Chapter 174: A Demon's Child 2
Ryn POV
It takes the healer two days to come back with an answer, and when she does, she won't sit down to give it.
I'm propped up in Zevran's bed because I still can't stand for long. Whatever the half-turn did to me, it left me weak in a way that hasn't lifted, my body is now slow to do the simplest things, like it used everything it had holding me together in that doorway between human and not.
Much to my surprise, Zevran hasn't left the room. He sleeps in the chair when he sleeps at all, which isn't much, and he watches me the way you watch a fire you're not sure is out.
"I've been in the old records since the night it happened," the healer says. She's got a book under her arm, one of the heavy ones from the locked archive, and her face has the look it gets when she's found something she'd rather not have. "There isn't much. The Ashveil curse was demon-made and demons don't write their workings down for our benefit. But there's enough."
"Enough for what?" I asked weakly.
"Enough to tell you why you're still alive."
Zevran goes still in the chair.
"By every reckoning I have, you should be dead, or dying, right now." She says it plainly, which I've come to be grateful for in her. "Your birthday's inside the month. The curse accelerates at the end, which I'm sure you must've felt. All those tiredness was the curse closing in. It should have taken you by now. It hasn't. And it hasn't for the same reason the Embrace couldn't."
"The baby!" I gasp as my hand's already there. It keeps going there without me consciously knowing.
"The baby." She sets the book down on the table but doesn't open it. "The curse is demon magic. And what's growing in you now is also demon magic. A demon's child, carrying that nature from the other side, taking root in the exact place the curse lives." She folds her hands. "Two workings of the same kind can't occupy the same ground. The child is there now, and the curse can't reach past it to finish what it started," she paused to read the look on our faces. "It's not entirely gone. Think of it as putting a pause in the process like a clock with a hand jammed against the works."
The room is very quiet.
"So the baby's keeping me alive," I say out loud because I need to hear myself say it, the way I always do, like saying a thing out loud makes it possible to carry.
"The baby is the only reason you're alive. If you weren't carrying it, you'd have died at the turn or you'll die at your birthday. The child is the thing standing between you and the curse, and as long as it's there, the curse can't move."
I look down at my own hand on my own stomach and I can't make my face do anything.
Because here's the thing the healer doesn't know, I owe my life to Sorin twice over now. Once for whatever the bond did, and once for this, for a baby I didn't choose, made by a man I left at an altar and swore I'd never see again.
He cursed me, yet he's the reason I'm not dead. And he doesn't even know it, and I can't decide if that's a mercy or just one more cruelty in a year that's been nothing but it.
"Ryn." Zevran calls out. I raise my head to see him watching my face do whatever it's doing.
"It's his," I cry, as a new round of tears flow down. "All of it. The thing killing me and the thing keeping me alive are both his. I can't get away from him even when I hate him. He's in the curse, he's in the baby, he's in the bond and there's no part of me right now that he isn't somehow inside, and I never asked for any of it." My voice cracks. "I left him. I did the one brave thing and I left, and it turns out I was already carrying him out the door. I'll never be free of him. Not really. Not now."
Zevran comes to the bed. "You need to stop crying. You're going to get really sick if you don't pull yourself together."
"But how can I?" I sniffled. "We're finally happy after so long. I was already seeing a family with you not... This!"
"You won't be free of him. That's true and I'm not going to soften it." He takes my hand off my stomach and holds it in both of his. "But there's a difference between being tied to someone and belonging to them. He's in the curse, the bond, the child, all of it, but none of it makes you his. The real deal is that you left and that counts as something even if you couldn't leave all of him behind."
"It doesn't feel like it counts." I whisper, hands going to his face. I can see just how much this is hurting him.
"It counts to me." He says it quietly. "You chose to walk out of his world. You chose to come back and save my life when you could have let me die and gone free. You're choosing, every day, what you do with the parts of him you can't put down. That's the only freedom any of us get, Ryn." he kissed the top of my head before pulling me close.
"There's a question you're both not asking," the healer interrupts, and we both look at her, because we'd half forgotten she was there.
"The curse is paused, not broken. The child stops it as long as the child is there. So you should understand what that means."
The cold comes up my spine before she says it.
"When the baby comes..." I'm muttering to myself
"When the baby comes, the child is no longer inside you." She says it as gently as the thing can be said. "And I don't know what happens to the curse then. It might break for good, having been starved this long. It might lift, the way some workings do once they've been interrupted. Or it might simply wake up where it left off and finish what it started." She picks her book back up. "I won't lie to you and tell you which. The records don't say, because no Ashveil has ever lived long enough carrying a demon's child for anyone to find out. You're the first. There's no one to have written it down."
So this is my life now. I'm alive because of the baby, and I stay alive only as long as I'm carrying it, and the day it's born is the day I find out whether I get to keep living or whether the curse simply picks up where it stopped and kills me anyway.
I put my hand back on my stomach on the very thing keeping me alive. The thing that might be the death of me the moment it leaves.