Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”
Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
“Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”
“You can promise me that?”
“That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.
As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”
“Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.
Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”
The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”
Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.
“Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.
She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.
For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.
The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”
“They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.
“Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.
Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.
She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.
“Take them away.”
The midwife, a goodhearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”
She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.
“See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”
Pitor shook his head.“My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”
The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.
“What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.
“I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”
So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.
The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.
The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”
The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”
So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.
The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.
By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.
Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.
“She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”
“Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”
For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.
“They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”
“That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”
The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.
And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.
Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.
Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering,