Chapter 714: A New Life
After Irene and Ferlin had gone, Carter crossed to where May stood and looked at her with the expression of someone who had something to ask and hadn’t yet decided how to frame it.
“Do you actually want to come? You don’t have to.”
“Why?” She turned to look at him. “Are you hoping I won’t?”
“No — the opposite.” He said it with complete sincerity and no hesitation whatsoever. “I want to be with you all the time. Everywhere.”
In the plays she’d performed in King’s City — including the tragedies, where the love declarations were designed to be excessive, calibrated to push the audience to the edge of what they could bear — the lines never came out quite like this. With quite this specific, uncomplicated earnestness. It required no craft. He simply meant it, which was somehow more affecting than anything she’d constructed with technique.
She gave him a look. “Who would you rather stay with — His Majesty, or me?”
“Uh—” The question appeared to have arrived at a part of his thinking that had never been organized. “Well—”
May reached up and patted his cheek. “It seems I rank approximately equal to the king.”
He exhaled in audible relief and wrapped his arms around her from behind, and she permitted it because the morning was cold and he was warm. His hands began to migrate.
“It’s still daytime,” she said.
Then something turned over in her stomach.
She went still. Carter’s hands stopped immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
May pulled away from him carefully and took a breath. The nausea was specific — not the general unwellness of a cold but something targeted and strange, her body insisting on something without specifying what. She made it to the bathroom and stood over the basin, retching on nothing.
“I’m going for Lily.” Carter’s voice was behind her, already moving.
“Wait.” She caught the doorframe. “Stop. I’m not sick.”
“But you just—”
“I know what just happened. I’m not sick.” She straightened and looked at him. His face had the particular expression of someone who has been told something that doesn’t resolve into any category he has available. “His Majesty’s textbook,” he said carefully, “mentions that vomiting is an early cold symptom—”
“I don’t have a cold.”
“Then why—”
This man, she thought, has no common sense at all. She felt warmth in her face — not illness, not embarrassment exactly. The closest she could name was the particular frustration of being ahead of someone in a conversation and not knowing how to bring them forward without admitting you’re ahead of them. She’d heard things. The way women talked when they thought they were alone in a dressing room, or when May had stopped registering as an audience. The early signs. The specific kind of nausea.
She could be wrong. She was probably wrong. If she was wrong and she told him and then she was wrong, she would hear about it until she was old.
“The girl in the Witch Union,” she said. “The green-haired one who sees through things.”
“Sylvie?”
“Ask her to come.”
Carter looked at her. She could see the thought assembling behind his eyes — piece by piece, the way his mind worked, through things rather than around them. Then his expression changed entirely. His mouth opened. He closed it. His fist clenched against his side in a gesture that was completely involuntary and completely his.
“I’ll find Lady Wendy right now.” He had his coat already. “If she’s in the Inner City—”
“Go.”
The door closed.
May sat on the edge of the bed, carefully, with the instinct of someone moving around something fragile that might not exist yet. The morning was quiet around her. The basin was in the bathroom. The basket of mushrooms was in the kitchen. The salted fish from Jasmine was wrapped next to it.
She thought of Jasmine’s face — the bow, the fish extended in both hands, the particular quality of her smile when May had accepted it.
This is probably, she thought, the taste of hope.
That night Sylvie came, and looked, and confirmed what May had suspected.
She was pregnant.
Roland received the news the following morning and found Carter standing in the office doorway with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously.
He stood up from the desk and put a hand on Carter’s shoulder. “Congratulations. You have time — months yet — so the work doesn’t stop. When she’s close to delivering, I’ll give you leave to be with her.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The salute was crisp; underneath it, Carter was still doing that thing with his face.
“By the way.” Roland sat back down and picked up his pen. “How does delivery work here? Is there a midwife system in Neverwinter?”
“A — midwife?”
“Someone who assists with birth. When the child arrives, there has to be someone present to manage it. The cord needs to be cut. Things can go wrong.” He searched through what Prince Roland had been taught and found nothing useful. Apparently palace tutors had considered this outside the curriculum. “The mother can’t manage it alone.”
“Usually the elder women in a family do it. People who’ve done it before.”
“What if there are no elders nearby?”
Carter was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure how that usually goes.”
Roland looked at the window for a moment, thinking through the arithmetic. Neverwinter’s population: past one hundred thousand now, growing. Most of the residents had arrived through recruitment and migration — people who had come with their own households, not whole extended families. The people who would normally be the repository of this knowledge — grandmothers, aunts, experienced neighbors — weren’t necessarily present in the ratios a normal village would have. The city had been built fast, and the stability that produced children hadn’t existed long enough yet to have produced many. But it would. The fertility rate would climb as the city settled. There would be new births, many of them, from next year on.
Nana and Lily handled illness and injury with a capability that had allowed him to defer the whole question. But Nana was twelve. When the demon war came, both of them would be at the front. The city would need to manage everything else with what it had.
I’ve been lazy about this.
After Carter left, Roland opened his notebook to a blank page and wrote across the top: Medical system — primary phase.
Start with childbirth because it was the immediate need and the most legible gap. From there: hospitals — meaning dedicated spaces and trained personnel, not magic. Medical staff recruited from the First Army’s existing basic training, then expanded. The brochures the army used for wound management could serve as the foundation of general health education for civilians, with modifications.
The critical thing — the thing he was certain about even without access to modern medical manuals — was infection. Sterilizing tools before they touched a wound or a body. Cleaning hands before and after contact with the patient. This single principle, applied consistently, had changed mortality rates in surgical contexts more dramatically than most of the other interventions combined. It cost almost nothing and required only the knowledge and the habit.
He could start there. Everything else could be built up from it.
He was still writing when a rider arrived with the message he’d been waiting for.
Tilly Wimbledon was on her way. Ashes was with her, and several other witches from the Sleeping Island.
He set down the pen.
Good.