lantern finished swinging. Water pooled on the boards beneath her nightgown, dark in the blue light, and she looked down at it, then up at her husband, with an expression Sophia would remember for the rest of her life: not panic, but a kind of stunned, rueful disbelief.

"It’s three weeks early," Martha said. "The baby isn’t supposed to come for three weeks."

"The baby," Arthur said, "has apparently read a different calendar."

Her laugh broke in the middle and turned into a sharp, indrawn breath. Her fingers whitened on the railing. In the dark behind them, Sophia stood frozen on the threshold with her device still screaming warnings in her pocket, and understood, for the first time, that the pulse had not spared anyone.

Rowan arrived at Sunny Vale a little before the sky began to gray.

He had left the palace at a run, with the Emperor’s blessing and a palace courier’s fastest mount, driving it along the south road under the burning pillar of the Tower with Arthur’s frantic message still glowing on his device. He had tried not to read it twice. He had read it four times. Your mother. The baby. Come home.

The courtyard was chaos. Lanterns bobbed in the dark as farmhands ran between the fields and the barns. The wheat lashed and glittered, the greenhouse glass was cracked and frosted, and the entire valley hummed with a wild, unfamiliar note that made his teeth ache. He took all of it in with a single glance and let it go.

His mother was sitting on the porch steps, wrapped in a quilt, with Arthur kneeling beside her. She looked up as Rowan reached the gate, and her whole face changed.

"There you are," she said. Her voice was thin with strain, but the old brisk warmth was still in it. "Don’t look at me like that. I’m perfectly well."

"You are not perfectly well," Arthur said, without turning his head.

Rowan was already on his knees in front of her. Up close he could see the sweat at her temples and the white line around her mouth, and he felt the pulse of her pain against his senses like a drum. It was not only the labor. The mana surge had flooded her body and the small, new life inside it, and both were struggling to hold the weight of it.

"Mother," he said quietly. "May I?"

She searched his face. Then she nodded and reached for his hands.

He drew a slow breath and let the world narrow.

He had practiced this a thousand times in the fields at Sunny Vale, on seedlings and sick vines and once, memorably, on a half-dead cat. The technique had no complicated name, and no complicated form. He simply let himself become still, in the way the earth is still, and called up the Breath of Eden.

Warmth gathered in his palms, soft and green and impossibly gentle. It carried the scent of turned soil and spring rain and sun on young leaves. A faint golden luster shimmered along his fingers as he laid them against her shoulders, her back, and the curve of her belly, and eased his pure mana into her body, thread by thread, slow as a tide rising.

He did not force it. He had learned long ago that force was the surest way to ruin a delicate thing. Instead, he coaxed. He let the surging, ungovernable mana in her body find the quieter current of his own and settle into it, the way a startled river finds its bed again. He felt her channels loosen under his touch. He felt the wild storm in her blood slow, and then slow further.

Beneath his palm, something kicked, small and indignant.

Martha exhaled, long and shaky. The white line around her mouth eased. The grip of her fingers loosened, and the tight, ragged edge went out of her breathing.

"Oh," she murmured. "Oh, that’s... that’s much better."

"Is it?" Arthur said hoarsely. He had not taken his eyes off her face.

"The pain’s almost gone." She laughed softly, wondering. "Rowan, what in the world did you do?"

"Only listened," he said. His voice was steady, though his heart was not. "The baby’s all right. It’s just early, and everything’s moving faster than it should. But you’re both safe." He lifted his gaze to his father. "She needs a physician, though. Now. I can steady her, but I can’t deliver a child."

"No," Arthur agreed. He was already on his feet. "That’s what the hospital’s for."

Arthur had the car out of the barn in under a minute.

It was an old, square, mud-splattered thing, kept running more by stubbornness than engineering, and it started on the first try, which Arthur later swore was a miracle of the pulse. Rowan helped his mother into the back seat with a pillow behind her shoulders and the quilt tucked around her knees. He climbed in beside her and took her hand, letting a thin, steady thread of mana flow from his palm into hers.

Through the window, he could see Sophia standing in the courtyard with lantern light on her face.

She looked frightened. She looked very young. But she was standing straight, and she was already turning to the cluster of farmhands who had gathered at the edge of the yard, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

"Sophia," Rowan called through the half-open window.

She came to the car at once. Up close, he could see the thin lines of pale light beneath her skin, and the hand she braced on the door was trembling. She was holding herself together by an act of will.

"The fields are yours until I’m back," he said. "Maren knows the ground and the schedule. But you can read what the crops are feeling better than anyone here right now. Trust that."

"Sir, I’m only an intern..."

"You’re the one the wheat curled around." His voice gentled. "Go slowly. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Find which fields are in the most danger, and start there. If the mana in a plant is rising too fast, don’t fight it. Guide it. If anything flares out of control, pull the farmhands back and wait for me."

She swallowed. Then, very slowly, she nodded.

"I won’t let them down."

"I know you won’t."

Arthur put the car in gear. As it rolled out of the courtyard, Martha leaned toward the window and called back, with a wobbling attempt at her usual crispness, "Eat something, dear! You can’t manage a farm on an empty stomach!"

Sophia laughed, a startled, tearful sound, and lifted a hand in farewell.

The taillights dwindled down the dark road, and the blue glow from the Tower washed the whole valley in cold light.

Sophia stood alone in the courtyard, with the lantern shaking in her hand and a dozen faces turned toward her in the half-dark. Maren stood at the front of them, arms folded, an unreadable look on her weathered face.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then Maren grunted. "Well, girl. You heard him." She jerked her chin toward the fields, where the Aether-Thread Wheat still thrashed in the wind that was not there. "Where do we start?"

Sophia’s heart hammered in her chest. She closed her eyes, set down her fear the way Rowan had taught her to set down a thought, and listened.

The valley spoke in a roar. Underneath it, one voice rose out of the din, thin and desperate and impossible to ignore. It was the Magma-Lilies, burning bright in their cracked greenhouse, their mana climbing toward a flashpoint.

She opened her eyes.

"The lilies," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she’d dared hope. "They’re closest to flaring. We start there. Maren, can you take the east terraces with half the hands, and keep the wheat from tangling? Everyone else with me. And somebody get water. A lot of water."

Maren looked at her for one long, measuring second. Then the corner of her mouth twitched, and she turned to the others.

"You heard the lady," she barked. "Move!"

The farmhands scattered into the blue-lit dark. Sophia stood a moment longer, and in the window of the farmhouse behind her, the little sprout on her sill had grown tall and strong enough to lean against the glass.