Weyrborn [Azh]

[Reky]

As winter progressed into spring, Samael progressed into a near complete lack of productivity. The cold and stormy winter had weighed on her a fair a bit, but - at least for the first half of the season - she hadn't been unmanageable huge. Pregnancy was an experience, she discovered. She spent more time than she should have trying to remember how uncomfortable her mother had been when she was pregnant with Embla, and writing her to ask questions upon questions. The first months had been fine. Her morning sickness was forgiving, and she was still sprightly enough to help out around the Weyr while being grounded from flight. She loved her little belly, and the myriad of maternity dresses Q'sis had commissioned for her. (She even asked for fine fabric from her homehold, Southern Boll, which her parents were delighted to send.) Now, though, as the snow melted and the dampness followed spring through its motions, she was bedridden, huge, and tired.

She was doing well enough, at least. As well as she could be. The healers suspected she had a big, big baby on the way - "and I'd be sharded if it was a girl; only boys get so big" - which Samael found entertainingly predictably, considering Q'sis' stature. He was so very good to her and made sure she made her healers' appointments, brought her all her strange edible demands, and made her feel very, very loved. Qaelis - for she had excitedly picked the name very early on - was very well taken-care of, by extension, and he or she got a daily earful of his or her mother's happy voice. Even exhausted in bed, she was able to dredge up stories to tell her baby - or else she just talked out loud to Naireth and Balto. "You can't hear Naireth," she told Qaelis. "She's nice, though. She'll be your babysitter sometimes."

Naireth had ever been tender and protective, too. Only one or two sevendays ago, Samael's little sister Embla came to Dalibor, too. Despite being embarrassed at being stuck in bed, she was elated, and had Embla sit with her and tell her everything that had happened since Samael left. She couldn't believe that it had been nearly 9 Turns already. A lot had happened, though, and she supposed it made sense. "Shells, I'm having a baby," she joked. "Did you ever expect that?"

The child would be born of tanriders, in the thick mountain stone of Dalibor Weyr. Not holdbred, like its mother, or born in a trader caravan like its father. A new generation and a new culture - but Samael talked frequently of seeing the child as much as possible, instead of having it grow up nearly parentless like so many weyrbrats. Every aspect of the baby's coming had been verbally explored, and that kept her busy, but eventually it just became a matter of waiting.

Qaelis decided to arrive into the world on a rainy evening. Samael, who had been knitting in bed, set her needles away and settled in to sleep. It was not yet late, but she had eaten dinner and Q'sis had come to tuck her in. A sudden twist of pain shifted her upright to clutch at it, and she wearily swung her legs over the edge of the bed to sit up. She felt, immediately, quite frantic. Her lips pressed tight together in worry. In the diffused, waning light of a drizzling sunset, Naireth's whirling eyes peered through the door at her woman. Samael took a heavy breath of the rainy, fresh air, but it did little to ease her, so she hesitantly stood.

"Q'sis," she said, using the night table to brace herself. "Q'sis, we're going now. I think. I'm pretty sure. I don't know."

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[Azhdarchid]

[Q'sis][Qunath]

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The selfish thought remained, brief as dust in his eye.

Steal Samael from the Weyr, get her to give birth in a proper rut at the side of a road, without attendance from anyone but him. A free child, a child made of wind instead of stone. A traditional child.

He got out of his chair and turned toward her in the same motion, hand falling to the chair's back more to mark its place than to balance himself. He always took steps to avoid things below his field of view. Q'sis moved in synchrony with Sam's peep of an announcement; he'd seen Naireth staring in. He looked around this cramped, cozy cave, the notch in the Weyr wall that served as a dwelling. It was a place that belonged to Samael, though he had played the necessary hanger-on at late. The chair beneath his hand was his chair, and Samael's desk had recently become his desk.

"Yes," he answered, prepared to allow it. The tanrider advanced, brushing past his peer and ripping back the thick fur blankets to expose the earthtone sheet tucked into the mattress. He caressed the corner of the bed, which was smaller than his but had served nonetheless. Then he wrapped his callused hand around Samael's arm. "Sit. I will get them. This is your home." Releasing her, Q'sis raised his hand and snapped his fingers a couple times, then pointed to his woman. Balto was to land in her arms, monitor and comfort. Q'sis had grown to tolerate the little firelizard out of more than pure invisibility. Q'sis had to be in the weyr with Sam, and seemingly the flit needed to absorb time in her presence as well. But by his color, or because Samael was at good at training animals as she was at everything else, he was the gentlest possible reintroduction to his kind. Q'sis could handle Balto in his peripheral view, coiled at the other side of the room.

And with that overcome, it seemed he'd recalled that firelizards had their uses. "Wait," he demanded of Samael, then stormed out past Naireth's waiting head and wild eyes to the ledge. He'd already called Unath down from her own perch, and as he jogged up her proffered arm, hiking his leg over her neck, he tensed open shared wings to take-off as soon as he sat back. His own body was deadweight on that incredible bridge of sinew, muscle, and bone ridge. He wrapped his arms around the spoke ahead to secure it, then flew Unath to the infirmary. Her wings clipped shut as he marched her inside, her tail tucked off the ground to keep it from dragging over anything. "My woman!" he yelled at a couple greenshirts lurking by the scribing desk where appointments were recorded.

It took Q'sis a moment to decide he did not recognize them, and them a moment to study the man on the tan, then roll their very blase gazes toward his blunt-nosed dragon's head. "No," he growled. "Nevermind you. Where is Loki-" Pause. "Where are the women?" Because it had been primarily female healers that had attended Sam through all the appointments Q'sis had insisted she make. Never Lokien, despite his first impulse. Why had he said that? The fleeting notion that the ghast might be cheered to attend the birth of Q'sis' first son, and the one that no matter their specializations, Lokien remained a better healer than any other. Because he was Q'sis' friend, and such respect did not fall to the meritless.

Another selfish thought.

The healers seemed to have pooled their brainpower sufficiently to figure out what the tanrider wanted, for they ran off and brought back one woman and a few bundles of supplies. It was obvious Q'sis would be making return trips. For more women. For more supplies. But this first, the midwife, he took to Samael immediately.

The woman came through the inner archway first, smiling at the burdened rider and motioning how she should lay on the bed, and re-positioning the pillows. Q'sis came after, the mountain of supplies shed from his back, a metal rod with a glowing pot at the end deposited carefully to the floor. Inside the pot was fire, and he wired a spit over it, and hung another pot full of water over. It began to boil while he departed again. For more women. For more supplies.

When they finally did not need him anymore, he dragged his chair to the very head of the bed, where he would not obscure anyone. Samael would not see him but if she turned her face back, but he reached down and laid his right hand, with its one abbreviated finger, on the bed for her to hold.

[Reky]

All Samael could do, then, was wait. The anticipation had swollen in her head like a cloud of cotton; she mumbled a little as she sat back down on the bed, half wanting to beg Q'sis to stay. Naireth could get healers, or her sister could, or somebody else - but Q'sis was gone and she suddenly felt very alone and frantic. Even with Balto curled by her shoulder, cheeping at her and nuzzling her face, she felt like she would drift away if she didn't have Q'sis to hold onto. In his absence, though, Naireth took up the slack. Her presence was like a second pillow beneath Samael, an unwavering comfort and support that Sam curled into.

Q'sis came and went, each time with supplies and healer women to drop off. The soon-to-be mother was more nervous than even before the Hatchings or Thread - there was her life and her child's life to keep safe, and the promise of pain, and she wished it would just happen and be over, but it wouldn't be so fast. She was hesitant when she announced each contraction, as if she was afraid she was giving false information. At some point, her water broke, and the midwives said it was a good milestone - but Sam's sliver of excitement was overwhelmed by the foreboding. She didn't want to do this.

There was a long time where all she could do was squirm and moan and wait. Sweat coated her face and slicked into her hair; one of the healers wiped her brow for her from time to time. She held tight to Naireth's mind, and to Q'sis' hand, her eyes weary and half-lidded locked on his.

Then, finally, came the last stretch, and Samael was in so much pain and had been for so long that all she wanted was to give up. Naireth hovered very close to the bedroom; at times she and Balto both snarled with their lady's bouts of agony. "Push," the midwife told her, and Samael said often, "I can't," but she could and she did anyway. She was screaming, and the whole time she refused to let go of Q'sis' calloused hand. "I can see the baby's head," assured the midwife, and finally, crying, the child was born.

He was handed to his mother. Tears of relief rolled thick down Sam's face and she took him into her arms, marveling. She gently wipe his face with the soft swaddling cloth, hushed his wailing, gently touch the fine, thin hair on his head. The umbilical cord was cut and cauterized; a healer waited beneath her for the placenta to depart. Another helped wash the infant, but he was kept next to Samael's breast and she would have been upset to have him taken away from her reach.

"Hello, Qaelis," she soothed him and put him to her nipple, where he instinctively began to suckle. It was a strange sensation, but it delighted her. She looked at Q'sis, and even though she was exhausted, she beamed brightly. Qaelis' little hand was wrapped around her finger.

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[Azhdarchid]

[ Q'sis ]

He released the mother's hand, but only so he could stroke the sides of her face with his worn fingers. Pulling her forward just a little, Q'sis closed his lips over hers. His arms dropped, collecting her and the child together, both of them so small.

Then he got up and left the head of the bed, walking to the other side where the midwives cleaned in silence. He tilted his head, gaze running up Samael's legs, then he looked at the woman he had brought first. She smiled at him.

"Everything is alright." Q'sis took a breath, then smiled back. That had been his impression too. He had seen births before. No process was secret on the caravan. The good, and the bad, he had seen. A twinge in his back told him he had been sitting too long, but he ignored it and returned to his throne aside Samael. Only now did he take interest in the thing nestled at her breast. He did not quite lift the boy away, but his hands intruded, poking and wrapping. Each minuscule foot was propped up for him to inspect, and he seized Sam's wrist, turning it forward so he could see the digits of the hand curled against her finger. The strength at play left Qaelis no worse for wear: Q'sis knew how to treat things of value.

The last point of address was the baby's hair. He brushed over the film of potential, blinking a few times before he exhaled through his nose. "Good," he pronounced, and a few of the healer women tittered, but he ignored the lot of them. "Big," he added, watching the infant nurse- a shade of critique wrinkling his brow at first -for long enough that some of the excess midwives had to approach him for a ride back to ground. "There's stairs," he grunted back at them at first, and upon noting their soured faces in their peripheral, he unhunkered from his observation, standing up and suddenly much taller than he had been for all these hours. "You know how to ride a dragon, Weyrfolk?" he asked. "Then show yourselves to the ledge. Unath will take you." He sat back down. These younger healers glanced at the head of operations, who shrugged and chuckled at them. With some muttering, they left. The lead midwife and one other, who was still cleaning, remained.

Eventually they would have to take Qaelis down for recording purposes. He would be riding a dragon on his first day. "When you are ready," he murmured, assuming Samael's thoughts would be in the same vicinity. "You can have him for a month," he informed her. "Then we pick out one of the milkmothers at the creche, and you get back on the dragon." The new father smirked.