Issue #27 RRP $8.95 Rory Douglas Abel Aliette ... - Upgrade Systems

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Eilis Arwen O'Neal
We’d been married five years and trying to get me knocked up the whole time.
Nothing worked. We’d been to every healer in the city. I’d drunk more teas, had more
spells recited over me, and endured more purification rituals than any one person
should. Our bed jingled when we made love because of all the charms tied to it. We
even tried going to human doctors with their fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization
and all that cutting-edge research. No luck either.
There’s nothing wrong with either of you, the healers said. The human doctors
echoed them. Just keep trying. Sometimes though, I thought I knew the truth. I may
not have Sylvan’s powers, but sometimes, late at night when he was asleep and I lay
awake and worried, I thought I knew why.
I was never sure I really wanted a baby. And I think there was enough power in
that indecision to keep me from having one.
Because magic knows. Take any sort of spell that affects another person — a compulsion
spell, say. If you try to spell someone to pick up a plate and throw it on the
floor and that person doesn’t want to, it makes it that much harder for your spell to
work. It needs more power, more oomph. The magic knows, even if the other person
doesn’t have any magic, and magic’s harder to work on anyone who resists it.
I’d never told Sylvan about the little kernels of doubt that wormed their way
through me. He wouldn’t have understood. After all, the whole point of marrying
me instead of some Elf chick was that I could get pregnant. That’s part of the deal if
you’re human and marry one of the Folk.
It wasn’t as if I hated children. I liked them; I’d been a great babysitter as a teenager
as long as the kid wasn’t my younger brother. My mother had done a good job
preparing me to become an Elf’s wife. Along with giving me a suitably fey name, she’d
spent a lot of my childhood making sure I got into the Folk-heavy schools, played with
Folk kids, majored in business with an emphasis on the fairy gold market. And she’d
made sure I liked babies. Lots of books about how great motherhood was, how fulfilling
and natural and wonderful. By the time I was twenty, I was perfectly groomed to
bear a fey baby.
I just wasn’t sure I wanted one. What if it cried in the middle of the night, and
instead of wanting to hold it I wanted to chuck it out the window? What if it were
born with a disease that even healers didn’t diagnose until it was too late? What if
Sylvan stopped needing me once he had an Elf baby? Some nights the questions
— the what ifs — danced in my head more brightly than will-o-the-wisps. And I did
not become pregnant.
I was gardening the day Sylvan told me about the party. That’s one of my oddnesses.
Even Merry, who’s as sweet as can be, would have raised her eyebrows to see
me in the garden. After all, it ruined my hands and knees — they had to use some
pretty strong beautifying spells at Rune Spa to erase the damage. They wouldn’t
understand that some part of me needed to be out there for at least a while every day.
That if I didn’t get to touch the dirt and the stems of plants I started feeling loose and
strange, like the molecules in my body might float away, not held down by anything
real. Even Sylvan thought I did it just to have our own supply of herbs for the fertility