The rain seemed to be unending in Dublith; for a week great sheets of water had fallen from the sky, dislodging the last of the autumn leaves, and turning the ploughed fields to thick, dreary mud. Inside the Curtis kitchen, however, was dry, warm and bright. In the mid-afternoon, while business was slow, Izumi was turning the small pantry upside-down in the process of baking a cake. Flour, honey, butter and eggs coated most surfaces and half the floor, a stack of bowls filled the sink, and the oven blazed, threatening to ignite the chimney. She worked with manic glee, beating the mixture and then pouring it into a round tin, before slamming the ensemble into the oven, and taking up a mop. When the cake was baked, rising to a beautiful fluffy gold, she took a dish of currants, and arranged them on the top, to spell out the message 'WE HAVE A BABY'. Then she hid the creation in a cupboard, danced happily around the kitchen, and went outside in the rain to chop wood.

After dinner, she presented the cake to her husband, who, after some initial confusion, pulled her into his arms so tightly she felt her ribs strain. They cried together, before settling down to eat cake.

Izumi found the pregnancy challenging; besides the nausea and back-pain, she was forced to become more careful and sedentary than came naturally to her. When they lay together, she would take Sig in her mouth, or in her rear, her own mother having attributed Izumi's tempestuous and lustful nature to too much sex while she was in utero. As an alchemist with an inclination for scepticism, she could not believe this to be true, but the story made her husband laugh approvingly, so they carried on. After several months had passed, they were able to sit together, their hands over her belly, and feel the tiny being moving around. She spoke to it, sang to it, described to it what she was doing as she moved around her daily tasks, imagined what it would look like, what combination of her and Sig's features it would carry, what its voice would one day sound like, what its favourite food would be.

Some weeks before she reckoned she would be due, a day passed in which she did not feel the little creature moving. She did not immediately share her concern, but waited with growing anxiety through the next day. Still no movement. By this point, she did not want to speak of it, could not bring the supposition into being, because then it would be real and inescapable. She had failed. She trudged through the house and into the store-room, where Sig was counting up the day's takings, and she worked her way into the shelter of his right arm, buried her face in his shoulder, and began to cry silently. The doctor was summoned, the bed was clothed in old sheets, and she was given a large dose of ergot suspended in castor oil, which made her vomit copiously, and hallucinate shadowy forms crawling across the ceiling. Then, as the waters broke, the doctor propped her legs open, ruptured the thick membrane with a surgical blade, and commenced to heave the baby from her, while she swam in and out of consciousness, shot through with pain.

Mercifully, it was all over by midnight. The doctor offered to dispose of the corpse, but Sig decided, on behalf of his unconscious wife, that they would deal with it privately. As the sun rose, they sat together, dry-eyed and stunned, the body of the child between them on the bloody sheets. To Izumi, it was perfect in every respect; its tiny hands and feet, fingers curled into little fists, its hairless head, its tiny eyes tightly shut, never to open, its lips slightly parted. Whole and entire, a tiny man.

"Why did this happen?" she whispered, redundantly, "There's nothing wrong with him. He should have lived."

Her husband did not reply, but reached his hand to cover hers. Then he stood, descended the stairs to the kitchen, and boiled a kettle of water to make tea. Still, she sat, trying to fathom how to say goodbye to her son. After tea, she wrapped the little form in one of the ruined bedsheets, and carried it through the falling rain to the woodshed. There she placed it among the logs, and shut and bolted the door.

"We will bury him tomorrow," Sig said, as, exhausted beyond imagining, he began to open up the shop.

Izumi nodded, and padded painfully through to the kitchen, filled up a large pan of water, and set it on the stove to heat, so that she could have warm water to clean the blood from her lower body. As she washed, she thought. Then, an idea having occurred to her, she could not extinguish it. In something like a daze, she dressed herself, took a large leather satchel that had been her travelling bag, and crept back through the house and out the back door, making for the woodshed. Her husband was busy with the day's first customers, so she was unnoticed as she bundled the bloody mess of sheets and child into the satchel, and departed down the road. Neighbours who knew her called out in greeting, or waved. Surely they noticed her flattened belly, and perhaps guessed at the truth, but nobody approached her.

An hour's walking brought her to the lakeshore. She loosed the small boat from its jetty, and without bothering to tip the pooled water from inside it, settled in the centre bench, with the satchel in the prow. Then, with weakened arms, pulled at the oars, travelling as quickly as she could to gain distance before she was discovered missing. Even accustomed to manual labour, her palms were ruptured and bleeding before she reached the island, and her shoulders shook with the effort. Still the rain fell, heavily spattering on the surface of the lake. The water was grey, and the sky overhead was grey. The trees that fringed the lake were vibrantly green with summer leaves.

At last, she reached the island shore, and leapt from the boat into the shallows to pull it ashore. Her head swam; why hadn't she taken any breakfast? She scooped handfuls of the teeth-achingly cold lake water into her mouth, an irony tang from the blood on her palms.

She placed the sheet-wrapped bundle on the ground and then, hastily, she traced a circle on the pebbly beach, using a stick of charcoal from her satchel. The symbols for carbon, building block of life, sodium and iron in the blood, hydrogen and oxygen for the air in the lungs, calcium and magnesium in the bones, aether in the vital spirit. The resulting circle was vast and intricate, and for a moment her courage almost failed her, as she tabulated all the ways it could go wrong. But the alternative was unthinkable, and there was no time to be lost.

She brought her hands together, feeling her way around the circle in her mind, and then brought them – palms down – to the black tracery to ignite the reaction. The impact hit her in the gut like a swift kick, knocking the breath from her. She gasped for air, and struggled to hold on to the vast process. She felt, rather than saw, that her consciousness was being drawn from the material universe, towards another. The join between them, really a rent in the fabric of space and time, was infinitesimal, but that was irrelevant. What was size without matter? The dizzying scale of this awareness made her feel light-headed, insane. Where and what was she?

A terrible pain brought her back to her body; her guts twisted and the matter inside her seemed to rend apart. She could not breathe, could not swallow, and her heart thundered. The pain was maddening, beyond endurance. She was an animal caught in a steel trap. She must die. Her eyes were open, unseeing, to the sky, and blood flowed from between her legs. Her life flowed into the circle, conducted away from her vivid consciousness and towards the gate.

She was overcome by pain, and fear of more pain and of death. With tremendous effort, she lifted her hands from the circle, breaking the circuit and terminating the reaction. She fell forward onto her face, and lay still on the pebbly ground, rain falling over her, mixing with blood and viscera. She had failed again, allowing her son's life to slip away because she could not offer up her own. She cried then, of loss and sorrow and bone-deep exhaustion.

She lay there still when they found her, a search party of concerned neighbours, friends and customers from the town and surrounding area. They carefully lifted her, wrapped her in blankets, and placed her in the hull of a larger boat. Her boat, they tied to the stern, so that it would be towed back to land. The satchel and sheet were recovered, but the corpse was not found. It was known that there were bears and wolves locally, and so it was assumed that it had been scavenged.

She woke in the middle of the following day, clean and warm in her own bed, weak beyond words, and still racked by savage pains. The sounds of business as usual came up through the floor, and the sun shone weakly through a fine mist of rain outside the window. Sitting up made her head spin. Standing was impossible. She waited, feeling hollow and cold, until Sig came to check on her, with a bowl of hot broth and a jug of clean water. His face was grim, but he sat gently on the bed, and scooped her into his arms.

"I'm sorry," she said, hoarsely, "I'm so sorry, love."

He did not rebuke her, although he was certainly angry, saying only;

"Never leave me."

"How am I alive?" she wanted to know.

"Who knows? The doctor is astounded. You have lost much blood, and many of your organs. You should be dead."

"Which organs?" she felt a stab of fear.

"Portions of your stomach, intestines and liver. Virtually all of your womb."

She had known this, somehow. They would never have another child.

"I'm sorry," she repeated, "I've been so thoughtless."

"It's in your nature," he said, without judgement, "But for once, listen to me. Rest. Eat. Sleep. I will join you later."

"Thank you. I hope you can forgive me."

In answer, he kissed her forehead, and lifted her, propped on some pillows, so that she could eat. Recovering her strength for who knew what next.