Holy
She returned to the city of her birth a broken woman, but a woman nonetheless. Motherhood had graced her young form all too early, turning girlish hips into instruments of childbirth and her small breasts into nothing more than the means to sustain her baby. Her beautiful baby boy, who she shouldn't love but she can't help it. They ask her, What happened? Who did this to you? But she only keeps her tired eyes on the ground, holding the child tightly to her chest. Rumors spread like a rash and suddenly she is a mute, her virginity a martyr. They would call her 'saint' but she's not dead yet, so they simply call her what she is. A mother. A Holy Mother. Do they pray to her? She can't tell, of course she can't hear them. All she can hear is her baby's constant crying, the unrelenting reminder of sour breath in her face and callused hands on her brown skin.
They don't ask her to explain again so she doesn't. Her mind ebbs and flows like the tide of some faraway ocean. One minute her hand is being delicately raised above the people – she can't repress a shudder at how small her hand appears in his – and the next moment there is only her baby, no violence, no master plan, no holiness. The baby is a baby but he is also her baby which means that she can't drop him on his head or drown him in a pool of shallow water. He is the burden on her back, the cross she must bear.
She holds the thing up in the dim morning light, loving it but hating how it came to be. Maybe she is holy, after all. She sacrificed her voice, that's what they tell her, so perhaps a part of her truly is a martyr. This child someone else's fault, the result of their deadly sin, not hers. But it is still her burden after all and to bear it without leaving the child in the cold overnight was the most righteous act she had ever accomplished. Perhaps without some divine intervention, she wouldn't have been able to do it. But then if she's learnt nothing else, it's that holiness truly lies in the eye of the beholder.
He comes back and she realizes what he has been trying to prove to her all along and now he's unable to move, frozen with something like fear and horror, emotions she knows only too well.
And she suddenly remembers that she's only a child with a baby in her arms, and that if he dies then she dies along with him because they are one and the same.
Hoarsely, she forms the sounds within herself and although her tongue moves sluggishly and it's difficult to be louder than a whisper, she repeats words she heard from him too long ago.
He goes back and Lyra takes her somewhere and now she knows that she is not holy, because martyrs never get their lives back.
