You Are My Light Part II

229 - Premature

Side Note - I'm working with the worst keyboard in the world right now, so I'm sorry if I miss any letters or there's any grammar errors.

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The Queen finally lays still, exhausted by her feat of what she now knew was childbirth. She's weak from exhaustion, from shock, from things she cannot even explain. Mary is nauseous and limp from the loss of blood and the suddenness of it all. For all of her academic attributes, she cannot fathom what she had just been through over the last hour. Has it been an hour? Maybe two? Maybe half? She didn't know, but she didn't really need to know. All she needed to know was the information the frantic midwives were keeping from her. Her eyes are on them, turned from her in the only circumstance they could without losing their heads, and she barely blinks as they continue to whisper with the physicians who have left her alone after removing an otherworldly thing from her body that she barely recognised as an afterbirth.

"What is it? What is wrong?" Mary murmurs, laying inside her bloody bed that she didn't even recognise as her own. The goose feathers are drowned in her blood, the bed is soaked and horrid, but it hardly matters. She didn't pay attention to it, all that matters was the thirteen inch long small person who they had pulled from her womb not that long ago. "Does-does it still live?"

There had been no loud cry, just a quiet cough, and a weak bleat, before the child she didn't even know she was to have, was taken from her. Mary blinks in exhaustion, the Queen inside of her subdued for now. She didn't even have the opportunity to look at her child, it had been wrapped up and taken away, and there was skant she could do about it, her limbs bound to the bed by invisible ropes that completley weighed down her whole body.

The eldest midwife poor Hadley had screamed at to attend the Queen of Scotland, and now of France, looks at Mary for a long moment. Mary stares back, the girl not even seventeen years of age feels her stomach roll at the sight. It had been so small, so it was obviously incredibly early. How early? Maybe two months? Perhaps three? When had they conceived in the first place?

The thoughts that run past her head do not draw her mind to the husband who had abandoned her just hours ago. Mary begins to think of possible conception dates, the strongest being around the time Francis imprisoned her in the tower, or around the time Kenna and Bash were forced to wed under duress. How can a woman not know she's pregnant? How can that be? How can the signs be missed? But she had no signs at all. There was no increase in appetite, no swelling of the womb, no tenderness of the breast, and she bled each month without fail. And, all that time, spent worrying over infertility and the prospect of being barron, all of that pain and worry and anxiety and the tears, they were all for nothing.

"Your Majesty." the midwife seems to remember the cries of the death of King Henry, and she falls to her knees in servitude of the new Queen of France. "My Queen-" she whispers. "You have a son."

A son. The prospect of getting pregnant all together was foreign to her, but getting pregnant unknowingly and then delivering an heir to a King who abandoned his crown, his King, his people, who may be just as dead as his father in this moment. Mary didn't know how to react, but the full weight of the news, of her situation, doesn't really register to Mary at all. All she realises is that she has born a son, that she now has a child of her own. One who may take her crown when she is gone from this world, a child who will provide power and security to her homeland, a child who may give her the Crown of England, should she play her cards right and providing lives in the first place. 

"Son." Mary whispers. The midwife rises from the floor, and presents Mary her child, a son that she can quite clearly see is alive, for the bloody towel moves and she can hear a quiet bleat. Her midwife smiles, nodding yes, before laying the child into his mothers' arms. "He is so small." Mary croaks.