Prologue

A Chapter by Sarah A. Nelson

     The babies were pulled from their tired, grasping mothers and handed off down the line of armored soldiers. One by one the new mothers were left crying, huddled in a heap of bedding and blood. The room smelled of sweat and salt, the air was musty. The walls were dark brown, it almost seemed as if the blood from all the births was staining the walls. The only light was a candle. It was late, and the nurses could hardly see what they were doing. The new mothers were shuffled off into another room, leaning onto the soldiers, crying. The next wave of pregnant women was rushed in, as the nurses quickly changed the bedding.

   The nurses were just the women who were unable to get pregnant in the Spring. Most of them did not regret that they could not bear children. They seemed to be the only ones who actually cared for the mothers that were being herded through the Women’s Housing as if they were cattle. As each new mother came in, a nurse was at her bedside. If the mother was already giving birth, the nurses waited and helped the baby be birthed naturally. If the woman was not yet in labor the nurse would make her drink liquor and numb her stomach as best as she could. Then she would proceed to cut open her stomach and remove the child. The mother’s care was not what was necessary. It was more important that the child lived. If the baby was healthy and well, only then would the mother be stitched back up. The entire night moved on at this rushed pace. Most of the women would not survive the night.

   After all of the mothers were no longer carrying a child, the night was through. The soldiers carried the wrapped infants through the snow, to the castle. The nurses spent the rest of the night cleaning the blood off of the walls and floors of the birthing room, and washing the bedding they used. Three of them were chosen to stay with the women who were, by now, asleep in the next room. Their faces stained with tears, and their clothes soaked in urine and after-birth. Three of the 21 women that gave birth that night were already dead. Their bodies were trapped in the pile of bloody girls, they were huddling up to the stiffening bodies for warmth. Once the nurses were done cleaning up the birthing room, the women were changed and washed, and moved into their bedrooms.

The town Bryndis, the armored goddess, is built upon blood. Rivers of red flowed beneath the past, staining the future. Years of death, bodies in the thousands, littering the air as they burned. Ash soiling the walls of the town, leaving them black and as dark as the hearts of the people that lived within them. How many deaths do you think it took for them to stop caring?

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