Chapter 27: Blooded
The cold was a physical blow. It stole the breath from Astrid’s lungs and bit through the furs Birna had wrapped around her. Each step was a negotiation with her own body. Her legs trembled, not from fatigue, but from a deep, systemic betrayal. The bleeding was a steady, warm trickle down her inner thigh, a stark contrast to the freezing air. She could feel her strength leaching out into the snow with every footprint.
The baby—her daughter—was a silent, tense bundle against her chest. She hadn’t cried since they’d entered the trees. Astrid wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or a terror.
“Here,” Birna hissed, pulling her behind the massive, moss-covered trunk of a fallen oak. Its roots formed a tangled wall, creating a shallow, dark hollow beneath. It was not a cave. It was a hiding place for animals. “Down. Slowly.”
Astrid sank to her knees, then onto her side, curling instinctively around the baby. The world tilted, a nauseating swirl of black branches and white snow. Birna was already moving, scraping dead leaves and snow over the opening, weaving a crude screen of broken fir boughs. The light dimmed to a murky grey.
Silence pressed in, thicker than the canvas of the tent. It was the silence of held breath. Astrid listened past the thud of her own heart. Distantly, back toward the camp, she could hear the faint echo of shouts. No clash of steel. Just voices, calling to one another. Searching.
“It’s gone quiet,” Astrid whispered. Her lips were cracked and stiff.
“The thing or the men?” Birna whispered back, settling beside her, a knife appearing in her hand from a hidden sheath.
“Both.”
They waited. The cold seeped up from the ground. Astrid shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t pull at the raw, empty ache in her core. The baby made a small, snuffling sound. Astrid loosened the furs just enough to look.
In the gloom, the infant’s face was a pale smudge. Her eyes were closed, but her tiny mouth worked silently. A fierce, desperate love, sharp as a thorn, pierced Astrid’s exhaustion. She had thought she understood duty, sacrifice. This was different. This was a compulsion written in her very blood.
“She needs to feed,” Birna said softly. “It will help your body, too. Slow the flow.”
The mechanics of it felt impossibly clumsy. With Birna’s help, she managed. The sensation was bizarre, intensely personal and strangely utilitarian at once. There was a sharp pain, then a dull, pulling rhythm. The baby’s fierce, desperate suckling was the only sound in their hideaway.
Astrid watched the tiny ear, perfect as a shell, and tried not to think of Caius’s face as the tent collapsed. I’ll find you. A promise from a man who quoted timber taxes at a nightmare. She felt a sob building in her throat and choked it down. Crying was a luxury she couldn’t afford. The bleeding might get worse.
“Tell me a story,” Astrid whispered, needing to fill the silence, to anchor herself to something other than the damp cold and the fear.
Birna was quiet for a moment. “Which one?”
“The one about the winter your sister fell through the ice. The real one. Not the song.”
Birna let out a slow breath. “It was the ford at Grann’s Creek. Not a grand river. Just stupid, flat ice. She was chasing a fox pup. We heard the crack. It wasn’t a loud sound. Like a knuckle popping.” Her voice was low, even. “By the time I got to the hole, I couldn’t see her. Just black water. I didn’t think. I just went in. The cold… it doesn’t feel like cold. It feels like fire. And then like nothing at all. Like your body isn’t yours.”
Astrid listened, stroking her daughter’s damp hair.
“I found her boot. Kicked my way down, blind. Got her tunic. Pulled. The current wasn’t strong, but the weight was. Her weight, my weight, all the wool. I got her head up. She wasn’t breathing. Her face was the color of slate.” Birna paused. “I got us to the bank. I remember lying on the ice, hitting her chest, screaming at her. Not her name. Just curses. The foulest words I knew.”
“And she breathed.”
“She coughed. She lived. She has two children now.” Birna shifted, her shoulders brushing the earthen wall. “The songs say I fought the river spirit. They say I offered my own breath. It wasn’t like that. It was just… not letting go. It was ugly. And loud. And it worked.”
Astrid understood. The songs got it wrong. The heroics were just stubbornness, a refusal to accept the inevitable silence. She looked down at her daughter, now sleeping, a drop of milk on her chin. “What do we call her?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“I have a list,” Astrid murmured, her head swimming. “In my saddlebag. Names of warriors. Names of mountains.” They felt wrong now. Too heavy. This tiny creature had fought her way into a battlefield. She deserved a name that was hers, not an heirloom.
A twig snapped, not close, but not far enough. Birna’s hand clamped over Astrid’s wrist. They froze.
Footsteps. Crunching methodically through the crust of snow. One person. The rhythm was wrong for a panicked run or a cautious search. It was slow. Deliberate.
Astrid’s free hand found the hilt of Birna’s knife where it lay between them. Her fingers were numb. She couldn’t hold it properly.
The footsteps stopped. Maybe twenty paces away.
A man’s voice floated through the trees, frayed with exhaustion. “...structural integrity of a quadrant arch, however, relies entirely on the keystone’s ability to distribute vertical force into lateral…” It was Caius. Reciting architecture again. But his voice was a dry rasp, the words trailing off into coughs.
He was baiting the darkness. And he was walking right past them.
Astrid’s heart hammered against the baby’s back. She willed him to keep walking, to lead any watching thing away. But the footsteps didn’t move.
“Astrid.” He said her name, not loud. A statement. “I know you’re near. I can’t… I can’t see the trail. My head…” He coughed again, a wet, ugly sound. “I’m fairly certain I’m concussed. The tent pole was rather emphatic.”
He was hurt. He was standing out in the open, talking to the trees.
Birna’s eyes met Astrid’s in the dark. A silent question. Risk it?
Before Astrid could decide, the baby stirred. She let out a thin, reedy whimper, a sound no louder than a mouse’s sigh.
The footsteps shifted direction instantly. They came closer, slow and stumbling. Caius’s shape appeared at the edge of their hideaway, blotting out the grey light. He was a mess. One side of his face was a mask of dried blood from a gash above his temple. His fine clothes were torn and smeared with soot and frozen mud. He held a broken spear shaft like a walking stick.
He peered into the darkness of the hollow. His eyes, wide and struggling to focus, found hers.
For a long moment, he just stared. At her face, at the bundle in her arms. His expression was raw, stripped of all charm, all pretence. It was just sheer, undiluted relief. It crumpled into something else.
“Oh,” he breathed. The word held a universe.
He didn’t rush forward. He sank to his knees at the entrance, as if his legs had given out. “You’re alive.”
“You’re bleeding,” Astrid said, her voice rough.
“You’re bleeding more,” he said, his gaze dropping to the dark, frozen stain on the snow between her legs. His amateur diagnosis was horrifically accurate.
“The men?”
“Scattered. The thing… it lost interest when I ran. It feeds on concentrated fear. A breaking camp is a feast. A single idiot in the woods… less so.” He tried a smile. It was a terrible, lopsided thing. “I think I bored it away. Told it all about drainage irrigation in the southern vineyards. It was a real snore.”
Astrid almost laughed. It came out as a pained huff. “Come in here. You’re framed in the light.”
He crawled into the hollow, his movements stiff with cold and injury. The space was impossibly small with him in it. He smelled of sweat, blood, and cold air. He didn’t try to touch her, just curled his large body near the entrance, between them and the outside world, his back to them. A living barricade.
“Is she…” he started, then couldn’t finish.
“She’s whole,” Astrid said, repeating Birna’s words. “A girl.”
Caius nodded, his forehead resting against the frozen root. His shoulders began to shake. Silently. Astrid watched the tremors run through him, this prince who had quoted taxes at a monster. He was crying.
She had never seen him cry. She didn’t know what to do. So she spoke to his back. “She has your hair, I think. What little there is. Dark.”
He drew in a ragged breath. “Poor thing.” His voice was thick. “And your temper, undoubtedly. I heard her issuing complaints already.”
“She has a point. It’s cold.”
A genuine, shaky laugh escaped him. He turned his head, just enough to look at her over his shoulder. The blood on his face was startlingly dark. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He nodded, accepting this. His eyes drifted closed for a second. “The Gloom is still out there. It’s… lingering. Like a smell after the fire’s out. We can’t stay at the camp.”
“We can’t stay here,” Birna said flatly. “She’s bleeding still. The cold will kill her as surely as any shadow. We need real shelter. Heat.”
Caius was silent for a minute. Thinking. Astrid could see the effort it took. “There’s a place,” he said finally. “A hunting lodge. My great-uncle’s. It’s derelict. But it’s stone. It’s on the maps. Half a day’s ride south, in a fold of the hills. Maybe… three hours on foot? In good conditions.”
These were the worst conditions imaginable.
“Can you find it?” Astrid asked.
“I have to.” He opened his eyes. The decision cleared some of the haze from them. “We wait for full dark. The men will have either regrouped or been taken. The thing will be… digesting. We move then. Quietly.”
It was a plan. A terrible one. Astrid looked at the tiny face nestled in the crook of her arm. Three hours. She wasn’t sure she could stand, let alone walk.
“I’ll carry you,” Caius said, as if reading her thoughts.
“Don’t be stupid. You can barely walk yourself.”
“Then we’ll crawl,” he said, with a finality that brooked no argument. “But we’re not dying in this hole.”
The baby made a small, sighing sound in her sleep. Astrid felt another warm trickle of blood seep from her. She pressed her legs together. She would have to bind herself with something. Tear her cloak.
“Alright,” she whispered. “We crawl.”
Caius gave a single, firm nod. He turned back to watch the woods, a sentinel once more. The light began to fail, the grey twilight deepening to a cold, blue gloom. Not the Gloom. Just night. Natural and deep and hiding them all.
Astrid closed her eyes, trying to store what little warmth she had. She felt the baby’s heartbeat, a frantic bird against her own slowing one. Three hours. She focused on the name list in her mind, discarding each one. None fit. The name would come, or it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. Only the getting there did.
Outside their fragile shelter, the Blackwood Pass held its breath. The hunt was paused, not over. Somewhere in the gathering dark, something old and hungry listened to the silence, waiting for a fresh wave of fear to ride.
Somewhere in the gathering dark, something old and hungry listened to the silence, waiting for a fresh wave of fear to ride. Inside the hollow, the fear was a quiet, metallic taste. It wasn’t the screaming kind. It was the slow, patient kind that knew how to wait.
“It’s time,” Birna whispered, her voice the soft scrape of a whetstone.
Caius moved first, uncoiling his stiff body from the entrance. He peered out, a dark cutout against the lesser dark. “Clear. For now.” He turned back, his movements painfully deliberate. “Alright. How do we do this?”
Astrid tried to push herself up on her elbows. The world swam, a nauseating carousel of black and grey. A fresh, warm seep of blood made her grit her teeth. “I walk.”
“You absolutely will not,” Caius said. He shrugged out of his heavy, fur-lined surcoat, the fabric torn from the tent pole collapse. He laid it on the frozen ground beside her. “Slide onto this. We’ll use it as a sled. Birna and I can pull.”
“That’s the most undignified thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s that or I carry you over my shoulder like a sack of grain,” he said, his tone leaving no room for debate. “The grain option involves a lot more jostling. For the bleeding.”
He had a point. A terrible, humiliating point. With Birna’s help, she shifted her weight onto the stiff fabric, the baby a secure, warm lump tucked inside her own leathers against her chest. The movement sent a wave of dizziness so severe she saw pulsing lights.
“Easy,” Birna murmured, her hand a firm pressure on Astrid’s shoulder.
Caius took the two sleeves of the surcoat, knotting them into crude handles. Birna fashioned a harness from a belt and a length of torn tent rope she’d had the foresight to stuff in her tunic. They worked in efficient, wordless sync, two people from different worlds building a single, ridiculous machine of survival.
The pulling started. It was not smooth. Every root, every stone, sent a jolt through Astrid’s body. She clenched her jaw, focusing on the canopy of tangled branches sliding past overhead, on the rhythm of Caius’s labored breathing ahead of her. He was hurt, too. She could hear it in each exhale.
“Left here,” he grunted, changing direction. “The map showed a game trail. It should be… yes.”
The trail was a slight depression, a ribbon of slightly less impossible terrain. The going became marginally easier. The silence around them felt watchful. The Blackwoods had a presence, a patient, vegetative intelligence that noted their passage.
“Tell me about the lodge,” Astrid said, needing to pin her mind to a future point.
“Moldy,” Caius panted, dragging her over a bump. “Full of mice. The chimney probably draws more smoke into the room than out of it. My great-uncle Alaric was a terrible hunter. He built it to drink brandy and complain about his feet. It does, however, have four walls. And a door that locks.”
“Luxury.”
“I thought you’d appreciate it.”
They lapsed back into silence, save for the scrape of the surcoat and their breathing. The baby slept, a miracle in the midst of the jarring motion. Astrid’s sense of time frayed. It was measured in pains: the deep, grinding ache, the sharp sting of a contraction as her womb tried to close, the relentless, worrying trickle between her legs.
After an eternity of cold and shadow, Caius stopped. “Look.”
Through a break in the trees, on a distant slope, a angular shape sat dark against the snow. A squat, stone building with a slumped roof. A thin curl of smoke, pale grey against the indigo night, rose from its chimney.
“Someone’s there,” Birna said, her hand going to her knife.
“Or something,” Caius replied, his voice low. He squinted. “That’s cook-fire smoke. Not peat. Wood.” He let out a shaky breath that clouded in the air. “Jenkins. Has to be. He was obsessed with that damned kettle. If he survived, he’d make a fire. He’d make soup.”
It was the thinnest of hopes. They dragged toward it.
The last hundred yards were a blurred agony of incline. Astrid faded in and out, the world receding to a narrow tunnel focused on the square of orange light that now glowed in a downstairs window. A human light. Caius’s knocks on the heavy wooden door were more like exhausted slaps.
The door opened a crack. A wide, terrified eye peered out, then widened further. “Your Highness?” The voice was reedy with shock. Jenkins, the cook, his apron still streaked with soot and old broth, yanked the door open. “By all the gods, you’re alive—”
“Inside,” Caius rasped, stumbling over the threshold and pulling Astrid’s makeshift sled after him.
Warmth hit them like a physical wall. It stank of woodsmoke, wet wool, and unwashed men. Four other soldiers huddled around a fire in the great hearth, their faces gaunt with exhaustion. They stared, then scrambled to their feet.
Birna took charge. “You, clear that table. You, boil more water. Now.” She helped Astrid off the surcoat and onto a threadbare rug before the fire. The heat was almost painful.
Caius sank onto a three-legged stool, his head in his hands. “Report.”
A soldier with a bandaged arm spoke. “We lost six, sire. To the… the whispers. The rest scattered. We five found each other. Found this place. We didn’t know if you…”
“The creature?”
“Gone, sire. At dawn, the feeling just… lifted. Like a fog burning off. We haven’t heard a peep since.”
Caius nodded, too tired to feel relief. His eyes found Astrid. Birna was already working, with a soldier’s aid, to get her out of the soaked furs and into a clean, dry blanket one of the men produced from a mildewed chest. The baby began to cry, a healthy, furious sound that echoed off the stone walls.
“Someone find me honey, or sugar,” Birna commanded. “For the water. For her.” She didn’t specify which ‘her’ she meant.
Astrid drank the sweetened water they brought, gulping it down. She was shaking uncontrollably, her body reacting to the sudden warmth. The bleeding, she knew, had not stopped. The blanket between her legs was already darkening. Birna saw it too. Their eyes met. This was beyond a midwife’s skill. This needed a surgeon, a physician, clean sheets, and rest.
Caius watched this silent exchange. He pushed himself up, every movement telegraphing pain. He walked to the grimy window and looked out at the paling sky. The Blackwood Pass was just a line of trees now, innocent in the weak morning light. The Gloom was gone.
He turned back to the room. “Saddle the horses. The three that are left. We ride for Eldoria. Now.”
“Sire, the men are exhausted,” the bandaged soldier said.
“I don’t care,” Caius said, and his voice was flat, princely, and absolute. “You will tie her to a horse if you have to. You will ride in shifts. We are leaving this forest today.”
He walked to Astrid and knelt, ignoring the watching men. He touched her cheek, his fingers cold. “You hear that? We’re going home.”
“It’s not my home,” she whispered, but there was no fight in it.
“It has a roof. And doctors. And no whispering trees.” He managed a ghost of his old smile. “Humor me.”
THE NEXT MORNING, THE GLOOM WAS GONE. THEY RODE SOUTH, BACK TO ELDORIA.
They had found only three horses that hadn’t bolted into the woods. Caius rode with Astrid mounted before him, his arms a cage around her and the baby to keep them from sliding off. She was tied to the saddle, and to him, with strips of cloth. Her head lolled against his chest. Her strength was waning, leaching away with the steady, continuous bleeding that had not ceased throughout the long, fearful night.
Birna rode ahead, a grim scout. The three remaining soldiers followed, their eyes scanning the peaceful, sun-dappled trail with a permanent flinch.
Astrid drifted in a haze of pain and warmth from Caius’s body. She could feel the slow, insistent soak of blood, a private, relentless crisis. The baby slept, worn out from feeding, a small, warm weight in the sling Birna had fashioned.
“Stay awake,” Caius murmured into her hair, his voice a vibration against her back. “Tell me what to name her.”
“Not… a mountain,” Astrid slurred.
“No. Not a mountain.” He was quiet for a long moment, the only sound the crunch of hooves on the thawing path. “What about Lyra?”
Astrid forced her eyes open. She looked down at the dark hair, the tiny, perfect ear. “Why?”
“It’s a constellation. The lyre. My mother loved the stars. She said music was the one thing that could outlast anything.” He adjusted his grip on the reins. “It’s not a warrior’s name. It’s a maker’s name.”
A name that held music, and light, and something that lasted. Not a shield, but a song. Astrid watched the southern road unwind before them, leading out of the shadows of the Blackwood. Each step of the horse was a small agony. Each step took her further from the wild North that was her home, and deeper into the unknown world of courts and politics she despised.
But it also took her toward a roof, and a doctor, and a chance.
She felt the warm trickle, persistent as time. She leaned back into Caius’s solidity.
“Lyra,” she breathed, testing the sound. It was soft. It was new. She closed her eyes. “Alright.”