Part 69: Seeking Alistair
Sheri was floating in vast silence. Water waved below her, and the sun beat down on her. There was nothing else besides the silence, the water, the sky, and sun. For long moments, she hung suspended, until she saw a small speck in the distance.
She knew immediately what—who—it was.
"Alistair, no!" she cried out in despair. Her heart became leaden and she could only hang in the silent brilliance as he drew nearer.
Every line of his body showed exhaustion as he gripped Buddy. His precious, beloved face was a mask of fear and desperation. It was more than she could bear and she sought to cry out.
It was The Dream. Again.
Buddy dipped lower and lower. He struggled to gain altitude, his breath rasping from a raw throat.
Then he faltered and anguish screamed through her. "No!" she screamed within the confines of her mind.
The pair crashed into the water with an impact so powerful that Alistair was torn from the harness and bounced across the water. She watched in horror and terror as Buddy sank beneath the waves. Then Alistair followed, reaching out to him…
And then they were gone, and she was looking at stone as her eyes flew open.
"ALISTAIR!" she screamed. The baby leaped in her womb, and she sobbed. "AL-IS-TAIR!" She wept, denying the truth.
He couldn't hear her.
He would never come.
Buddy was lost. Alistair was lost.
Their child kicked, as if in protest of the terrible loss. She was overcome with grief, and could only curl her hands around her belly. Beside her, she felt purring erupt.
Curbles looked into her eyes, and Sheri saw grief and loss there, as surely as if she looked into the eyes of a sentient being.
"They're gone, Curbles," she sobbed to the griffon.
Curbles laid her head down and watched Sheri with eyes filled with infinite sorrow.
"It was real, wasn't it?" Sheri asked redundantly. "They flew away and they never made it." The baby kicked again, and Sheri felt wetness between her legs. It was too soon. "He'll never see our baby," she told the purring, but otherwise silent griffon.
"Oh, Alistair," she sobbed as she slowly sat up. "I need you!" She screamed it impotently at the uncaring roof of the shelter.
Slowly, with great exhaustion and pain, she got up and waddled out the doorway to the water's edge. She filled the bucket and sat back, cleaning the blood off to the best of her ability.
She turned to go back inside, but it seemed so far. So very far. So she laid down—just for a minute.
When she woke again, it was raining. She slowly stood, gripping Curbles as dizziness overwhelmed her. Moving slowly, every step a laborious chore, she managed to get back into the shelter, where she shivered and cried until sleep overtook her.
Part 70: Seeking Alistair
She swam through consciousness, trying to keep herself clean and eating when she could force herself to do it. But everything she did was difficult, and she wept often. But she felt the baby still moving, and she clung to that with all her strength.
"Wake up and drink, girl."
She opened her eyes, so heavy… so very heavy. "Flemeth?" She stared at the face that hovered over hers. "Is this a dream?"
"No, girl. I'm no dream. Drink this."
Sheri drank obediently. "That's vile!" she objected, though not very strenuously. Certainly not as strenuously as she felt the revulsion for the nasty concoction. She turned away until Flemeth offered her water. That, she drank carefully and gratefully.
"How did you get here? What are you doing here? Are you sure I'm not dreaming?"
"You're going to be fine now. I've stopped the bleeding. You're anemic, so you're going to be tired until the bairn is born. You lost so much blood that you'll be low on iron until after the birth."
"You never give anyone a straight answer, do you?"
"It's part of my charm, girl." Flemeth handed her a handful of vials. "If you bleed again, you'll drink this."
"You're leaving?" She felt alarm run through her as she thought of being left totally alone on the island with a baby on the way.
"You'll be just fine, Warden. Women have been birthing babies longer than men have been keeping histories. Most of them alone, so be glad your man is here to help you."
Sheri sobbed. "He's dead. I watched him die."
"Are you sure? Could you be wrong?"
A contraction tore through Sheri then. She suddenly realized what it was—and that it wasn't the first. "Contractions. I'm having contractions!"
"Why didn't you say so sooner?" Flemeth admonished her.
"What am I going to do?"
"You're going to have a baby, obviously."
"But it's too soon! I can't have the baby now! I'm not ready! The baby's not done!"
"You'll be fine. The baby will be fine. It's early, but not too early."
"How do you know?" Sheri knew she was being unreasonable, but she couldn't help the aggravation that struck her, especially as it was accompanied by another harsh, rippling contraction.
"The Chasind were terrified of me. But not so terrified that they weren't willing to come get me every time something went wrong. I know about birth, girl."
It was some fourteen hours later before Flemeth handed the tiny, squaling baby to Sheri. Sheri sobbed as she held him. "Hello, Adrian," she murmured softly to him.
She didn't even notice when Flemeth left.
Part 71: Seeking Alistair
"Come on, boy, wake up."
Alistair batted the hand away from his shoulder. "Leave me alone."
"Get up, boy, your other Warden needs you."
Alistair groaned as stabbing agony sheered through his head as if a boulder had landed on it.
"Here, drink this."
When he had finished gasping, he drank the offered potion, only to cough and choke. "Are you trying to kill me? What IS that?" He gagged as his stomach rebelled at the taste.
"Stop whining and go in to see your babe," Flemeth told him. "Even through you're an idiot, you're the only father he's got."
"What?" Alistair tried to get his mind around the mercurial change in conversation.
Flemeth spoke slowly, enunciating as if speaking to a particularly dense person. "Sheri had a boy. You should go see them."
He struggled to sit up, his body aching in places he hadn't even known existed. Slowly as he worked his way up to his knees, Flemeth talked to him.
"You have plenty of trees here, boy. You should make a large raft. Have the griffons fly in shifts. Put a rudder and a sail on it, and you should be able to go right over the tops of those rocks."
He grunted and staggered to his feet. "I have a son," he told her, his mind preoccupied as the reality of that fact tried to sink into his wandering, pained brain.
"Yeah." She turned away and rummaged in her pack while he slowly staggered to the doorway of the shelter.
"Sheri?"
As Alistair disappeared inside, Flemeth turned and shifted, throwing her bulk up into the air, ignoring the hissing and agitated squawking of the griffons. She winged away back the way she had come, leaving the new family to meet and greet one another.
Inside the shelter, Alistair and Sheri stared at each other in equal shock.
"A son?" Alistair asked her.
"Alistair?" She said his name with such surprise and reverence that he stopped and stared at her, his eyes actually leaving the tiny bundle at her breast for the first time. "I saw you die. I saw Buddy crash into the water and I saw both of you go under…"
Alistair dropped roughly to the floor and crawled to his beloved and his baby. "We fell, yes. But I survived. I don't know how. Then Flemeth found me…"
He laid down beside her. She handed him the small bundle, and he cried as he took the tiny baby from her arms.
"He's so small!" Alistair felt joy and terror seize him. "What if I hurt him?"
"He couldn't wait to meet his daddy," Sheri told him.
He looked up to find tears in her eyes as she looked at him. He smiled.
"Couldn't wait to see how pretty his momma is, more like it."
He groaned. "I ache," he told her. "I don't ever want to swim again. Seriously, ever."
But he forgot about swimming when his son opened his eyes. Alistair swore the tiny little guy smiled when he saw him.
Sheri informed him that it was probably just gas or him making his first poop later on.
"Is Buddy gone?" Sheri asked him.
Alistair's eyes met hers. The sorrow and the loss in them was all the answer she needed. They cuddled together with their son and accepted that life was filled with joy, and sorrow, and sometimes both at the same time.