How (Not) to Soothe a Siren (Cindy Eller Book 9)
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Authors: Elizabeth A Reeves
No portion of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and coincidental. Any resemblance between persons living and dead, establishments, events, or location is entirely coincidental.
Copyright© Elizabeth A. Reeves
Dedicated with love to Hyrum Asher, my little love bug. You crawled all over these pages.
J
essi was starting to look better. She’d been on bedrest in Faerie for the past few days, but already I could see that she was getting the best care. Of course, I would have expected nothing less of Freyja. The House Folk midwife was considered the best in her line of work. She’d had miracles attributed to her.
Now, she was carefully looking over my son, while Jessi and I watched.
My son. The thought made me feel giddy and terrified all at once.
As if he could hear my thoughts, Timothy squeezed my shoulder. I leaned my cheek against his hand, wondering if I had ever loved him more. He had not left my side, since we had found our child, waiting for us in the boughs of the great golden tree that was thought to be the heart of Faerie.
Freyja stroked the thick, dark hair of the infant on the bed. Even though we could tell that he was very young, he already had quite a headful of hair. He swung his arms and legs in a random pattern, looking like a chubby sort of helicopter, ready to take off. He hiccupped, startled, and started wailing—a thin, high sound.
My heart clenched. That cry had led me to him. Even in my dreams, I had heard him.
Foundling or not, I knew that he was my child. No one could tell me otherwise.
I knew that Timothy felt the same way that I did. I could see it in his face. That half-starved expression was fixated on the little bundle now cradled against Freyja’s ample breasts.
The baby whimpered again. I looked up at Timothy helplessly. I had no way to give him what he needed. I supposed that Freyja had some special brew for little ones without their mothers, some kind of Magical formula, but I’d been born and raised in an adamantly breast-is-best kind of family.
“I’ve got this,” Tansy said, swooping in. With her long, golden waves of hair, and sweet face, Tansy was the epitome of a Fairytale Princess, complete with pink gown bedazzled with real gems. In fact, she had married her Prince Charming and now lived in a castle with a growing brood of blond hellions.
Tansy dropped her own, much older, baby into my arms and lifted up the tiny stranger. She murmured something in a soft, and very maternal voice, as she guided him to her own breast and encouraged the baby to root and nurse.
“That’s a boy,” she said, as if a miracle like this were part of her everyday life. I supposed that it was.
Freyja nodded in approval. Her floor-length blond braids bounced with the movement. The Folk midwife turned to me and shot out a long series of words, of which I didn’t understand a single syllable.
Freyja spoke, I believed, in a form of Old Norse. Even my Faerie-enhanced education hadn’t covered whatever rare dialect she spoke.
Thankfully, her assistant could—and did—come to the rescue.
“She says he’s healthy,” the shy girl said, ducking her head to avoid having to look into my face. “Ten fingers, ten toes, very strong, considering…”
Considering we had no idea how long he’d been watched over by a tree.
“She does not know what he is,” the girl continued. “Some Fae, perhaps? Some human? She can’t tell.” She listened as Freyja kept speaking. “Ah, she says that she can give you a… potion that will help you feed your baby. To make milk?” She gestured towards my chest, and then turned scarlet at the thought of her own audacity.
“Really? You can do that?” I turned to the midwife, who nodded vigorously.
I was struck by yet another wave of the combination of fear and awe that had filled me from the moment I had become mother to this infant. I had grown up with multitudes of sisters. I had changed my first diaper when I was four years old… None of that seemed to help at all, now that it was my child I was dealing with. How did anyone do it? Was anyone ever truly prepared for parenthood?
“But, where did he come from?” Jessi asked, leaning against her pillows. At the beginning of her confinement to bed rest, her face had almost matched the pallor of her pillow cases. I was relieved to see that her usual, vibrant golden-brown had returned. She raised an eyebrow in an expression that was classically Jessi. “You can’t tell me that you’re not curious.”
“Of course I want to know,” I said, softly. “I want to know everything about him. But, even if I never know where he came from—I know that he’s ours.”
“Our son,” Timothy added, his voice husky with emotion. I smiled up at him. His eyes shined with the mirror of the tears I could feel in my own eyes.
“How about the real question of the day? What are you going to name him?” Tansy asked, rocking slightly as she fed the baby. She stroked his hair softly with her free hand as she swayed, her body moving in that instinctive motion that all mothers seemed to possess.
Timothy and I stared at each other. We hadn’t even considered that aspect of our situation. Of all the aspects of our situation, this one truly made everything feel real.
He was
ours
. We could name him.
This day kept bowling me over. I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel steady again.
“Quinn?” I asked Timothy, thinking of the great sacrifice his mother, Quinna, had made for us. Naming our son after her would be the smallest way we could begin to repay her.
“Maybe Lenus?” Timothy said thoughtfully. “Like your father? Is it a family name?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“What about Asher?” Jessi asked. She stroked her own tremendous belly thoughtfully. “I was saving it for this baby, but I think it suits your little one better. It means “blessed”. What do you think?”
A shiver had traced down my spine as she spoke the name. I knew in my heart that it was mean to be his name. I turned to Timothy, just hoping that he felt the same way.
“Asher,” he said, in agreement. “It suits him.”
We’d talked about names in the past, of course—names that would be forever associated with the pregnancies I had lost. Asher, I knew, had been in the long list of names we had considered, but it had never caught my interest.
But, I knew, without a doubt, that this little one was Asher.
Tansy slid the now-slack baby from under her shirt, and handed him over to Timothy, who had the reverent expression of a man holding an unspeakable treasure. I had never seen my husband so awe-struck.
I gave the snoozing baby Cin back to her mother, trying to blink back the tears that were in my eyes.
“Let them fall,” Tansy murmured. “Motherhood is as much about tears as it is about laughter. It’s as much rainy days as sunshine.”
“Unless you live in Tucson,” I sniffled.
She laughed. “Yes, there is that.” She hugged me with her free arm. “Don’t ever be ashamed of what you are feeling. You’re a mother now. Embrace it! Motherhood comes with a thousand emotions, but no handbook. There’s not wrong way to love your child.”
My child. I tingled all over. I was a mother. A mother! How long had I wanted to hear those words? Now that the title was mine, I couldn’t believe it. It felt surreal.
Then I looked down at the sleeping infant in my husband’s arms, and I knew, just as I had at the tree, that he was mine. Ours. Forever.
Was adoption always like this? I felt like the branch that Asher had been grafted in, just as surely as the gardeners in the orchards grafted trees together. I had grafted Timothy into my heart. Now there was Asher.
How did it make sense that I had never felt overwhelmed with so much love? Shouldn’t loving the two of them so intensely make me have less for myself? Instead, I felt an infinity in love that I had never felt before. I felt as if my essence—my soul—had doubled in a hurry.
Freyja pressed a wooden cup, held in her plump and steady hands, against my lips. It smelled vile—like evergreen cotton candy, if I had to put a name to it—both pungent and overly sweet. I obediently drank, despite my first instinct, which was to chuck the stuff out of the closest window.
It tasted even worse than my nose had warned me. I tasted honey and fenugreek in the mix somewhere, and slightly fermented oats? Surely, there was no actual turpentine included. That last lingering taste in my mouth reminded me of something tropical, like papaya, but not quite. Something Fae, of course.
“You will drink this seven times today,” Frejya said, through her assistant. “Then, tomorrow, three times. Then, if all goes well, once. Soon you will be making milk like a…” The girl gave her mentor a horrified look. She flushed from her neck to the roots of her hair. “Like a good goat. It sounds less insulting when she says it, of course.”
“She said ‘Heidruin’,” Timothy said helpfully, looking up from our son. “That’s not a normal goat. She was a goddess among goats.”
“I’m comforted,” I said, wryly. I looked down at my shirt-covered breasts with new eyes. They had been many things to me—in the way at times, an appendage, or something I wore with my best dresses. This would be a new role for us both. “Do you think that this will work?”
“Oh, yes,” the assistant said proudly. “Freyja could coax milk out of stone breasts.”
“Lovely image,” Timothy murmured.
I fought the urge to giggle hysterically.
“You need to eat,” Jessi said, from her nest of blankets. “You’re going to need to eat well to support a baby—and to help you get through the long nights. Believe me.”
Her words were the breaking point. The dam of my emotions—held back for ten long years—couldn’t be held back any longer. An overflowing wellspring of long-hidden sobs shuddered through me. I leaned my head against Timothy’s back, trying to stifle the tears before I woke up the baby.
Then Freyja was there. She held me and rocked me, which should have been ridiculous, considering how much taller I was than her. She somehow gathered me up and patted my back—full of that abundance of love and compassion that reflected everything she was.
“She says to cry,” the assistant said, earning an approving nod of agreement from Tansy. “It is good to let go of the pain and the joy together.”
If only she knew how truly those words rang in my ears.
I had ten years and eight miscarriages worth of pain to surrender—and ten years of being happily married and the joy of finally having my own baby to balance out the whole of what I was feeling.
No wonder the waterworks were flooding.
“I’m happy,” I said, waving my hands at my eyes as if waving them like a flag of surrender was going to help me stop crying. “I’m just so very happy.”
Asher, in Timothy’s arms, started to wail.
“Here she is,” Timothy said, sliding him into my arms. “Here’s your mama.”
Asher looked up at me. I felt that shock of recognition down my spine—that knowledge that he was mine. His eyes, still the vague blue of a newborn, flitted from side to side, calming suddenly on my face.
His mouth, which had been an ‘O’ of misery, turned instead to the lifting of the corners of his mouth. His bleating cry turned to a coo. His hand bumped gently against my cheek and grabbed onto a strand of my hair.
I buried my nose into his neck. His scent was warm and milky, with an earthiness that reminded me of the golden tree, where he had been kept safe for me.
“That boy certainly knows his mama,” Jessi said, her voice sounding a little choked up.
“He does, doesn’t he?” I pressed my lips to Asher’s forehead. He bumped his head against my lips, as if he couldn’t get close enough.
I couldn’t wait for my milk to come in as Freyja had promised. Maybe, when I was able to feed him myself, this would stop feeling like an incredible dream, but reality.
Tansy sniffled.
I turned to her. “What do you have to cry about?”
“It’s all so sweet,” Tansy said, sniffing again. “It makes me want to have another baby.”
“You already have six,” Jessi said, from the bed. “Let Cindy have her moment, Tansy.”
It really was my moment.
“Ouch,” I yelped, as an electric shock moved from Asher’s blanket-swaddled body into mine. “What was that?”
The baby didn’t cry. In fact, he looked at me with a wobbly sort of old-man expression.
“That,” Freyja’s assistant reported dutifully, translating for her mistress, “was his Magic. He has a lot of it. Good luck.”
Freyja chuckled as she gathered her things together.