Chapter 15: Ember's Five Days
The five days passed the way a match burns. Ember ate breakfast at Katherine's right hand the morning after her planting, and by the second morning her belly had begun to show, a small firm swell under the cloth wrap she refused to replace with anything softer. By the third she wore nothing but an open robe because nothing else fit, and the ember veins had started to climb her stomach in branching lines, faint at first, like frost forming on a window in reverse.
Alexa moved into the house on the fourth day. She brought her obstetrical kit, a stethoscope that proved useless, and a notebook of her own, and she set up a chair beside Ember's bed in the end room and refused all offers to make her more comfortable.
"Textbooks don't have a chapter for this," she said, pressing both broad palms flat against Ember's blazing belly. "So I'm writing one."
"Feel free," Ember said. "I'll tell you if you're wrong."
Under Alexa's hands the baby moved, and where it moved the veins flared bright, a lantern lit from inside. Alexa's face went carefully still, the face she wore over a mare in difficult labor, and then she grinned down at Jordan, who stood at the foot of the bed with a pitcher of water nobody had asked for.
"A girl," she said. "Strong heartbeat. Faster than anything human, but steady. She's been turning since noon. Presenting right."
"Since noon," Jordan said. "Mara's been in labor for two days with her second."
"Mara's baby is human. This one has a schedule." Alexa looked back down at Ember. "How do you know it's a girl? Your mother couldn't tell with you either, Cecil said."
"The fire keeps records." Ember settled deeper into the pillows Katherine had ordered brought up, silk against her scorched skin, and her tail curled around her own ankle the way it did when she was pleased. "I heard it. A girl. She already has a temper."
"She gets that from nobody in this room, I'm sure," Alexa said dryly, and wrote in her notebook.
By the evening of the fifth day the whole house had found reasons to drift toward the end room. Katherine arrived first, eight months round herself now, and took the chair Alexa had vacated and then ordered Alexa to bring back a second chair. Celeste came with warm milk already leaking from the effort of climbing the stairs, and nursed Katherine absently while they both watched the veins on Ember's belly blaze and dim, blaze and dim, like coals breathing. Cecil sat against the headboard with newborn Ember's half-sister, the first daughter, asleep across her lap, one molten-gold eye cracked open and refusing to miss anything.
The sisters filled the floor. Fourteen of them sat cross-legged on the deep carpet in the lamplight, the way they had sat for the welcome, and Liana was shushing people who weren't talking. Serana's belly had just begun to show, a secret Katherine touched once in passing and said nothing about aloud.
Jordan stood at the foot of the bed again. He had not been given a task and had not asked for one, which Katherine had noticed and was pointedly not commenting on.
The heat came at midnight.
It rolled off Ember in a wave that reached the doorway, and the lamplight shivered in every fixture, and Alexa was on her feet with her hands on that blazing belly before anyone else had finished a breath. The veins went white, all of them at once, and the room smelled of struck flint and warm smoke.
"Now," Alexa said. "Everybody breathing. Good. She's crowning and the whole crown is lit, I want you all to see this, none of the books will ever believe me."
Ember gripped the headboard the way her mother had, both hands, and the silk smoked under her fingers, and she made one sound. It was low thunder, but smaller than Cecil's, a girl's thunder, and it rolled out the open window and across the yard, and Jordan would learn later that the horses at the stable had answered it.
The child came into Alexa's waiting hands slick and glowing, veins of ember light running down her tiny arms and legs like the filaments of a bulb, and she cried once, a struck-bell note one octave above her sister's.
"A girl," Alexa said, and her voice cracked on it, which Jordan had never heard. "Strong. Loud. She's perfect."
She was awake at once. That was the thing that stopped the room. Cecil's daughter had opened her eyes within the minute, and this one had them open before Alexa finished lifting her, molten gold, already tracking, already counting faces. The glow under her skin settled as Alexa wrapped her, dimming to a faint warmth like a banked fire.
"She's measuring us," Celeste said softly. "Look at her. She's doing what Ember did."
"She's deciding who's worth the effort," Ember said from the pillows, sweat-soaked and glowing and utterly pleased with herself. Her tail uncurled from her ankle and wrapped Cecil's wrist, and Cecil's hand closed around it without looking.
The baby's gaze went around the room the way a landlord's hand goes along a row of chairs. Katherine. Celeste. Alexa. The fourteen sisters on the floor, and the eldest of them leaning forward with her milk-slick chin on her hand exactly as she had leaned for Ember. And then it came to Jordan at the foot of the bed, and stopped, and stayed.
She looked at him for a long time. The room went quiet enough to hear the lamp filaments hum.
"Well," Katherine said finally, from her chair, and her voice was dry and warm at once. "She was born knowing whose she is, apparently. Same as the last one." She turned her head. "Jordan."
"I know," he said.
"Naming's yours. Older custom. The one who planted her." Katherine folded her hands over her own vast belly. "Take your time. But know that she's going to sit at my table someday, that one, you can see it already, and the name has to carry."
The baby kept looking at him. Ember watched from the pillows with her too-many-teeth grin arriving, and Cecil watched with that open, unreadable expression Jordan had seen once before.
He came around the bed and sat on the edge, next to his daughter, this impossible warm parcel in Alexa's arms. Her skin gave off heat like a stone left in the sun. She turned her face toward him and did not blink.
"She'll light the bowl someday too," Ember said quietly. "I can tell. She was born knowing that much at least. Ask her what she wants to be called. Go on."
Jordan looked at his daughter's gold eyes, and the ember veins pulsing slow under her new skin, and he heard himself ask it.
"Say your name," he said. "If you have one."
The baby did not answer in words. She was minutes old, her fingers curled around Alexa's thumb, her gold eyes fixed on his face, and whatever the fire had put in her, it was not speech yet.
"She can't talk," Celeste said gently. "Ember could. But this one's been out for two minutes."
"She'll grow into it," Ember said from the pillows, unbothered, sweat cooling along her jaw. "I was walking by midnight. She'll be faster. I could tell she was impatient from the third day."
Katherine leaned forward in her chair, one hand flat on the vast curve of her own belly, and studied the newborn with the same measuring look she had once turned on Cecil herself.
"Then we hold the name until she's ready to claim it," Katherine said. "A name carried before it's earned is a costume. This house has never once dressed a child up as an adult, and it isn't starting tonight."
"She'll be grown by tomorrow," Ember said.
"Then tomorrow she can tell us who she is." Katherine settled back. "Jordan, you hold the right of it either way. That doesn't expire."
Jordan sat on the edge of the bed a while longer, his daughter's heat soaking through the blanket into his thigh, and watched her watch him. The ember veins under her new skin pulsed slow and even, a banked fire learning its own rhythm, and her grip on Alexa's thumb was already strong enough to leave the veterinarian smiling in spite of herself.
"She's got her mother's hands," Alexa said. "Grip like a foal standing for the first time. She'll be fine."
Jordan reached out and pressed one fingertip, careful, to the small hot palm. It closed around it.
"Rose," he said, quietly, testing it against the room. "No. Something that keeps. She'll need something that keeps." He looked up at the women arranged around the bed, his mother, his lover, his sister's sisters, fourteen half-sisters on the carpet, and shook his head. "Not tonight. Katherine's right. She'll tell us."
The night passed in shifts. Celeste nursed Katherine and then, at Cecil's nod, sat on the edge of the bed and let the newborn fasten on, and her milk came down for a child that was not hers and did not need it, because in this house that had stopped mattering years ago. The sisters filed out in twos and threes near dawn. Serana stayed last, her hand resting a moment on her own small secret, and looked at the glowing infant with an expression Jordan couldn't read and didn't try to.
By morning the girl had doubled. By the following evening she stood holding the bedpost, willow-thin, horns curving, and her first full sentence, spoken to the room at large, was a demand for breakfast. She still had not offered a name. Katherine did not ask. The household learned to call her nothing, and she answered to it, which everyone agreed was very much the family way.
On her third day she walked into the kitchen, pulled out the chair at Katherine's right hand that everyone knew was not hers, sat down anyway, and said, "Ask me now."
Jordan set down the pan he was scrubbing. The whole table went quiet, fifteen women and one man, and the girl looked across the room at him with her mother's gold eyes and her grandmother's patience, and waited.
"I asked you the night you were born," Jordan said. "You didn't answer."
"I didn't know it yet. Now I do." She folded her hands on the table, absurdly formal, and the ember veins in her forearms pulsed once. "Sear. Sear Daly."
"Sear," Katherine repeated, and something in her face suggested the name had passed an inspection the girl couldn't see. "Fire takes to it. It carries."
"It's accurate," Sear said, and her grin arrived, too many teeth, third generation of the exact same grin. "I checked."
Jordan laughed before he could stop himself, and the table broke into noise around them, and Maren went to get pie, and the name went onto the slate by the patio door under the cribs, a spare that Mara had insisted on eighteen years ago finally finding its occupant.
Sear grew the rest of the way over that week, filling out into a tall, broad-shouldered young woman who shadowed Alexa at the clinic and asked Mara questions about the copper vessel that made Mara's pen go still. She sat at Katherine's right hand every morning and never once had to be told the seating order was non-negotiable. She learned to milk the goats, badly, and to ride, well, and she stood in the stable yard on her seventh day watching Jordan work a mare's hoof and said, "I was born knowing the bowl can be lit. I wasn't born knowing what it costs. Teach me that part."
"That's the custom," Jordan said. "Nobody's a repeat."
Sear followed him along the rail, her heat radiating through her sleeves into the cool stable air. The mare shifted under Jordan's hands and he set the hoof down, wiped his palms on his thighs, and turned to face her.
"Costs start with materials," he said. "Copper vessel, real flame, and a formula you burn on purpose. Mara got it wrong twice and got your mother. Lucky, but luck isn't a teacher."
"And after the flame?" Her gold eyes didn't move from his.
"After the flame, you live with what walks out of it." He nodded toward the pasture gate. "Come on. Mara keeps the bowl locked, but she'll show you the copper. First lesson's standing right now."
Sear's ember veins pulsed once, and she fell into step beside him.
Mara met them at the clinic door with the copper vessel already in her hands, and Sear held it the way other girls held babies. She asked about the flame's angle, the draft, the intent, and Mara answered with her pen going, and Jordan watched his daughter learn in an afternoon what had taken the household eighteen years. By the time the light went long through the clinic shutters, Sear set the vessel down and looked at him.
"You've been deciding something since the stable rail," she said. "I can feel you thinking. It's loud."
"It's a custom," Jordan said. "The welcome. Every daughter gets one, administered by me. Serana. The rotation. Ember."
"I know the theory." Her grin arrived, too many teeth. "The theory was insufficient for Ember too. She told me. In detail. At breakfast. Twice."
They walked back to the end room, the one with the bed nobody used, and Sear closed the door behind them with her tail, which Jordan was learning not to stare at. The lamplight pooled on her lava-pale skin. The ember veins ran fine as hair down her collarbones and faded under the cloth wrap at her waist.
"You're nervous again," she said.
"That was a surprise last time too."
"Keep it." She untied the wrap and let it fall, and stood in the heat of her own light, willow-slim and broad-shouldered, small high breasts with wide dark nipples already beading pearly. "I have that already. I know what it's for now. Ember explained that part the loudest."
He knelt and put his mouth on her, and the first mouthful flooded thick and sweet, smoke made liquid, warming him from the throat down. Her thunder came out low and small and her hands found his hair. He fed twice from each side until her nipples dripped freely down her stomach, and then he laid her back on the bed.
She was scalding and wet, the glow visible between her thighs like coals under ash, and she pulled him in with her ankles before he was halfway seated. The heat closed around him in rings, new muscle but quick, and she arched and cried out at the depth.
"Move," she ordered. Third generation of the exact same word.
He drove into her hard, long strokes that slapped their bodies together, and her milk jumped with each thrust, thin white lines spurting from her breasts to land on his chest and the sheets. Her nails scored warm lines down his back. The bed smoked in small brown rings under her heels.
"Harder," Sear said. "I was born knowing you can."
He braced one hand on the headboard and gave her everything, the whole weight of him behind each stroke, and she met every one with her hips, her tail gripping his thigh, the light inside her climbing up her stomach vein by vein. Her breasts swung and leaked and then began to spray in earnest, little pulses of white with every impact, milking down over both of them.
"I can feel it," she gasped. "Coming. Don't slow down."
He didn't. He hammered into the furnace of her and her inner rings began their ripple and she came apart with a flash that lit the room gold, a thunderclap of heat rolling off the bed, and her breasts let go. The milk came in bursts, then in streams, thick pearly ropes arcing off her chest and hitting the floorboards on both sides of the bed, spattering and pooling, and it kept coming as she rolled through it, her whole body lit, his name in her mouth in a voice one octave above her mother's.
He spilled into her deep, and felt the flutter of the planting, unmistakable, and she glowed from throat to knees.
When he could move again he rolled off onto his elbow and looked down. The floor was white. An inch of milk stood pooled across the boards in a wide ring around the bed, lapping at the bedposts, still spreading.
"Ember didn't do that," Jordan said.
"Ember didn't come as hard as I just did." Sear lay gleaming and boneless, her nipples still dripping slow fat drops that ticked onto the sheets. "Note the record. Someone should tell Alexa. She's writing a chapter on this."
"Someone should tell Rosa. She's going to mop."
"Rosa can bill the fire." Sear pressed a hand to her lower belly and the glow there pulsed once, deciding. "A girl. Already. Five days, then we do all this again at the end room's expense."
He got up on unsteady legs and found a towel, and the milk soaked it through in one pass. Under the door, faintly, Liana's voice: "Why does the floor squeak? Did something flood?"
Sear laughed, low thunder struck bright, and sat up with milk running in white lines down her stomach.
"Get Katherine," she said. "I'm telling her about the floor before the fire does."