“I’m a mother,” she muttered.

Zuri raised her black brows. “I can see no other conclusion.”

She heard the sound of trickling water. The surgeon, washing his bloody hands in a basin.

“Well done,” he said, a neat smile on his face. “Very well done. Tell Lord Brock he might meet his son.”

Savine was vaguely tempted to swear at the surgeon again, but it would probably have been in bad taste now. And she was too busy staring at her baby’s face and smiling. Smiling in a weepy, trembly, utterly unguarded way that was quite unlike her.

A person. A tiny, helpless person, that had emerged from her body.

Savine had always scorned babies even more than pets. When other women cooed over them she used to smile indulgently, and say the things she was meant to say, and think to herself what ugly, wrinkly, pointless things these little shrieking people were, that needed help for everything and shat themselves once an hour.

They all say, Yours will seem beautiful, of course. In a smugly knowing way, as if shitting out a child comes with secret knowledge, like joining the Order of Magi. They all say it, but you tell yourself the poor things are just trying to wring some shred of advantage from the curse of parenthood and let them have their self-delusion.

Now it appeared they had been understating the case all along. Her own baby was astonishingly, breathtakingly beautiful, its every twitch a miracle. What a cliché.

“A boy,” whispered Savine. She vaguely remembered preferring a daughter. But now somehow a son was exactly the thing she had always wanted.

She could hear talking near the door. Men’s voices. Warm words. Congratulations. As though they had done any of the work. She heard the uneven thumping of crutch on boards. She looked up through her swimming eyes to see Leo standing over the bed. He had this odd slant to his shoulders, these days. One dropped, where his useless arm was tucked into his jacket, one high, with the effort of leaning on his crutch.

“There’s a lot of blood,” he croaked, eyes wide.

“Entirely normal,” said the surgeon. “No need to worry.”

“It’s a boy,” said Savine, smiling and crying at once.

His brow furrowed as he stared down at the baby’s tiny features. As though the whole business was coming as a total shock to him. “I have a son.”

“We have a son— Ah!” She gritted her teeth at a sudden, stabbing pain through her stomach, down into her legs. “Ah!” And another, even worse, that made her jerk up.

“What is it?”

“Take him,” she grunted, offering the baby out with trembling arms.

Leo tried to rest his crutch against the side of the bed, got his wrist tangled with it, was nearly knocked over as Zuri slipped around him. “Damn it!”

“Take him— Ah!” Savine arched her back. Another spasm of pain, much longer, much stronger, and she had to twist onto her side, kicking, whimpering, wriggling in her bloody sheets back onto her hands and knees, groaning for breath, shaking with weariness, trembling with fear.