“I do not care,” Mairi groaned, breathing hard. “I only want — it over – ahh – will it be long now – ?”
“Of course not. Just a little while, Mairi, and you will have your child in your arms . . .ah, that’s right, just a little more . . .One begins just as another ends; I know it’s hard, but it means your babe will be here all the sooner —”
Eilan felt almost rigid with fright. Mairi did not even look like herself any more. Her face was red and swollen, she cried out and seemed not even to know she was doing it. Then she gasped, arching her back and bracing her feet against the end of the bed.
“I can’t — oh, I can’t,” came the hoarse cry, but Caillean was still crooning encouragement. It seemed to Eilan that the birthing had lasted a lifetime, but the sun was barely set.
Then Caillean’s voice changed. “Now I think we are ready. Let her hold your hands, Eilan; no, not like that – at the wrists. Now, Mairi, push just once more. I know you are tired, child, but this will soon be over. Breathe — that’s right, breathe hard, just let it come. There, there, now look!” Mairi’s body heaved, and the priestess straightened, holding something, unbelievably red and tiny, that jerked in her hands with a thin cry. “Look, Mairi, you have a fine little daughter.”
Mairi’s red face relaxed in a blissful smile as Caillean laid the newborn child upon her belly.
“Ah, Lady,” breathed the priestess, looking down at them. “More times than I can remember I have seen this, and always it is a miracle!” The thin mewing became a shrill and demanding cry, and Mairi laughed.
“Oh, Caillean, she’s so beautiful, so beautiful. . .”
With swift efficiency the priestess tied off the birthcord and cleansed the child. When Mairi began to deliver the afterbirth, Caillean handed the baby to Eilan.
It seemed impossible that anything so fragile should be a human child; its fingers and feet were thin and spidery, its head covered with a downy dark fuzz. As Mairi fell into an exhausted sleep, Caillean hung a small metal amulet around the infant’s neck, and began to cocoon it in swaddling bands.
“Now she cannot be stolen by the elf-kind, and we have watched her every moment since she was born, so we know she is no changeling,” Caillean said. “But not even the Good Folk would be likely to come out into this rain. So you see, even from such a flood some good can come.”
Caillean straightened her weary back, realizing that a red watery sun was beginning to peer through the heavy low-lying clouds for the first time in many days.
The baby was long and frail. Her hair turned to a downy reddish fuzz as it dried.
“She looks so delicate- will she live?” Eilan asked.
“I see no reason she should not,” Caillean replied. “It is a mercy of the gods we did not leave here last night. I thought it might be safer to take refuge in the Forest House after all; and then this babe would have been born beneath some tree or in an open field, and we might well have lost both mother and child. My foresight is not always true.”
The priestess sat down heavily on a bench before the fire. “Why, it is day again; no wonder I am weary. And no doubt before long, the boy will wake and we can show him his little sister.”
Eilan was still holding the baby, but as Caillean looked up at her a veil seemed to fall between them, like a breath of cold mist from the Otherworld. As it swirled, a dreadful sorrow chilled Caillean’s bones; suddenly she was seeing an Eilan who was older, in the blue robe of the Forest House, with the blue tattooed crescent of a sworn priestess between her brows. In her arms she held a young child; and in her eyes Caillean saw a grief so great it tore her heart.
Caillean shuddered, shaken by that flood of sorrow, and tried to blink the tears away. When she looked again, the young girl was staring at her in amazement. Involuntarily the priestess took a step forward and snatched Mairi’s child, who mewed softly and fell asleep again.