The queen bit down fiercely on the leather strap, moaning. The labor had commenced around brunch the previous morning, and she had been riding the lurching rhythm of violent contractions and brief respites all day and very nearly through the night. She was exhausted, dehydrated and delirious.
Agnes, her lady in waiting, tried to comfort her with soft words and gentle embrace.
The nurse tried her best to get fluids into the queen: mostly water, but at the doctor's direction, sedatives and a generous supply of hard spirits.
Harold sat on the daybed by the corner of the room, hunched over, wringing his hands.
Queen Lillian's shrieks reached a crescendo. Her back arched and her body convulsed.
"That's it, dear," Agnes cooed. "Just let it push. Let your body do the work."
"GAAAAAAAAAH!" Lillian shouted. "This thing is HUGE!"
"Yes, dear, a newborn may be little but they always feel surprisingly big on the way out."
Lillian opened her eyes and shot a withering glower at Agnes. "Have you squeezed a watermelon out your—"
Agnes squeezed Lillian's hand and hurriedly replied, "No, you're right. But every mother I've spoken to has said it always feels like it's not going to fit." Her voice dripped soothing balm; it barely mattered what she was saying. "It's the storm before the calm, it just means the baby will be here soon."
Doctor Musgrave spotted motion, and reached between the stirrups. "There we are, my Queen! We've got some motion." The queen, contorted in agony, didn't catch it, but the doctor's face twisted up in a strange expression.
Harold leapt up and rushed over by the doctor to watch the delivery.
Red rivulets ran down over an enormous glistening dome. Harold understood childbirth was tough, but watching that watermelon head shove and tear through his wife's delicate body!? He felt simultaneously bad for his wife but a guilty sense of relief that it wasn't happening to him.
Doctor Musgrave looked at the king, then back at the head emerging into his left hand. He wiped the dome with his other hand, and gestured at it.
Harold suddenly understood the doctor's expression. The head was not only the size of a watermelon, it was the color of one. At that moment, a springy mass popped out of the birth canal and sprung to attention, protruding straight out of the rancid-appearing globe. Whatever it was, it wasn't a baby.
"Dear heaven, it's hideous!" exclaimed King Harold.
Lillian gasped, her exhausted tenor rising to a panic. "What!? What is it?" she demanded, craning her head as if to see over the blanket covering her legs.
"Oh, nothing dear, just the prebirth," the doctor intoned authoritatively.
Harold gestured desperately at the doctor.
Lillian's addled mind couldn't make much progress between savage contractions.
Musgrave collected the squirming discolored mass into his hands. An umbilical cord trailed back into the writhing mother, gray, green, throbbing. His deft hands twisted and crimped the cord, a knife separating it from the thing that had emerged.
In a fluid motion, the doctor scooped up the "prebirth", swiveled to place his back between the queen and the thing in his hands, and told the nursing attendant to "catch the placenta, would you, Edith?" He tipped his head to direct Harold out of the room.
Lillian slumped back on the bed. "Placenta? What's happening? Why don't I hear crying?"
"We'll have him back in no time," the doctor lied.
The door clicked closed behind Harold.
In the side room Doctor Musgrave deposited the wriggling green slug into a washbasin and turned to face Harold. The king examined the thing cautiously, his nose refusing to point right at it. It was big—the size of a toddler—and a remarkably big fraction of it was head. Eyelids squeezed closed tight against the world; four stubby appendages radiated from its glistening abdomen, two from its huge noggin. It wasn't his little baby child, that's for certain, but it had all the parts to be a baby something. "What is it?" Harold implored in a hoarse whisper.
"Oh, sometimes this happens, I am given to understand; a deformed uterine growth."
So, not really a baby after all. Confusion gave way to loss; the prince he had been anticipating for months had never really been coming. Harold's eyes softened. "My baby boy, my prince," he lamented, gaze looking through the error that stood in his place. Moisture slipped down his throat and elicited something between a cough and a choke. "We've waited so long for you. What happened to you?"
"Your highness, I'm so sorry, but there was no way to know. It never was your prince. Your good Queen Lillian had a mass instead of a pregnancy. Allow me to sew up her majesty, and I shall dispose of the pathological tissue."
Harold stared in desperation at the baby-shaped cyst. "It's ... it's still moving," he said, visibly uncomfortable.
"That'll happen. Now it's out of the body, it'll be dead soon enough." The doctor's indifferent manner conveyed his confidence that this occurrence, while unfortunate, was a commonplace clinical reality.
Harold nodded, then slowed, then the nod transformed into a shake. "Oh no," he lamented. "No no no, what will I tell Lillian!?"
"You may tell her it's a stillbirth, your highness. There's nothing that could be done about it. The counselor can help you console the Queen." Doctor Musgrave slipped out of the side room back into the bedroom.
The throbbing pile of tissue, a paler green than when it was ejected, was now turning almost teal. Then it coughed.
A tear slipped off Harold's cheek.
A bubble popped.
"Well Harold, are you going to hold your baby?" came a dry voice, gesturing at the basin.
"Wot?" Harold looked up and met the gaze of a fairy godmother. And not just any, but his Fairy Godmother. It had been years since she had made her pact with him, but he recognizer her instantly. She'd acquired a few more lines and grayer hair, but, perhaps, so had he. "There was no child, godmother, only this, this—" he gestured and sneered at the quivering mass in the basin, "—tumor."
The Godmother saw the baby, slick and naked in the basin, and picked it up. "Well that's no way to store a baby," she scolded Harold. She supported the baby by its chest, letting the body drape down, and examined it. "Look here, Harold, it's a girl!"
So suspended, Harold could clearly see the form of a child. Plump legs and buttocks, arms flopped over the godmother's hands, and an outsized green dome with a lock of hair plastered down by mucous. Two stout stalks protruded from either side of its melon. Harold shuffled around to the front to confirm Godmother's analysis; whatever it was, it was a she.
"That's … that's not a bouncing baby boy or girl," Harold protested.
The baby chuffed, eyes squeezed shut.
"Of course, Harold, what did you expect to come of a dalliance between lady and toad, a ravishisng beauty!?"
Harold looked down.
"There there, Harold, I'm here to help." Godmother pulled the chilled baby to her to warm it up; where it touched her, mucous darkened the fabric of her gown behind the sequins. Harold's cheek bent into half a grimace at the sight. "But you've got a decision to make," she continued unfazed, "and not a lot of time to make it."
The king looked up at her, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
"I can help you, let us say, hide your little problem."
Harold grimaced uncomfortably at the creature in her arms.
"Or," she intoned with a hint of a threat, "you can wait for Musgrave to get back and dispose of the remains. It hasn't cried yet, so if you decide promptly, you can tell Lillian it was a miscarriage." Godmother laid the creature back in the basin and offered Harold a pillow from the lounge.
Harold's eyes grew huge. The growth was awful, and he'd desperately wish it didn't exist. But now that he saw it was shaped vaguely like a baby, the idea of killing it, of having to smother it himself...
"Your choice, Harold."
The baby chuffed again and shivered.
"Ww— wha— what do you mean by hide?" Harold asked.
Godmother warmed up; she was pleased that he was bending to the correct choice.
"I'm your Fairy Godmother, Harold. I can cast a spell. You'll still have a little ogre, but I can make her look like a perfect little princess. At least when it matters."
Harold gulped. He'd been waiting for this child to arrive, and now the thought of bringing this slimy green ogre into his family filled him with revulsion.
He worked through the mechanics of dispatching it in his head; it was going to be difficult to raise himself to the task. Besides, he realized, even if he succeeded, what would make him believe the next try would produce a real baby?
The baby coughed, and cried.
"Sshh!" Harold shushed, snatching the pillow from the fairy and placing it over the baby to muffle her cries. He cast a worried glance at the doorway.
Lillian's voice shot through the door. "What was that!?" It rode in on a surge of hope.
Harold's shoulders slumped. The opportunity was past; the choice was gone.
A satisfied grin settled over the godmother. Establishing the proper level of commitment required her customers to engage willingly.
Harold withdrew the pillow. "Very well then, yes, make it beautiful," he acceded, hope vanishing.
The Godmother lifted her wand, chanted a rhyme, and cast a blast of light over the basin. The plump green mass was replaced with a smaller pinkish-blue mass, still plump, still slimy. "There you are, Harold. This is your daughter, time to act like it."
Harold took a washcloth from the marble counter top and spread it out over the glistening pink child. He picked the baby up from the basin by the cloth like a servant using a napkin to retrieve a greasy drumstick from the floor. He beheld the baby girl. She was pale and scrunched and … she was beautiful. Harold held her close and made for the bedroom.
"Oh Harold," Godmother stopped him.
Harold looked back anxiously.
"There's the matter of payment for services rendered. We'll talk later."
Harold dipped his head and pushed through the door.
·❧·
Lillian was distraught, halfway sitting up, propped on her elbows. The first beams of sunrise slipped through the curtains and danced across the carvings in the upper corners of the bedroom.
"You mustn't move, your highness, or I risk injuring you," Musgrave admonished, shoving the suture through resistant tissue.
"But I heard my baby!" she insisted, gritting her teeth against the pain, her head swimming with exhaustion and anesthetic elixirs.
"Now, now, your majesty," Musgrave tried to calm her delirium.
The door swung open and Harold strode in, baby against his chest, a hesitant smile on his lips. "Heard her you did, my dear. She's here!"
Lillian's face broke open in relief. She extended her arms to receive the baby, falling back against her pillows. Harold deposited the baby on Lillian's torso, and the queen wrapped her up in her arms.
"Oh my little baby, why are you so cold?" Lillian comforted the baby. The baby cried. The mother cried.
"A blanket, Harold!" Lillian demanded. "What took you so long in there? She's freezing!" she scolded. She turned back to the newborn. "I'm so happy you're here! I almost thought you didn't make it!"
Harold laid a duvet over mother and daughter. He gulped and forced a smile. He watched mother, engrossed in baby. What a near miss! What a terror, he thought. He took in the tableau before him; it all looked so natural, so right. Mother and daughter.
Not a prince, but still, at least a healthy baby girl.
You'll still have a little ogre, the fairy's voice echoed in his mind. I can help you hide your little problem.
The scene was a lie. The baby under the blanket transformed in his mind's eye back into the hideous ogre that Musgrave had poured into the basin. Harold shuddered and shook the picture from his mind. There was no point in frightening himself, or his wife. She was happy, the baby was healthy and beautiful.
Lillian clamped her jaw and stifled a scream. "Last stitch!" sang Musgrave from behind the blanket draped over the royal knees.
The doctor caught the king's gaze, challenging him with an incredulous look.
Harold mouthed "it's alright."
The doctor wiped down the repair site and rolled his tools into his bag. Then he stood and dropped his jaw, about to ask a question.
Harold piped up, cutting him short. "Thank you, Doctor, for everything you've done. You saved our baby girl!"
Musgrave tilted his head, then walked up to the queen and saw the exposed head of little baby, her skin a warm pink with a shock of now-dried hair revealing its vivid auburn coloring. Baby's face pressed into mother's chest, nudging and searching and seeking. Mother's head bent over, studying the mound of baby on her chest in disbelief.
Musgrave looked up at Harold with renewed inquiry. Harold shrugged, then adopted an authoritative tone. "So yes, doctor, you have done right by the crown. I think it's best to let the lady recover." Harold raised his brow and shot his gaze urgently towards the door.
"Ah yes, very well then, your highness. Congratulations," the doctor said cautiously, "on your new baby."
