Defying Nature

By Laura Schiller

Based on: Seraphina

Copyright: Rachel Hartman

I lean over the latrine, my whole body shaking as I lose my breakfast down the hole. It happened again, and I do not understand why. My saarantras body has never been ill before. Could it be bad food? Or – and this makes my stomach heave even more – has Imlann tracked me down and tried to poison me? It sounds unlike his usual direct methods, but I should not underestimate his capacity for holding a grudge …

Paranoia. Another human response. I shudder and lean forward again.

Claude rushes in, concerned, holding back my hair with gentle hands. I did not want him to see me like this and worry unnecessarily, but now that he is here, I take comfort from him anyway. I lean back into his warmth, allowing him to hand me a towel to wipe my mouth. He turns me around to face him, his gray eyes focused on my face. What is that emotion he is showing – hope? Fear? Confusion? Worry? Or perhaps all of them at once?

"You know," he says quietly. "There might be a simple explanation for this."

"What explanation is that?" I ask hoarsely.

The corners of his lips twitch into a tiny smile. "What if … Linn, what if you're having a baby?"

"Impossible."

My flat response actually amuses him. His smile widens, and he tilts his head to look at me the way he sometimes does after lovemaking, when he has provoked me into a particularly intense response.

"I wouldn't say that," he says. "We have been doing rather a lot of what babies are made from, after all."

His eyes sparkly. He is not only amused, I realize – he is happy. He is hoping for me to be pregnant.

That is when I remember, with all the force of an avalanche crashing down the mountains of my birth, what I so often forget around him. I remember that he still believes I am human.

I thought I knew what fear was. I have been threatened, humiliated and physically injured by my own father many times; I have chosen to exile myself from my home and people for the sake of a man to whom I dare not even reveal my true nature.

I have never known true fear until now.

"How long has it been?" asks Claude. "Since … you know … your last courses?"

I count back the days. This body bleeds during every lunar cycle just like a human female's, a fact I always endured as an unpleasant necessity until now. Today, I would give anything for it to return.A cold sweat runs over me as I arrive at the number. How could I not have noticed? Unless some part of me did notice and refused to admit it?

"Fifty-two days."

I struggle to keep my face impassive, but Claude's human empathy picks up my feelings anyway.

"What's wrong?" he asks, frowning, putting both hands on my shoulders.

I must tell him some of the truth, if not all of it.

"What if I do not survive the birth? What if … what if the child does not?"

My husband's face brightens with compassion, a look I have come to know and love so well over the past year. It makes my human eyes burn with impending tears.

"You mustn't think like that," he assures me fiercely. "Don't give in to fear, my love. It's not like you. I shall pray to the saints that you will come through this in good health, and so does the child."

Giving in to fear is unlike me? If only he knew …

"Should I send for a midwife? Or one of the physicians from St. Bert's?"

"No," I answer automatically.

He raises his eyebrows skeptically. A moment ago, I was afraid to die, and now I am refusing a healer? He must be nearly as perplexed by my illogic as I am. But of all the people most likely to recognize an interspecies pregnancy, a saar-trained physician would be it. As for the uneducated city midwives, some of them would be capable of strangling a half-dragon child at birth.

"I … I overreacted just now," I tell Claude, smiling for his benefit, taking a deep breath. Imlann's forceful instructions on mental hygiene are coming in useful. "You are right. We shouldn't be afraid. If there are complications, we can still send for a healer … " (I fervently hope that there will be none!) "But for now … can it be a secret? Just between us?"

I lift my hand to his cheek, a soothing gesture, and it seems to work. He smiles at me again and pulls me into his arms, ignoring the smell of my breath and the state of my gown. Happiness radiates from him like heat from the sun. He has no idea of the danger we are facing.

We. The three of us. I glance down at my flat abdomen. He follows my gaze and caresses me there, already showing affection for the tiny organism that will grow to become our child. Would he still love it – and its mother – if he knew what we are? Or would he recoil from me the way Orma did when I told him of my marriage?

Can I do this? Can I deliver the child alone, so that no one will see my silver blood? Am I truly capable of living a lie for the rest of my life? And supposing the child takes after me, what then? The possibilities are too varied, and too frightening, to contemplate.

What frightens me the most, however, is not what I expected. Like romantic love, motherhood is one of those human mysteries dragons find most incomprehensible. The act of carrying another life inside one's body, nurturing it with one's own blood, is deeply alien and somewhat revolting. I never would have thought that it would happen to me so suddenly, or I would react like this.

I fear more for the child, which barely exists yet, than I do for myself. How is this possible?

I can imagine him, or her, with Claude's rainstorm eyes and my angular saar features, and a musical gift belonging to both of us. I can imagine the crude jokes, the disgust, the hatred directed against him or her by anyone who knew the truth. If my son or daughter lives – which is by no means certain – I will have doomed them to either life of suffering, or a life of lies.

If Imlann knew, he would order me to induce a miscarriage somehow, the way nesting dragons break weak eggs before they hatch. There must be healers in this city who are capable of that. It might even be kinder than allowing such a child to live … but even as I contemplate the idea, I know down to my smoldering core that I could never put it into action.

This little life that defies all the laws of nature is a part of me. A part of Claude. I could no more end that life than I could end his.

I close my eyes and cry into my husband's shoulder, as undisciplined as any human woman. His love carries me like the wind undearneath my wings. I pray to the saints I never used to believe in that he will not let me fall.