The gown still lay hidden beneath her bed, its hem dusted with cedar and secrets. Lytavis was smoothing the last stray thread back into its trunk when the knocker struck the front door—two quick raps and a third softer, urgent.
A temple apprentice stood there, breathless, hands pressed together in apology.
"Crysta sent me. Sylann Moonglow has been in labor since last night. She asks for you."
Lytavis didn't pause. She changed out of her underdress and moved before the echo of his words faded. Satchel, water skin, clean cloths. Zoya's hands were there in an instant—steadying the strap on her shoulder, tucking a small pot of salve into the side pocket without words. Lucien met her in the doorway with a single nod that meant think first. Then the door closed behind her, and the city took her in.
Sylann's rooms were not what the gossip made them. Yes, there were silks—curtains hung like dusk, cushions tossed like fallen petals—but there was also last night's incense turned sour, a basin filled with cooling water, and the sharp, honest smell of labor. Candles guttered, their light butter-soft across a bed where a woman fought.
Sylann was beautiful the way a coastline is—bruised by waves and still unbroken. Sweat had swept her violet hair back; kohl had smudged into tired shadows around her silvery eyes. Her fingers clenched the sheets in knotted handfuls, the lacquer chipped from her nails. When a contraction took her, she swore like a soldier; when it eased, she whispered, "Don't let me die," to no one in particular and to everyone at once.
"I've got you," Lytavis said, voice low, washcloth cooling the line of Sylann's throat. "Breathe with me."
Crysta was already working—counting the pulse, reading the rhythm, listening for what the body was saying beneath the noise. Her eyes lifted to Lytavis only once. "Breech," she said, unadorned. "We'll turn if we can, guide if we can't. She's exhausted. Keep her anchored."
The hours narrowed into a small world: the crack of fresh kindling in the brazier, the clink of a cup set down and taken up, the catch of a breath when pain crested. Lytavis wiped Sylann's brow, braided and re-braided her damp hair out of the way, hummed a steady note until the room seemed to lean toward that thread of sound.
"On hands and knees," Crysta murmured when the time came, calm as the moon. "Slow… good. Lytavis, firm pressure here. No, there. Hold."
Sylann cursed every god she knew and invented three more. Her bracelets bit her wrists; she tore them off and flung them. When the pain crested again she grabbed Lytavis's forearm and hung on, eyes gone bright and wild. "If I break you," she gasped, "I'm sorry."
"You won't," Lytavis said, though her skin would carry small moons of bruises later. "You're nearly there."
The room contracted to four hands and a heartbeat: Crysta's, precise and sure, translating the language of bone and muscle; Lytavis's, steady as rock in a storm; Sylann's, shaking and then not, white-knuckled on the edge of the world; and the small unseen heart that insisted on being born.
"Now," Crysta said—a single bell-strike of a word. "Breathe. Bear down. Good. Again."
The child came foot-first, stubborn as his mother, and then—after a long breath and a longer one—shoulders, soft belly, the slick tumble of a back. For an instant he was too quiet, the room holding itself as if it dared not exhale.
"Come on," Crysta murmured, already clearing, coaxing. Lytavis's palms hovered an inch above his chest—warm without touching—a whisper of reassurance she would later insist was only habit, not magic.
A cough. A small, outraged cry that filled all the hollow places.
"There you are." Crysta's mouth softened. "A boy."
She set him in Lytavis's hands for the briefest heartbeat—warm, heavier than he looked, a fist already curled as if claiming the world—then into Sylann's waiting arms.
"Ryathen," Sylann said, voice broken open, the word more breath than sound. She pulled him close—the fierce clutch of someone who had fought for ground inch by inch and would not give it back.
They worked on, because birth does not end at breath: checking the bleed, brewing the tea that steadies, mending what needed mending with careful, merciful stitches. Sylann shook once, twice, and then stilled. When the worst of the tremors passed, she turned her face toward Lytavis, lashes spiked with tears.
"They see silks," she said hoarsely, rocking the child, "and think that is all. Thank you for seeing… this."
Lytavis only touched her shoulder, gentle. "Rest. He's perfect."
Outside the curtains, voices rose and fell, muted as if underwater. The city would keep talking—about the courtesan with her jewels and her clients, about the parties lit like false dawn—but in here the world had narrowed to a woman, a boy, and the slow, holy climb back from the brink.
Crysta cleaned the last bowl, checked the cord again, and tied the neatest knot Lytavis had seen all season. "You did well," she said, which in Crysta's mouth meant you did not falter when it mattered.
They left when the room had settled into the soft hush of after. Sylann's hand was curved around her son's foot. He slept with his mouth open in a small pink o, the air whistling slightly as it came and went. Lytavis stood in the doorway and let herself smile the whole way through before pulling the curtain closed.
They walked home through streets bright with daylight and small, ordinary noises: a baker sweeping his stoop, a child chasing a moth, bells marking the hour in the distance. Lytavis stared at her hands, at the thin seam of dried blood at the edge of her nail, at the crescent moons already forming on her forearm where Sylann had held on.
"Tea," Crysta said—the single most generous prescription in the world. "And sleep."
Lytavis nodded. But when the Ariakan door opened and the familiar hum wrapped her, she found she could not yet sit. She went to the garden instead. Zoya's rosemary brushed her skirt; the leylines under the villa throbbed like a satisfied pulse. Skye landed on the trellis and tilted her head, as if counting Lytavis's breaths.
"Ryathen," Lytavis said softly, testing the name. It fit on her tongue the way new things do when the world has already made room for them.
Only when the tremor left her hands did she go inside.
Notes in the Margin — Lucien Ariakan
She returned at midday, with the look of someone who has walked the measurable edge—between one more breath and none—and found a way back for another besides herself. She spoke briefly: a breech, a boy, a mother who lived. If she trembled, it was in passing and not from fear.
I write so the house will remember when we are gone: today, my daughter carried skill into a room that had more silk than mercy and left it with more life than it had when she arrived. She thinks this is simply the work. Perhaps it is. But the work has weight, and today she lifted it.