It Has Begun
And by “it” I am referring to both NaNoWriMo and my newest WIP, The Circled Green.
It’s 8.50am, I am sitting here at my house with Rebekah and we are writing away. Well, I was writing away, but I have finished my prologue and needed to check something. So, in the meantime, have a really really really rough prologue to tide you over, and also as my first snippet.
Make sense, no?
Even with death upon her, the end imminent, Lady Sorcha Darrow was still beautiful.
She had fought for two days, but ultimately she had lost. In the end death would always emerge triumphant. And this day she was its prize.
“They will come for me,” she croaked. Her voice was as dry as her mouth, her lips cracked like the earth at the height of a hot summer. “They will come for me. Soon.”
Her confidant in all her secrets, the ageing cook of her husband’s household, watched Sorcha struggle to sit up. Her hair, that soft white-blond colour that one usually sees only in very small children, was matted against fair skin slicked with sweat. Her blue eyes were still bright with the fever that continued to ravage her body.
The pregnancy as a whole had been hard on her, her slender figure becoming even more waif-like as her growing stomach swelled further. But even as the child acted more like a parasite and she its host, Sorcha had endured, aglow with talk about how this one would be a boy and how she loved him already. She felt it in her heart, she had said.
The birth had been worse. Much worse.
The babe - it was a boy, after all - had died not long after entering this world. Tiny and weak it lay there, silent as the grave while his mother wept and wailed, begging unseen people to help her, for someone to come and save her baby.
“I really should have known not to have made a bargain with them,” Sorcha said. Sanity had finally returned from the hold of the fever, although only to let her say goodbye. “They never just grant boons with no consequences. Why should I have been any different to them?”
“You had no choice, my lady.”
“I did, I did. But were they really choices? Even if I had known of this… condition… it would have meant abandoning one child at the very least.”
“My lady?”
Sorcha stiffened, grasping into the bed linen that covered her. “Did you hear that?” she asked, ignoring her servant’s previous question.
“Hear what?”
Sorcha closed her eyes but did not relax into her pillows. “The Bean Shìth is calling. I can hear the song, I hear what she says.” Her eyes opened and fixed upon the west-facing window. “Aye, I hear you. I will come, but not just yet.”
“Please, Sorcha, hold on.” She spoke as a friend and confidant then, the keeper of lifetimes of secrets, and not as a servant. “For the sake of your husband, for the sake of your child!”
A bitter smile crossed Sorcha’s face at those words. “Everything I have done was for his sake, and all of this - this ending, this beginning - was for the sake of my child. Just not the child you speak of.
“I speak of her now, though. They will come for her, sooner or later. She may be ignorant of the truth, but they will not be. They know of her, and the only thing that keeps them from her is me.” She paused for breath, so far gone now that even speech was tiring. “The burdan falls to you now that I have failed. Protect her, keep her safe. You know the secrets - I have taught you them well.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Promise me you will keep her safe, as safe as you can!” A plea, a demand, a hope. “Please!”
“I promise, my lady.”
“Good.” With a sigh, Sorcha finally sank back into the voluminous pillows that supported her. “Aye, aye,” she said softly, tilting her head slightly in the direction of the open window, “I hear you. Soon, soon.”
There was a knock at the door then, and the cook jumped. She was not supposed to be here with her alone, but Sorcha had ordered the holy man out for now. She had things she wanted to say in private, and no one would ever make her waver on that decision.
Sorcha smiled. “Let my lovelies in. It is time for me to say farewell. For now.”
Mirrored from Catherine-Haines.com.