A thin but piercing wail rouses me from my stupor. Like a deftly launched spear, it rips through my skin, sinews, and, finally, my heart, burning deep. A warm wetness soaks my chest. Blood? I've been mortally wounded! At the same time, something stirs in my belly, an indescribable yearning to reach out and embrace whoever is crying. The wailing rises to a higher, more urgent pitch. The wound in my chest flows, ripening into raw soreness. I groan and fight to lift my eyelids just one more time, so that I may see the face of the slayer.

The face of Emer the handmaiden looms, pale as the moon. Her mouth forms a smile that does not light her eyes, which stay solemn and dark. Her voice is merry even if a bit too shrill, as if she might break into keening in the next breath. "Ah, Rian! You've finally come back to us! Goddess be praised!" She leans in to kiss my brow.

"I'm dying," I moan. "Emer, a spear has gone through me. The blood -"

There is a murmuring behind her. Others are here, a vague wall of trembling shadows around the bed. From out of the haze floats Neas, the midwife, with a bundle in her arms, a soft, warm bundle that she places gently upon my bleeding chest.

Relief floods through me with a gush of aching that empties me out. I drift away, anchored only by a tiny tugging at my heart, my breast. Life flows out of me and into someone else who feeds hungrily on my dying sigh, sucking greedily at the last breath.

"She's gone." I hear the keening edge in Emer's voice sharpening with the promise of a shriek soon. "The Rian is gone!"

"And what of the babe? He was born too soon." A deeper voice, male, heavy with the weight of tears yet to be shed.

Neas answers with her usual unflappable assurance. "He's small but mighty. Beag ach laidir! He'll survive. There's a woman who lost her newborn to the fevers just yesterday. She'll keep him fed."

Emer sobs. Her tears wet my face. "Better to leave him to the wolves! Look at him. This is not Fenian's son. She must have got with child from the scum of Dun Ailinn! That, or the black druid himself, look at those eyes!"

I am drawn back from wherever I was slowly, pleasantly, drifting. A son? The aching to hold him is fading and I am helplessly fading too, no longer a part of this, free to rest, to sleep, to dream. Yet I want to see him, for he carries my life's blood in him as well as his father's.

The tender top of his skull is swathed with the fuzzy down of a raven, dark as midwinter midnight. He senses my presence above him, no longer beside him, and glances up, confused, to stare wonderingly through those sky-bright eyes at what's left of his mother, drifting, drifting, drifting away.