The Warrior Midwife : An enemies to lovers fae fantasy Read online

  Bluebell, petite with a belly that seemed to dwarf her, was ferociously kneading a wad of dough on the bench. I raised my brows at Charlie, and he shrugged. Though she looked tiny and carried a mountain of grief on her shoulders, she was a strong, determined girl. Perhaps it was a lifetime of kneading dough that made her like that, I didn’t know. She looked up and saw me standing there, gawking at her.

  “Saraya!” she gasped, hastily wiping her hands on a towel before rushing towards me.

  “Hello, Bluebell.”

  She grabbed me in an embrace, and when she pulled back, her anxious hazel eyes searched my green. “Were you at a birth tonight?”

  “I was.” I gave her my best smile. “Mum and baby are both bouncing and delighted.”

  Exaggerated, but I needed Bluebell to be positive. If there was one thing that hindered a birth, it was fear. She beamed at me as if I was a heroic warrior from an ancient tale returning from battle.

  “Wonderful news! Charlie? Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Charlie rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “It is.”

  He was terrified of a repeat of last time. We all were. Second births were so different from first, as we’d been telling them over and over again, but that fear of the dark unknown was enough to cripple anyone.

  Bluebell’s hands were still clutching mine. “Can you check me?” she whispered. “Can you check if everything’s okay?”

  “Are they moving normally?” I asked, squinting at her tummy.

  “Yes, too much sometimes.” She smiled and placed her hands lovingly on her stomach. “They keep me up. Getting me ready for—” her throat caught on her words.

  She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say that her babies were keeping her up in preparing for nighttime feeds, and my heart squeezed in sympathy for her. She wouldn’t let herself believe that she would come out of this with one or even two healthy babies. The hope was too much.

  Bluebell had named her stillborn baby Rose, and it was the first funeral I had gone to since my own mother’s. I knew grief, how it could weigh on a person like a dense cloud, suffocating and blinding you. I had gone through it with them.

  If there was one thing that I knew, I would make sure, by the goddess, that everything went well for her birth. That all three of them came out of it with sighs of relief. All four, including poor Charlie, who could only watch and wait helplessly, whispering words of encouragement into his wife’s ear.

  I looked inside Bluebell’s abdomen the way my mother had taught me as a thirteen-year-old girl. Always get permission first, she had said. Invading someone’s body is neither ethical nor polite. A person’s body is their own. Never forget that.

  And I hadn’t forgotten it. I never looked inside anyone unless they asked me to. This ability was fraught with ethical dilemmas, and my mother had done her best to warn me of them when my Power appeared at my first bleeding.

  In my mind’s eye, Bluebell’s two babies, one boy and one girl, kicked each other in their sleep. I looked past them and into their thankfully fat tumble of umbilical cords, checking to see that the flow of blood and nutrients was sound. I followed one cord down to the placenta, checking its integrity. I felt the tension in my own shoulders abate when I saw that all was well. Her tiny frame was supporting her infants beautifully. When labour came, they looked like they’d be able to withstand the stress of the contractions.

  I closed my inner eye and opened my physical ones, grinning at Bluebell and Charlie, who were studying my face with absolute focus.

  They smiled back.

  “All perfect!” I said happily. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to my bed.”

  “Well deserved,” said Charlie, reaching out to shake my hand.

  I hesitated because it was highly unusual of a Lobrathian man to offer his hand to a woman like that. But I think Charlie was so thankful that he considered me akin to a man, so I shook it with a grin as Bluebell hurried off to the kitchen.

  She returned to place a warm paper bag into my hands. I peered inside, and a hot sweet bun awaited within, slathered with white icing. I looked back at her with so much gratitude I could have burst. “Goddess, you’re the best, Bluey! I’ll see you any day now.”

  She smiled at me, but I could see it was strained at the edges. “Promise me you’ll be here.”

  I took her hand, and my voice quavered with a seriousness I felt in my marrow. “I’ll be here, Bluey. The goddess herself couldn’t stop me.”

  I left the bakery through the back door, so I could lose the queen’s useless guards as I made my way up to the palace. I tore into the warm, sticky bun just as the pre-dawn light cast its eerie blue glow around me. Exhaustion clung to me like a heavy, invisible veil. I almost missed the dense grove of trees at the edge of farmer Thompson’s land that marked my secret entrance—an entrance only visible to someone with a power like mine.

  The palace had been built hundreds of years ago, in the days of the old kings, when, I guessed, magic had been commonplace. No one knew how I got in and out of the castle without being seen. I only managed it because of this tunnel—which I had stumbled upon by accident one day playing tag through the servants’ corridors with my sister, Altara. Even if one of the guards was looking right at me as I went through my entrance, by some trick of the eye the ancient architects had come up with, it would just look like I had disappeared into thin air.

  With my mental eye, I reached behind the layers of rock, soil, and tree roots. With my power, I flicked the latch that would open it. Rock grated against rock, and the ancient door swung open smoothly. I hurried into the passageway and let the door swing shut behind me.

  In complete darkness, I reached into my satchel and fished out my tinder box and candle. Quickly lighting it with the ease of many years of practise, I used its circle of light to hurry my way through the dark tunnel of rock. There had to be some old magic in these tunnels because they were always in top shape. I’d never had any trouble with collapsed sections or blockages. And that was lucky because it was a long tunnel—about a thousand paces, at a guess. And when I emerged, it was always with a happy gasp of fresh air.

  When I reached the exit, a mirror to the entry, I clicked open the latch and slinked outside, right into a vacant servant’s corridor on the lower floors of the palace.

  I hurried through the back passages, up a series of servants’ stairs, and into my room through a narrow door hidden behind a tapestry.

  As I entered my dark room, a voice like freezing ice stopped me in my tracks.

  “Sneaking back in, are we, Saraya?”

  2

  SARAYA

  It’s commonly said that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. That is very incorrect. The truth is that prostitution is the second oldest profession because the first is midwifery. Older women have been helping younger women give birth since the first humans walked upon the earth. And there was always one of them designated as an expert at the job.

  In my humble opinion, there is no higher nor more noble a profession than midwifery. So, when my stepmother rudely inserted herself into my room and snidely accused me of sneaking around like some wanton thief, irritation spun through me like a spiked wind, grating and wild.

  I could never openly admit what it was that I snuck into the city for because that would be admitting that I had magic—which wasn’t supposed to exist in humans, for all intents and purposes, so my mother had forbidden me to reveal it to anyone unnecessarily.

  My stepmother was in my room, in my personal space, like a foreign invader—which was accurate, really. My father had married her rather quickly, at the behest of his advisors, to secure relations with Kusha, the most isolated, northernmost kingdom of the human realm. We had not been on good terms since a trade scandal some decades back, and it was seen as a logical alliance. They were secretive people, and tall stone walls lined their entire southern border.

  There was a soft whirr as the dark panel of a quartz lamp was opened. Yellow li
ght filled the room, revealing my stepmother’s cold, alabaster face, blue eyes trained, snake-like on me. It always struck me how different we were, like night and day. Me, dark and soft, her light and sharp-edged. Maybe that’s why she hated me so much.

  “I’m going to bed, Stepmother,” I said stiffly. “I will see you at lunch.”

  “I think not.” Her voice was like a serrated blade into my core, and it made the skin on my back twinge with an old memory.

  Because I knew that voice. That feminine hissing, spiteful sneer that I had not heard in quite some months. That voice was only reserved for when the queen was feeling particularly malicious.

  Her red quartz necklace glinted as she arose from my chaise, becoming an elongated shadow, the source of my fear and misery, the very reason I felt more at home in the city than in the palace.

  “You are nineteen next week, and you still won’t obey your father. I think you need another lesson.”

  It took all my self-discipline not to fall to my knees and beg. I had thought she had stopped. The last lesson had been months ago. I thought I had gotten too old for this. Not again. She couldn’t possibly—

  “Things are going to change around here, Saraya,” she said. “And for the better.”

  I only realised her guards were behind me when heavy hands grabbed me by my arms.

  I refused to let the scream escape from my throat. “No,” I said, hearing my own disbelief like the quiet before a thunderclap. “You can’t do this.”

  But we both knew she could. Havlem and Yarnat wearing copper and black colours, standing behind me were not my father’s guards. They bore no allegiance to me. She had brought them and two ladies in waiting with her from the Kusha Kingdom, and they were strictly loyal to her.

  I hadn’t known my stepmother hated me until a month after the wedding. It had been the first time since her arrival that I had left the palace for midwife purposes. The next morning, she had her guards escort me to her rooms, as they were doing now.

  When she had taken out her whip, the shock of it had been so complete that when her ladies in waiting undid my dress and held me down across her red velvet ottoman, I did nothing. My own mother had been so gentle and kind to everyone she met that when faced with the complete antithesis of her, this monster in silk and chiffon, I completely froze.

  As if the lashings weren’t bad enough, after the queen was done, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “If you tell your father, I’ll punish your sister too.”

  I had been fourteen at the time, my sister thirteen, and over the next five years, my beloved stepmother took out her seemingly endless anger upon me for any and every transgression. Telling my father was unthinkable, for half the time was too caught up in state affairs and the other half too caught up in a black grief that clung to his mind like tar. So each time my own guards would move to stop Havlem and Yarnat from taking me, I would shake my head with a firm ‘no.’ Confused, they stepped back every time.

  Over the next four years, I wondered what I could do to stop it. But she was the queen and outranked me in all things, and I needed to protect my sister. Although she was only a year younger than me, I would do anything to protect Altara from this monster of a woman. I would die for my sister, and this torture was a small sacrifice for her safety.

  Every time I looked into my stepmother’s dead blue eyes, I saw something that made a shiver cut through me. A coldblooded, life-altering rage lay sleeping within her. I wondered what she’d been through that made her feel the need to hurt someone as if her life depended on it. I’d seen a version of that look in the eyes of some of the veterans from the old war. Memories and trauma made them mean, and for some of them, it curdled their mind and made them insane.

  I hated the fact that even at my age, a woman grown, her guards dragged me down the marble corridors of my own home like some child. These beautiful marble corridors and halls Altara and I had once happily played in. I wasn’t a child anymore, and yet she still made me feel so small. I would have much preferred to walk to her rooms on my own terms, but I knew that would make it less satisfying for her twisted mind.

  When we got to her suite, lit with a luminous red quartz hardly anyone else used, her ladies in waiting, Marissa and Tenna, took over, sweeping towards me as if this was some dark ritual. I knew she beat them too when she had nothing to punish me for because I had seen them cringe in their dresses on some days. But neither would ever seek to help me beyond first aid, and that was because they hated me.

  Marissa had come to my rooms one night, crying and panicking. She was two months pregnant by the very much married palace stablemaster and asked me to terminate the pregnancy. I knew the consequences she was facing. She’d be sent back to Kusha in shame, losing her position here, and probably be shipped off to a nunnery to live the rest of her life in religious poverty. But if there was one rule my mother had, it was to never stop a beating heart without careful thought.

  “You must always ask goddess Umali for wisdom,” she whispered to me one night as we lay snuggled in my bed, all three of us.“She represents the space between life and death. If you are asked to stop a heart, it should be with caution, carefully considered, and never before you are an adult by law. Promise me that.”

  And so I had promised my mother.

  I had only been fifteen at the time Marissa had come to me, and I heeding my mother’s warning, I declined her.

  I ended up sending Marissa to see Agatha, who gave her a special concoction. Marissa had returned a few weeks later, gaunt and pale from blood loss. I had felt sorry for her, but there had been nothing I could do. So, although she didn’t need to do it at all, it was with great vehemence that she grabbed me by the arm and swung me down across the ottoman. I frowned up at her, and she scowled back, reaching for my dress buttons. I slapped her hand away and undid them myself.

  Perhaps it was the exhaustion of assisting Chirra’s birth, the emotion of seeing Bluebell so frightened, or the fact that my nineteenth birthday was just around the corner that made me snap back for once.

  “How long?” I suddenly whipped around and faced my stepmother.

  “Excuse me?” The whip was in her hands, and she held it like a lover, but when I had spoken, she’d gone as still as a snake looking at its prey.

  Since the day she had told me that any resistance would land Altara under the whip, I had never spoken back to her for fear of the consequences. But my sister and I were almost grown women.

  “How long will this go on?” I asked breathlessly. “I’m not a child anymore. Until I get married and leave here? And then what? Who will bear the brunt of this vile anger you have? My sister? She’s old enough to fight back. You can’t threaten her the way you’ve done with me.”

  I thought my words would make her angry, might make her remind me of who exactly was Queen here and under whose thumb I lived. But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she smirked.

  “Speaking of marriage…” her voice trailed casually as she stroked her whip. “There might be some news on that front.”

  “What?” My entire body went limp with disbelief. My father had always avoided talk of our marriages. In fact, avoided was putting it lightly. He outright refused to talk about it. Altara and I weren’t so happy about that because we would rather know which brutish idiot we’d be expected to bed well in advance. But despite his advisors’ persistence…nothing. So it was with a violent amount of surprise that I heard this news.

  “What do you know?” I asked lamely, full well knowing she’d give me nothing.

  “Turn around, Saraya.”

  I hated the way she said my name. In her mouth, the beautiful name given to me by my mother became something dirty. And at that moment, it was almost like the thought of a wedding being planned for me—of leaving the home I had grown up in with all the memories of my mother shattered some old contract I’d made with myself. If I was going, Altara would have to face our stepmother on her own. I had to end this once and for all.
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  “No.”

  The queen raised her eyebrows, her grip going tight against the leather.

  “You are speaking to the queen,” hissed Marissa.

  “And you are speaking to the princess,” I shot back at her.

  My stepmother’s lips went white, and I was suddenly very aware of the fact that it was three against one and that I had two knives on my person. Bearing steel against the queen was treason, and I wasn’t even sure if my father’s disease-ridden brain would be able to stop the consequences of that.

  Physically? Marissa and Tenna were older than me by about five years, but I had been training in fighting since I was a toddler. I could easily take them and my stepmother down without even using my knives. But hurting women was something that went against everything my magic and I stood for. My magic was made to serve women, and something ancient and deep-rooted in me forbade me from hurting them.

  So I ran. I darted towards the servant’s stairs at the edge of the room because I knew the guards were waiting outside her official door. I ripped the door open and ran down the narrow stairs, Marissa shrieking after me.

  But I’d never come down this way before. The servants' stairs were an impossible labyrinth if you didn’t know where you were going. So I just ran in the general direction of Altara’s rooms, which were right next to mine. I would collect my guards and—

  Abruptly, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I halted in my tracks, panting and weary from my long night. The castle guards, even my guards, would take the queen’s orders over mine. If she instructed them to drag me into her room, they would have no choice. It would be treason for them to disobey.

  I couldn’t go to my father. He would take her side. I was the disobedient princess. By now, everyone knew I snuck out night after night. He would think that I needed to be disciplined too.