Where Two Loyalties Meet

Three

The clinic at the edge of Carrow's Peak was not much to look at.

One story. White walls gone slightly yellow with age. A waiting room with four plastic chairs and a dying fern in the corner that nobody had gotten around to throwing out. It smelled like antiseptic and something faintly floral, like someone had sprayed air freshener to cover the antiseptic and then given up halfway through.

Nyra had been coming here for her checkups since her fifth month. The doctor who ran it — a quiet older man named Dr. Hess — had retired two months ago and moved to be closer to his grandchildren. The midwife who replaced him was a woman named Constance.

Constance was somewhere in her fifties, gray-haired, unhurried, with the kind of face that had stopped being surprised by anything years ago. She had asked Nyra exactly three questions at their first meeting. Medical history. Allergies. Emergency contact.

Nyra had said none, none, and none.

Constance had written it all down without blinking and that had been that.

It was the middle of a Thursday night in July when Nyra knocked on the clinic's side door with one hand pressed to the wall beside it and her breath coming in slow, deliberate counts.

Constance opened it, took one look at her, and stepped back.

"Come on then," she said simply.

It was not easy.

Nyra had known it wouldn't be. She had read everything she could get her hands on, borrowed every book from the small library two streets over, prepared herself as best a person could prepare for something that was ultimately not preparable for. She knew what to expect.

Knowing didn't make it easier. It just made her less surprised by how hard it was.

She didn't scream. She wanted to — God, she wanted to — but she pressed her lips together and breathed through it because screaming felt like losing something she needed to keep. Control, maybe. Or just the sense that she was still the one running this.

Constance moved around her quietly, checking, adjusting, saying calm and practical things in a calm and practical voice. No chatter. No false reassurances. Nyra was grateful for that more than she could say.

"You're doing well," Constance said at one point, and it wasn't gushing or performative. It was just a fact being stated.

"I don't feel like I'm doing well," Nyra said through her teeth.

"You are anyway," Constance replied.

Hours passed. The fluorescent light above the bed hummed steadily. Rain tapped against the single window. Nyra focused on that sound between contractions — the rain, the hum, her own breathing — and thought about nothing else because nothing else was survivable right now.

She thought about him once. Just once, and briefly, the way you touch a bruise to check if it still hurts.

It still hurt.

She let it go.

He came just before four in the morning.

One moment the world was pain and effort and the sound of Constance's steady voice, and the next there was a different sound entirely — small and furious and real — and Nyra's whole body went loose with relief.

And then the lights flickered.

It was brief. A blink, really. The fluorescent above the bed stuttered twice, buzzed, and steadied. The lamp in the corner dimmed and came back. The medical monitor beside the bed made a single odd sound, like a hiccup, and then returned to its normal rhythm.

Constance paused. Looked up at the ceiling. Then looked back down.

She said nothing.

Nyra said nothing either.

But she felt it — felt the pulse of it, that brief wave of something moving outward from the tiny person now in Constance's careful hands, rippling through the room like a stone dropped in still water. Warm. Strange. Unmistakably there.

She knew what it was.

She had hoped, in the private part of herself she never examined too closely, that she might be wrong. That he might come into the world ordinary and small and uncomplicated and have a regular life and never have to hide.

She looked at her son's face for the first time.

She wasn't wrong.

He was tiny and red-faced and furious about existing, which felt entirely reasonable given the circumstances. Dark hair, damp and soft. Eyes screwed shut against the light. The smallest hands she had ever seen.

Constance wrapped him efficiently and held him out.

"Here he is," she said. Just that.

Nyra took him.

The weight of him was extraordinary. Not physically — he was not a large baby — but in some other way she didn't have words for. Like holding something that mattered more than anything she'd ever held, which was both obvious and still somehow shocking when she actually felt it.

He had stopped crying. He opened his eyes — dark, unfocused, blinking slowly in the low light — and seemed to find her face.

Nyra looked at him for a long time without speaking.

"What will you call him?" Constance asked from across the room, making notes on her chart, not looking up.

"Auren," Nyra said.

She hadn't been sure about it until just this moment. Now she was completely sure.

"Auren," she said again quietly, just to him this time. Trying out the shape of it. Watching his face.

He blinked.

She pulled him a little closer and dropped her voice so low it was barely a sound at all.

"I know you don't understand me yet," she said. "And maybe that's better. Maybe I'll be braver if you can't understand." She swallowed. "Your father doesn't know you're here. And I don't know if that will ever change. I don't know what any of this is going to look like." She paused. "But I'm here. I'm right here. And whatever comes for you — whatever tries to get near you — it's going to have to come through me first." Her voice didn't shake. She was proud of that. "I will protect you. Whatever it takes."

Auren made a small indistinct sound.

She took it as agreement.

She registered his birth the next morning.

The forms were straightforward. Name. Date of birth. Mother's name.

She left the father line blank.

The woman at the records office glanced at it briefly and then at Nyra and then back at the form and wrote something in the margin without comment.

Nyra signed where she was told to sign and walked back out into the pale morning with the registration paperwork folded in her jacket pocket and Auren asleep against her chest in the carrier she had bought secondhand three weeks ago.

The mountain air was cool and clear. The town was waking up slowly around her — a few cars, a couple of people walking dogs, the smell of Petra's bakery already drifting down the block.

She stood on the pavement for a moment and breathed it in.

They were going to be okay.

She had decided.

She should not have relaxed.

Six weeks later, Petra came up the stairs and knocked on her door just before closing time, which she had never done before.

Nyra opened it with Auren on her hip.

Petra was holding a small white card, turning it over in her fingers the way people do when they're not sure what to make of something.

"A man came into the shop today," Petra said slowly. "While you were upstairs. Asked about the town. Friendly enough." She paused. "He asked if there were any young women living nearby with a new baby."

Nyra went very still.

"I didn't tell him anything," Petra said, looking up at her steadily. "But Nyra—" She held the card out. "He left this."

Nyra took it.

It was plain and white with nothing on it except a symbol — a small, sharp-edged mark she recognized immediately even though she had only seen it once before, carved into a stone marker at the edge of Dravenblood territory.

Not Dravenblood.

The other one.

Her blood went cold.

"Lock your doors tonight," she said, her voice coming out very quiet and very even.

Petra stared at her. "What's going on?"

Nyra looked down at Auren. He had both hands wrapped around her finger and was studying her face with those dark, serious eyes.

"Nothing," she said. "Everything's fine."

She went back inside and locked the door and stood in the middle of her small room in the slanted-ceiling dark and tried very hard to believe that.