Chapter Two

The Midwife of Ash Hollow

POV: Sorcha

The baby came at the cold hour before dawn, the way they so often did, as if children preferred to be born into the part of the night that belonged to no one.

Sorcha Wren had her hands inside another woman's pain, and she was not thinking about anything at all except the next breath, the next push, the slick small head crowning under her palm. This was the only place left in the world where her mind went quiet. Not in the herb-shop with its hanging bunches of yarrow and its jars of tincture; not in the little house at the edge of town where her son slept; not in the woods where she still, after five years, sometimes ran on four legs under the moon and let herself howl out the thing she could never say in words. Only here. Only with her hands in the work that her blood had been made for.

"One more," she said, low and even, and the laboring woman — Dell, twenty years old and terrified and gripping her husband's wrist hard enough to bruise — found one more from somewhere, and the baby slid into Sorcha's waiting hands in a rush of heat and wet and the particular animal smell of new life.

A girl. Bawling already, furious at the cold, perfect.

Sorcha's gift rose in her without being asked. It always did, around birth — the omega-warmth pooling in her chest and spilling down through her arms into her hands, the calming hum her caste had carried since before there were words for caste. She let a thread of it go into the exhausted mother, into the scared young husband, into the room itself: peace. You are safe. It is done and it is good. She watched Dell's clenched shoulders come down, watched the husband stop shaking, and she felt the price of it as she always did — a small grey tiredness settling into her own bones, a candle's worth of her own life spent to light theirs.

A small price. This one was small. She had paid enormous ones, once, and lived, barely.

She cut the cord, delivered the afterbirth, packed Dell with clean cloth, and stitched the small tear with three neat sutures and a breath of warmth to take the sting. Human medicine and wolf gift, braided together so seamlessly that the humans of Ash Hollow had stopped, years ago, asking how the herb-woman's patients healed so clean. They had decided she was simply good. They were not wrong. She was very good. She had made herself very good, because being needed was the closest thing to safety she had found, and she had been looking for safety for five years.

It was full morning by the time she walked home, the spring sun thin and yellow over the ridge, her bag heavy on her shoulder and her whole body emptied-out and clean the way it only got after a birth. The town was waking — the diner sign flickering on, old Hutchins sweeping his stoop, the smell of frying bacon and woodsmoke and the green wet smell of the season turning. Human smells. Safe, ordinary, blessedly dull human smells.

She had built a life out of dull. She was proud of it the way other people were proud of cathedrals.

"You look like death warmed in a skillet," said Mara, falling into step beside her without being summoned, two coffees in her hands. Mara Quint ran the diner and had appointed herself Sorcha's keeper roughly nine seconds after Sorcha had stumbled into Ash Hollow five years ago, pregnant and feral-eyed and clearly running from something she would not name. Mara had never asked what. Mara had simply made room — a job, a couch, then a friendship that had become the load-bearing wall of Sorcha's new life. She was the first family Sorcha had ever chosen rather than been assigned by blood and rank, and Sorcha loved her with a fierceness that still sometimes frightened her.

"Dell had a girl," Sorcha said, taking the coffee."Both fine."

"Course they are. You touched 'em." Mara said it lightly, the way she said everything, but her eyes were doing the thing they did — the watching thing, the keeper thing."Walk faster. Need to tell you something and I don't want to say it in the street."

Sorcha's spine cooled. Five years of dull had not unlearned her the old vigilance; it had only put it to sleep, lightly, the way a wolf sleeps."Say it."

"Strangers." Mara kept her voice under the morning noise."Two of 'em, yesterday and the day before. Asking about you. Not by name — that's the thing. Asking about 'the healer.' How long you been here, where's your place, you got family." A muscle worked in her jaw."I told 'em you were a hundred years old and mean as a snake and lived over the diner. They didn't laugh. C