The night began like any other. Kyrwan came home from school to the flat. It was early spring, but the smell of snow still hung in the air, and he knew that there was at least one more blizzard in store before the warm weather came again. He curled up by the hearth, as he did on cold nights when Kyla was working, and drifted off to sleep with the dying embers warming his back.

The fire was out when Kyla yanked him awake. She pulled him up with both hands on his collar. Her face in the moonlight was fierce and almost frightening. He swallowed a scream.

"Fetch a midwife," she said, "Tell them to go to Dayven's flat across the street. Don't take no for an answer."

It took a moment for his sluggish brain to register the command, "What's happened?" he asked.

"Don't ask questions!" she nearly screamed, and he could hear the panic in her voice. Without being asked again, he pulled on his breeches and threw a jacket over his undershirt. He took off into the frigid night, half walking and half running up the hill to where the midwife, and old crone named Nadie lived. The wind sliced into his lungs like so many knives, but he did not let up. He had seen Kyla beside herself with fear once or twice before, but he knew in his heart that something awful had happened.

He pounded on the door, once, twice. He stood there, breathing the air, trying to calm the fire in his lungs. Finally, he saw a candle get lit in the window upstairs and heard the creaking of stairs as someone came to the door.

It was the old biddy herself who answered him, her snow-white hair loose and hanging like silvery curtains around her knotted walnut face, which was lit eerily from below by the dancing flame in her candle-holder.

"What do you want, lad?" she asked, "It's past midnight."

"My sister needs you," he said, "Please, it's an emergency."

"Your sister, eh?" Nadie asked, "Does your sister have coin enough to get an old woman out of bed at this hour?"

"Please, ma'am," he said, summoning ounce of charm he had, "She's awful scared."

"I know women who've labored through the night without my benefit and given birth to many a healthy babe. Are you sure it can't wait until morning?"

"I know she'll pay you whatever it takes," he lied, "And she ain't having a baby."

"Really," Nadie said. She held the candle in her hand closer to him, "Well someone's bleeding an awful lot."

He looked down, and caught his breath to see that the place where Kyla had gripped him by the shoulders was now marked by two rusty handprints.

"Please ma'am," he said again, "Please."

"Very well," Nadie grumped, "But tell her the next time she gets knocked up that I like to meet my patients before they're all screaming and bleeding and pushing forth another sorry bastard."

He skipped along the street, the surprisingly nimble midwife keeping up with him the entire way. Thoughts raced through his head. Kyla's face had been pale, but she did not look injured. And she certainly wasn't with child. He'd seen pregnant women before, skinny and frazzled with their bellies blown out like sails on a ship, distending from their otherwise bony frames. Kyla always glowed with health, and her stomach was flat as it had ever been.

He heard the screaming almost as soon as he opened the door to the stairwell. It was a woman, or a man in such severe pain that his voice took on a high and hysterical quality. It chilled him to the bone, more so than any cold on the wind had. To Kyrwan's frustration, Nadie took her time with the winding stairs.

He burst into the flat. On the floor was a ratty mattress stuffed with straw, the walls lined with shelves. Kyla stood over the woman on the bed. Dayven was pacing from wall to wall, his green eyes wild and terrified. The woman on the bed barely had a face, her cheeks and eyes were so swollen. As she screamed, blood trickled from her mouth. She was convulsing, and he looked down to see that she was also bleeding from between her legs.

"About fucking time!" Dayven exclaimed. He took the old woman by the elbow and yanked her roughly towards the bed.

"If you touch me like that again I will curse you so that your manhood shrivels and blows away," Nadie said simply, jerking her arm back, "Get out of here, this is not a place for men."

"Like balls it isn't! That's my son!" he roared.

"And she's your wife!" Kyla shrieked, "And look what's happened to her! Get out!"

Kyrwan backed off towards the door, but Nadie stopped him. "You ain't a man yet, and we need the help. You, husband. Go fetch a priest, make yourself useful. I can see to it the child's delivered, but there's no way this girl's going to see the dawn without divine intervention."

The woman on the bed had stopped screaming and started making a horrible, pathetic mewling noise, half moaning and half sobbing.

"Don't look," Kyla commanded him. She moved away from the bed and moved to the corner, pulling Kyrwan towards her and hiding his head in her bosom.

"Boil some water, boy," Nadie said, "You, girl, come hold her down by her shoulders. There's no way we're getting this child from there to hear if she keeps thrashing around like that. Did her husband do this?"

"No," Kyla said, "But he might as well have."

Kyrwan put a kettle on the fire, and pretended to be watching it, all the while stealing glances at the woman. The midwife had peeled off her shift, and she lay naked. He saw her breasts, swollen and covered in red welts sprawl out across her chest. There were bruises on her throat, too, and he could have sworn he could make out the shape of a handprint where someone with huge fingers had choked her. Worst of all, though, was her belly. She wasn't that pregnant, he could tell, but she was certainly showing, and the skin of her belly rippled with movement as though inside her, a tiny life were writhing for its very existence, just as she was.

"There's no saving the child," Nadie said after about fifteen minutes of poking and prodding the woman, "If we don't get it out of her and do something to stop the bleeding, they'll both die."

"But it's not dead," Kyla said, "It's moving."

"It's only a matter of time," Nadie said, "We can lose the baby, or the baby and the mother. I can tell you which one I'd choose if I were in her position." Without further ado, the midwife rummaged through her bag, "After this she won't conceive again. Might be a blessing, if this is the kind of life she's leading."

"Can she swallow?" Kyla asked as the older woman pulled out a vial of an evil-looking dark brown liquid.

"Boy!" Nadie exclaimed.

"No, I don't want him seeing this!" Kyla protested.

"Hold her down," Nadie said, "Boy, come pinch her nose so she opens her mouth. She's delirious."

Cautiously, Kyrwan approached the woman from the head of the mattress. Kyla stood over her holding her shoulders down. Nadie insinuating herself between them, and when the woman had opened her mouth to take a breath, she emptied the vial down her throat. Kyrwan jumped back as he heard her gag. Nadie held her mouth shut and her lips closed with the wiry strength that old woman often possess. After a long minute, she let her go. She fell back on the bed, more blood dripping from her mouth.

"What's happening?" she asked. She turned her face, for her eyes were swollen shut.

"You're dying," Nadie said, "If you don't stop it now, you'll never come back to us. Now lie still, you're not going to like this."

The woman turned her head then. Her eyes opened a bit, as much as they could. She looked at Kyrwan without seeing him, her eyes were fierce and golden. It was Addie, the girl who'd given him the rent money. He couldn't bear to look at her face, scarred and swollen, or to hear her voice distorted with pain. He turned away, and stuck his fingers in his ears, staring at the fire in the hearth, wishing the rushing blood in his ears would die down. Is that what happened if you were hurt in a way you couldn't recover from? The blood just rushing from you? Soaking the sheets and dripping to the floor?

Kyla came up behind him and held him tightly. "You're being very brave," she said, "Thank you for your help. I need you to do one more thing?"

"What is it?"

"Take this," she said, handing him a wooden box, the sort that potion vials came in from the glassblower, "Throw it in the river, and whatever you do, don't look inside."

Why anyone had ever bothered telling a twelve year old boy not to look at something, especially when he had just force-fed Gods knew what to a pregnant and beaten woman, Kyrwan didn't know. He went to the river, to the place where he'd seen hitmen dispose of their kills. He watched them sometimes. The current there sucked the bodies underneath until they went way out to sea. Nobody was there, it must have been the wee hours of the morning. The moon was high, though, and he didn't need to light a match to see where the black waters lapped at the banks. He paused a moment.

Don't look inside.

He took a breath, and opened the box.

It was tiny, no bigger than a baby rabbit, and blue. He stepped forward into the moonlight. It had all the parts he had. Nose, mouth, fingers, toes, but all too impossibly tiny to live. Its little mouth was open impotently. He stared at it in morbid fascination, his eyes drifting over its arms, hands, all coated in blood. He stepped closer to the river.

And then he saw it. Clear as day, a tiny, perfect handprint against the top of the box.

It'd been alive. Drawn breath. Summoned all of its meager strength to throw itself against the top of its coffin. And then it had died. He'd carried it – had it died while he carried it?

He slipped forward and tossed it into the river. It floated a moment, and was sucked down by the current. Gods. Gods almighty, you expect us to bow and scrape to you and yet you allow things like this to happen?! He fell to his knees and gave up his dinner there on the bank. Retching, he pulled himself up, he sprinted all the way back home and pulled the covers over his head.