The Elf Prince Is My Baby Daddy novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: Redroot

I didn't scream.

Screaming wastes breath, and I needed all of mine.

I lay still and ran my tongue round my teeth. The bitterness was still there, under the honey.

Not palace tea.

Redroot.

Every midwife in the south knows redroot. Women come to you in the night for it, when they can't have another, and you give it to them, and you tell them exactly how much. Too much and they bleed out on the floor.

Two cups.

"Seren," I said. "Seren, wake up."

She sat up in her books. "What? What is it?"

"Get my bag. The leather one. Then run across the bridge and get Ilvar and a healer. Not the one with the beard."

She saw the sheet. Every drop of color left her freckled face.

"Go," I said.

She went, barefoot, still in her nightgown.

I tipped my bag out on the bed with shaking hands.

Crampbark. A twist of dried bark in waxed paper, at the very bottom where I always kept it.

Mam taught me never to go to a birth without it.

I chewed a piece the size of my thumbnail, raw. It tasted like a burnt fence.

I made myself swallow.

Then I lay on my left side with my knees up and a pillow under my hips, and counted my own breaths, and talked to them.

"Stay put," I told them. "You hear me? All three of you. Your father's coming. He's slow on stairs, but he's coming."

The cramp came again. I breathed through it like I'd told a hundred women to.

The second one was weaker.

Ilvar came through the door so fast it hit the wall.

He'd run the whole bridge. His hair was everywhere. He was in his shirt with no coat, and his face was white.

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