"Sit down, you great fool, before you drop my patient on my own floor."
Maela did not care that I outranked the ground she stood on. She was Nightriver's healer, old and square-handed and gloriously unimpressed, and she pressed her palms to the swell and read it the way I read wounds and gave her face away to no one, which I loved her for, because I would have read her face and it would have undone me.
"Days," she said. "Maybe fewer. This child is in a hurry the like of which I have never felt. And you are planning to spend those days doing what, exactly."
"Emptying a holdfast," I said.
Maela looked at Dain. Dain looked at me. And for once in this whole argument, the Lycan King and I were on the same side, which frightened me more than the labor had.
"No," they said, close enough to t
