The child came in the ninth month, on a morning bright with early summer sun, and the whole of Ashenveil seemed to hold its breath until the first cry split the quiet.
It was a hard birth. Aria would not pretend, afterward, that it had been anything else. Hours of it, with Vael at one hand and Kael at the other, with Cress's old healer-woman directing everything in a voice gone hoarse from shouting instructions, with the seal humming low and watchful in Aria's chest the whole time, as though it too understood that something enormous was happening and had finally, fully, learned to simply witness instead of reach.
When the cry came, it was furious and bright and unmistakably alive.
"A girl," the healer said, and her voice cracked with thirty years of having delivered exactly this announc
