The birthing blood had already cooled when Suthren Cohl found the godling with its mouth clamped around the queen's thigh.
She had charged the queen's physicians thrice her usual rate for a royal bed — four gold marks, no bargaining — because queens always tried to die in the worst ways. Suthren had dragged three living saints from the rot-wombs of the ash-cast pantheon, had cut the cord on a stillborn prophecy once already in her thirty years. She knew the smell of trouble.
This smelled of copper and wet stone and the wrong kind of hunger.
"Get back," she said to the wet nurses cowering by the hearth. None of them moved. She didn't repeat herself.
The godling's head was wrong. Too large, scalp split by something pushing through from beneath — not hair but filament, pale and corded, already drying to the queen's ruined sheets. Its eyes were closed. Small mercy. Suthren counted breaths — the queen's, shallow and fast; the godling's, steady, almost amused.
She needed her kit. The bone blade, specifically, locked in her runner's pack three rooms away because she'd believed, stupidly, that this would be a simple extraction. That the oaths between queens and midwives were still worth the breath spent on them.
"Fetch my pack," she told the nearest wet nurse. "The tall one with the black clasps. Run."
"The creature," the woman said. "It's — it's feeding on her —"
"It's blessing her." Suthren's voice came out flat, smoker's rasp scraping the words. "The old powers still think blessings taste like meat. Now move."
The queen's hand twitched. One bruised eye opened, found Suthren's face.
"You swore," the queen said. "On the Throne-Below. Safe passage for us both."
"I swore safe passage for the child." Suthren leaned closer, close enough to smell the queen's sour fear, the godling's grave-milk breath. "I never said which child."
The queen's mouth opened. Closed. The godling's eyelids fluttered, preparing to part.
Suthren looked at the color of the skin beneath those lids — blue-threaded, bruise-born — and knew the precise shade. She had seen it once before, in a daughter she had not been allowed to bury, in a war the gods had eaten while her village burned.