“You and your cards,” murmured Wilhelmina, without heat. She heaved herself into the chair beside Clara and the younger woman pulled out her battered deck from a pocket.
Clara’s knowledge of card games came from her four years behind the trenches in Belgium, and as a consequence it was quite extensive. She had taught both Wilhelmina and Signore Lynd several different games, and the three of them had spent many an enjoyable evening playing.
While the card game was diverting, Wilhelmina kept finding her attention wandering. If she had had to describe it, she would have said she was listening for something she couldn’t quite catch, something that wasn’t a sound.
Within the hour, the contractions began. While not too bad at first, several hours later they were painful, and regular. Signore Lynd had come in by that point, and he and Clara assisted Wilhelmina into the bed, which had already been prepared.
“Will you stay or go?” Clara asked Signore Lynd, once his wife was situated. “Most men prefer to go, and it is traditional among humans that the only man present during a birth might be a doctor if he is summoned. But you are not most men. Once you make your choice, however, I must ask that you not change your mind too many times. It is very distracting to have the door constantly opening and closing, and I would rather none of my patients catch cold.”
Wilhelmina translated this, though he would have divined the gist, having picked up some rudimentary English in the two months Clara had been with them.
“I will stay,” declared Signore Lynd. “You may need my help, and it is essential that my son feel comfortable and safe. Otherwise he will not come out. My presence may speed things, and spare Wilhelmina unnecessary pain.”
“Very well,” said Clara once this had been translated. She glanced at her notebook on the table, obviously wanting to jot down the strange thing he had just said, but decided against it in favor of making Wilhelmina comfortable. “Boil some water, then, if you please. And gather—” She reeled off the names of several different herbs. “And lay them out on the table. I may not need all of them, but better to have them to hand.”
“Of course.” He moved off and began doing as she requested.
“And now I will not make you exert yourself by translating,” said Clara to Wilhelmina. “You will need your breath for other things.”
And she did, as the pain became more intense Clara had her focus on breathing in a very specific pattern. It was a technique Wilhelmina had never tried before with her mothers; Clara claimed to have read of it in a medical journal.
Wilhelmina was soon glad she did not remember Karl's birth, or she was not sure she would have been able to convince herself to do this willingly a second time. But she focused on her breathing, as instructed. Signore Lynd was very solicitous, and as gentle as always. Despite his size, Clara managed not to bump into him as she moved around the bed. Between the two of them, Wilhelmina thought she could not be in better hands. If she had to do this, then she trusted them without question to see her and the children through it.
No sooner had her hazy mind completed this thought then she felt a change ripple through her. Something had shifted. Clara noticed it, too, for her brow furrowed, she observed closely for a few seconds, and then smiled. “You can push now, whenever you are ready.”
Wilhelmina heaved and strained, and eventually felt a great rush. There was a rustling of sheets, and a sensation of movement across the bed. Clara and Signore Lynd tracked something small with their heads, something fast that hit the floor and scrabbled for the closed door.
“I'll handle him,” rumbled Signore Lynd. Clara nodded wordlessly at him and turned back to the task at hand.
“That's the first of them out, your handsome lindworm. Looks like his father.” One side of her mouth quirked.
“Good,” Wilhelmina gasped.
“Now for the second, though it may not be quite so easy.”
“That was...supposed...to be easy?” Wilhelmina managed between the onset of another pain. And then she had no more breath for quips.
The second child came into the world just a few minutes of hard labor later with a much more traditional human infant wail. “You have a daughter,” Clara said, all English reserve forgotten for the moment; she bore a delighted smile on her face. She cut the cord, wrapped the wiggling pink thing in a blanket and took her away for a few moments to clean her in the bowl of water that had been warming by the hearth. Then she brought the baby back and held her out.
“A daughter.” Wilhelmina's arms moved automatically to accept the bundled infant. She felt tears streaking unbidden down her cheeks, and not from the pain of the births. “I never thought...after Karl, I believed the best I could hope for was a granddaughter. I never dreamed I would hold a daughter of my own in my arms. Oh, I have such things to teach you.” She touched the child's button nose with the tip of a finger.
Clara, her own eyes glittering at the corners, glanced up and behind her, and then faded to the side. Markus stood there, something green and glistening held with both firmness and delicacy in his big hands. There was a strange expression on his face, though Wilhelmina mostly detected happiness.
“Thank you,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed breathlessly. Wilhelmina held up the baby girl for his inspection as he lowered himself to sit on the bed beside her.
“She is absolutely perfect. And she looks just like you,” he said, and the words sent a thrill down her spine.
“May I...?” she asked, peering at his hands.
“He is a bit fractious, and soon I will let him out for his first run. But I persuaded him you would want to see him first.”
He unfolded his hands so that what he held could be seen more clearly while still keeping a firm grip. Wilhelmina and Clara both gasped at the same time.
“But that's—” Clara started, and then cut herself off.
In his hands, Markus grasped a tiny—dragon. It was a lizard, and it did look like his lindworm form made miniature, but from its back sprouted two delicate, golden-ribbed batlike wings, damp but rapidly drying and stiffening.
Wilhelmina stared with an open mouth for a few long seconds. “But...how?” she asked. “Did you know this was possible?”
He could only shrug, amazement and joy in every line of his body. “We have produced two wonders this day,” he said.
“Indeed,” Clara murmured.
This reminded both Markus and Wilhelmina of her presence, when they had been completely caught up in their offspring. They turned to look at her, and Clara flushed and began bustling about cleaning unused herbs, clearly embarrassed at having interrupted.
They glanced at each other again, but the magic of the moment was gone. Markus quirked a half-smile. They both laughed awkwardly. With great care, Markus freed one of his hands while maintaining a firm grasp on the baby dragon. He cupped it around the back of Wilhelmina's head, not minding her sweaty, tousled hair, then leaned forward and kissed her forehead. It lingered a second, and then a second more. Wilhelmina closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath.
Then he released her, stood, and carried the new child out the door. The two women heard the air impact of his change, and the sounds of the massive form quickly moved away and faded into the distance.
Wilhelmina turned her attention to the girl in her arms, whose cries had turned to gentle mewls. She smiled down at the tiny, wrinkled form.
“He loves you,” said Clara.
“No he doesn't,” Wilhelmina replied automatically, not taking her eyes off the baby and shifting so that she could feed. “He isn't human. He doesn't know how to love, not as we do. I never let myself forget that.”
“That might have been true once. I never met him before he had a human form,” answered Clara, coming back to the bed. She appeared to be absorbed in checking Wilhelmina to make sure that all was well now that the birth itself was done, but Wilhelmina was not fooled. The remark wasn't off-the-cuff or facetious. Clara meant what she said.
The y
ounger woman continued, “Given what you had told me about him, I was surprised to find how well, and how quickly, he has embraced his human side. I was expecting him to struggle with the mere idea of having a human form, especially since it came about in so unexpected a way. I thought he would still spend the majority of his time as a lindworm, and become a human only when strictly necessary. Yet he has spent a great deal of time here, with us, when he need not. True, he isn't much of a conversationalist, but he isn't so silent as to draw attention. He has cared for you with much more solicitude than I have seen many a husband care for his expectant wife. He even sleeps in human form now, in a bed, all for your comfort.”
“That was only because I was giving him what he wanted most in the world,” said Wilhelmina, keeping her chin ducked down to hide the traitor tears.
“Is it?” said Clara, very softly, her too-understanding brown eyes on Wilhelmina's face. She finished her inspection and, since Wilhelmina's hands were full with the nursing baby, came around and dabbed at her weeping eyes with her own pocket handkerchief. Then she smoothed back Wilhelmina's tangled hair, a very motherly gesture for someone so much younger. “I was once where you are. I was convinced David could not love someone like me, that we were too different. Someone advised me that I would regret it forever if I gave up on him too easily. And that's the last I will say on this matter: don't be too hasty to proclaim it impossible.”
“It is impossible.”
Clara laughed. “And you seem to live your life spitting in the face of impossible. I've never met a hedgewitch with as much power or cunning at casting spells as you. And may I remind you that you just singlehandedly brought dragons back into the world through a breathtaking act of selflessness. I don't think I would have had the courage to do what you did in swallowing those petals, knowing everything that was to come.”
“Is that what did it?” Wilhelmina asked, glancing at the door by which her son and husband had exited. “Because I wanted to give him a son, rather than out of desperation to get a baby of my own?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. We may never know for certain.” Clara shrugged. “However it came about, it certainly is a miracle, if ever there was one. I need a few handfuls of snow to melt for cleaning my instruments. I'll leave you two alone for a few minutes to get acquainted, then come back to finish.”
She ran a hand gently down the baby's downy head with a smile. Then she got up, pulled on her hat, scarf, mittens, boots and jacket, and exited the cabin.
“Is she right?” Wilhelmina asked the contentedly suckling baby. The baby girl did not respond. Wilhelmina sat in silence, contemplating the flickering fire. It didn’t occur to her until late that night, just on the edge of her dreams, that Clara had not asked if she loved Markus. She had taken that as a given.
Chapter 17
Spring 1921 Brig, Switzerland.
Clara left for England and home a week later, after satisfying herself that all her patients were thriving. The infant dragon needed the least amount of care; Markus proudly reported that he was able to catch mice and other small creatures on his own within an hour or two of birth. He couldn't fly yet, though he had gained control of his wings and seemed to enjoy flapping them when Clara was writing in her notebook in order to make the pages move at just the wrong moment.
“You have a handful there already,” Clara told the parents, clamping a hand down on the book and shooing the dragon away gently with the other.
Wilhelmina and the baby girl stayed in bed, though by the time Clara left Wilhelmina was up and about and able to cook and tidy the cabin on her own. Everything else, they both knew, would soon follow. Wilhelmina found it a relief just to be able to walk about without feeling as if she carried half the earth on her front. With time, her body, still cozily thick at the moment, would return to something like its previous shape. Or it wouldn’t. Wilhelmina didn’t mind a bit of extra meat on her bones to shield her from the biting mountain wind. And being slightly plumper would, she thought, increase her impression of a benevolent, nurturing auntie to the townsfolk. It might even improve her business.
The day after Clara left on the train (“time to face the music” she said with a glance down at her own rounding belly), a blizzard blew up, snowing the little family in. The dragon seemed to understand that he could not go outside, but sat in a dejected manner in the fireplace as close to the fire as he could manage without actually being in the flames. Wilhelmina and Markus sat in their accustomed chairs drawn up to the hearth and Wilhelmina held the wrapped baby girl in her arms.
“What a pair they make,” said Markus. His chest was as puffed as any proud father’s. “You deserve all the credit, Wilhelmina, for enduring all of this to bring these two precious creatures into the world.”
“I am just grateful they’re here at last, and we all survived the experience,” Wilhelmina replied.
“What shall we call them?” he wanted to know. “I was thinking…”
“Then we’re in trouble,” she grinned.
He scowled, then couldn’t resist a grin of his own. “I thought perhaps you might name the boy, if you would allow me the honor of naming the girl.”
This was not what Wilhelmina had been expecting at all, but she was struck by the idea. She sat back to think about it, her eyes drifting to a nondescript spot on the back wall as she considered. Markus waited patiently—when had she starting thinking of him as Markus? Somehow he had slid into the name in her mind, and she thought it suited him as he was now better than Signore Lynd or even Herr Lindworm.
“I think it is a good suggestion,” she said at last. “What were you thinking to name her?”
“Edel,” he said promptly. “Edel Lynd has a pleasant ring to it.”
It was also a nod to the flower of the children’s’ origin, and the pleasant memories they had of the high mountain meadow. Wilhelmina nodded, pleased. “Yes, I like that very much. And I was thinking Georg for him,” she nodded at the dragon, who lifted his head and made a soft chirrup.
“You would pick something with a certain amount of irony to it, to name him after the most famous of dragon slayers,” Markus said. “Still, I think it suits.” He rumbled something deep in his throat at the dragon, who growled back. Wilhelmina, who had managed only a passing familiarity with the private language father and son seemed to instinctively speak, had no idea what to make of the exchange other than neither speaker sounded displeased.
“Yes, he thinks that is good for a human name.”
“Once the weather clears, I shall speak to the priest in town about christening them Edel and Georg,” said Wilhelmina.
Markus raised an eyebrow. “‘Them?’ I hope you do not mean to take them both into church and have them christened as our twins, just as if they were both ordinary humans.”
“That is precisely what I mean to do, just as soon as I can work out how to safely alter the spell that gave you a human form so that it is more…predictable in its outcome. And certainly less painful,” she added as he opened his mouth with a look of horror.
At this he relaxed, and leaned back in thought. To Wilhelmina’s private amusement, he even rubbed his chin, a very human gesture he must have picked up from the men in town. “Can it be done?” he asked after a minute’s contemplation.
“I believe so. The only reason I was not able to do so for you was because there was no time and I was not certain the spell would work even in its original form, let alone if I attempted to alter it on the fly. There are times when improvisation is appropriate, and times when it is decidedly not. I am very sorry I caused you such pain. I would have avoided it if possible.”
“I know.” He smiled affectionately at her as he leaned forward and ran one large hand over the back of her head and across her cheek.
She tried and failed to stop her flush, then cleared her throat. “In any case, I believe I can change the spell to give Georg a human form of his own. He probably will not want to use it much at first because he will be a helpless i
nfant for the first few years. I would have preferred to wait for him to grow a bit, but it seems to me to be the best solution if we don’t want the townsfolk to think our son appeared from nowhere years down the line once he is old enough to go among them. Perhaps more importantly, we want him used to humans and their ways from the very beginning. That way he will not be tempted to regard them as creatures wholly unlike himself, or worse, as meals, once he is grown to his full size and neither you nor I are around to restrain him.”
“Sensible enough,” Markus said, though she thought she detected a trace of continued skepticism in his voice. “Can I assist you in any way?”
“Explain to him as best you can what we are going to do,” she said. “And I may need your help if one of the ingredients only grows high in the mountains—without you I might not be able to reach it in one piece, especially with the weather so chancy.”
“I shall be glad to,” he replied.
Wilhelmina spent every minute she could spare for the next few weeks studying her copy of the old transformation spell, making notes and jotting ideas. It almost helped that she was up at all odd hours with Edel, because sometimes her brain made the oddest connections at three in the morning when still halfway in dreams. Reading her notes the next day was another problem altogether, but she muddled through.
Clara wrote to say that she had made it safely home to England despite some delays for poor weather and that everyone was glad to see her. In her usual oblique English way she hinted that while her husband had indeed been displeased she had not told him of her condition before she left, the joy at the prospect of a second child had quickly overshadowed any lingering ill feeling.
By the time Clara’s letter arrived, Wilhelmina was nearly satisfied with her alterations to the spell, and was only waiting for a few ingredients being sent to her from other hedgewitches. She had ridden on Markus past the snowline to find a particular hardy plant that stayed dormant under the snow in the winter, the first time she had ridden him since the growing twins had made her balance unpredictable. She was pleased with how quickly she settled back into the rhythm of it. Where once being so high in the air had been unsettling, now she reveled in being able to return to her perch after so long stuck on the ground. Edel was fastened comfortably to her back, secure in a cocoon of blankets and leather straps. Georg tucked himself behind Wilhelmina, riding since he was too small to keep up with his much larger father’s strides.
The Dragon & the Alpine Star Page 16