Free Gilt and Midnight by Megan Hart Page A

trembled. “No reward you could offer me would be enough for me to betray my wife.”
    “Not even the life of your child?”
    Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”
    Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
    “Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”
    “You can promise me that?”
    “That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.
    As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”
    “Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.
    Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”
    The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”
    Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.
    “Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.

     
    She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.
    For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.
    The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”
    “They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.
    “Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.
    Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.
    She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.
    “Take them away.”
    The midwife, a good-hearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”
    She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.
    “See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”
    Pitor shook his head. “My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”
    The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.
    “What do you want me to do with