Free The Binding by Kate Sparkes Page B

sorry. You should enjoy what time you have left with her, but you need to start letting go." I sat up and reached for my slippers, but the nurse shook her head. "The little one is resting," she said. "She needs her sleep. See her when she wakes for a feeding." And she left.
    Would it have made any difference if I'd fought off the fog of exhaustion and gone right away? Probably not. I think it was all over before the nurse came to me.
    The baby didn't cry for her late feeding, and when I woke my breasts were over-heavy and leaking. I ran to the nursery and looked into the cradle. She could have been sleeping. She looked so peaceful in the moonlight that streamed through the window.
    I brushed my hand over the soft fuzz that covered her head. The hairs on my arms lay still.
    This was why they told us not to become too attached to our babies. This was why we didn't name them until six months after birth, why we weren't supposed to let them become real people in our hearts until the danger was past. I don't know any mother who has managed it. I certainly hadn't. I grieved for that child, barely leaving my bed for weeks, happiest when I was asleep with her blanket tucked beneath my cheek where I could still smell her.
    I still grieve.
    I can't pinpoint the moment when the suspicion first came to me, the thought that the nurse had killed her. When I mentioned it to the doctor, he told me it was understandable that in my fragile emotional state I would look for someone to blame for this tragedy, but that the nurse was not responsible. It was magic that had killed my baby, and nothing else. He ordered me a medicine to calm my nerves and urged me to rest, recover, and try to forget.
    When I went back a year later, still grieving, he cautioned me against trying for another baby and wrote a different prescription, this one to prevent pregnancy. I suspected that it was already too late for that, but something kept me from telling him that I'd been feeling sick again. I hadn’t told anyone.
    "Once this happens in a family, it's likely to happen again," he said. "I might tell another woman to go ahead and try, but I think it would be too dangerous for your mental state. I won't tell you what to do." He tapped his pencil on the desk, then made a note in my file. “If you have a baby, I'll be sure to have the nurse come back to look it over as soon as possible after the birth."
    The nurse.
    There was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go. It was all out of my control, and always had been. Or so I thought.
    The wind howling outside the windows interrupts my memories and brings me back to the present, to the cabin in the woods.
    Why am I here now? Because of the trial. I lied to my husband and my community, I suffered through childbirth in this horrible place, I wait in fear because of a young woman in chains, one whose face and name I will never forget. I hope it will be worth it. Maybe this was a stupid plan, but it was my only hope.
    The new baby’s eyelids flutter, and gooseflesh breaks out on my arms. A tear slips down my cheek, and I tremble as the sun sets, as the hour grows closer. It's the only way , I remind myself, and I kiss the crown of my daughter's head. If she survives, she’ll be my fourth child by official reckoning, but fifth in my heart. I won’t lose this one.
    "It's the only way," I repeat aloud, and the baby opens her eyes.
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    2 .
    My husband is a magistrate, but I’d never been to a trial before. I was always busy with my own work at the glass shop, and later with the children as they came along. But it’s not often that a magic user is brought to trial in Lowdell. When the magic hunters captured one a week after my last appointment with the doctor, the news was on everyone’s lips. My sister was visiting from Ardare, and she convinced me to go along with her and watch from the back of the room.
    I'll admit that I was curious. The only people who could control magic were ones who had sold their souls to the