The infant shrieks; an icy rain batters the roof. She tries bracing him upright with her thighs while squeezing a breast with both hands, but she can’t get his lips to form a seal. His mouth gulps; his throat trembles; he loses far more milk than he gets.

Amani, the eldest daughter, left hours ago to summon the men down from the trees; they’ll be hurrying the team home by now. The two younger daughters glance from their mother to the newborn and back again as though trying to understand if such a face is permissible. The midwife sends one to the river for water and the other to bury the afterbirth and it’s fully dark and the child is still howling when they hear the dogs, then the bells of Leaf and Needle, their oxen, as they stop outside the byre.

Grandfather and Amani come through the door aglitter in ice, their eyes wild. “He fell, the horse—” Amani says, but when she sees the baby’s face, she stops. From behind her Grandfather says, “Your husband went ahead, but the horse must have slipped in the dark, and the river, and—”

Terror fills the cottage. The newborn wails; the midwife edges toward the door, a dark and primeval fear warping her expression.

The farrier’s wife warned them that revenants had been making mischief on the mountain all winter, slipping through locked doors, sickening pregnant women and suffocating infants. The farrier’s wife said they should leave a goat tied to a tree as an offering, and pour a pot of honey in a creek for good measure, but her husband said they could not spare the goat, and she did not want to give up the honey.

Pride.

Every time she shifts, a little stroke of lightning discharges in her abdomen. With every passing heartbeat, she can sense the midwife hurrying the story from house to house. A demon born. His father dead.

Grandfather takes the crying child and unwraps him on the floor and places a knuckle between his lips and the boy falls quiet. With his other hand he nudges apart the cleft in the infant’s upper lip.

“Years ago, on the far side of the mountain, there was a man who had a split under his nose like this. A good horseman, once you forgot how ugly he was.”

He hands him back and brings the goat and cow in from the weather, then goes back into the night to unyoke the oxen, and the eyes of the animals reflect the glow of the hearth, and the daughters crowd their mother.

“Is it a jinn?”

“A fiend?”

“How will it breathe?”

“How will it eat?”

“Will Grandfather put it on the mountain to die?”

The child blinks up at them with dark, memorizing eyes.