They Hanged My Parents as Traitors, Now the Prince Needs My Heart novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Lamp

The kitchen at night was the only room in the keep that had never been afraid of anything.

The ovens were banked and glowing.

Rows of loaves sat under cloths on the long table, and a great lump of dough waited in its bowl.

Sioned had pulled three stools up to the end by the hearth.

Dafydd stood at the back door with his arms crossed, which meant nobody was coming in.

Cadoc came down the back stairs in his shirtsleeves.

Sioned looked at his bandaged hands and said, "I'll see to those after."

"Thank you, Mistress Pugh."

"Sit down, Your Highness. You're making the place look untidy."

He sat.

She turned the dough out of the bowl onto the floured board.

She began to knead it with the heels of both hands.

"I'll tell it while I work," she said, "because if I stop I won't start."

I sat across from her.

I had known Sioned for ten years as the woman who fed me.

I had never once thought to ask what she'd been before.

"I was thirty-nine," she said. "I was your mother's second pair of hands. She was the keep's midwife, and I carried her bag and boiled her water."

She pushed the dough away from her and folded it back.

"Your mother went into labor on Midwinter night, in the Row, with snow up to the sills. Your father was out at his post, and I ran for him myself."

Cadoc made a small sound.

"That's the first thing I remember," said Sioned. "Hywel coming in the door with snow on his shoulders and his face gone gray."

"It was a hard labor," I said.

"It was a long labor." She didn't look at me. "And at the end of it, you came out blue, Bronwen. You didn't cry. You didn't move. You were dead, love. I held your mother's lamp and watched her work on you, and you were dead."

It went straight through me.

I had known I was a Midwinter baby.

I had never been told I'd been a dead one.

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