Prologue: Egg Born – Written Excerpt (Part Chapter)

The child did not come screaming into the world.

Nor did the storm break the dusk. It had been gathering momentum all afternoon, but it was not strong enough to deter patrons from visiting the pub that night. Such were the folk of the Stone Kingdom, strong as bedrock and hard as quarried rock. Despite it being mid-winter, there was a warmth in the air, the kind of warmth that warned rather than comforted, the calm before a storm that would not be denied.

As usual, the regulars sat at the bar, gossiping, complaining, airing their dirty laundry over too many jugs of beer.

This night, though, the patrons were not as loud or as bashful as most. A quiet had settled among them, a shared restraint, as though they were all, without knowing why, bracing themselves for what was to come.

Above them, in the proprietor’s private residence, a woman laboured in childbirth.

Those below heard each consequence of a contraction. The sharp intake of breath. The raw push of body and voice. A midwife barking orders to push harder. The heavy silence of the husband.

He stood in the corner of the room in defiance. He did not like this. He did not like it at all.

This pregnancy had been strange. It had taken, for one thing, not like the other two, both lost before they had even raised a mound on his wife’s abdomen. He turned toward the narrow wooden window. The shutters were already closed, but he could see through the gaps between the slats. He needed something else to focus on, anything other than the sounds coming from the bed.

The pub sat at the end of the village’s main road. Beside it stood other shops and stores, each two stories high, their stone walls joined shoulder to shoulder like a defensive line against the sea wind. Beyond them lay the villagers’ houses, stone and timber, roofs pitched low against salt and storm. Light glowed amber behind their windows, a fragile warmth set against the pressing dark.

The wind rattled the shutters, driving them hard against the window frame.

Another push. Another hoarse groan. Panting.

He did not turn.

He searched instead for the tree.

The one that stood at the cliff’s edge, long dead, its bark split and silvered by salt, yet somehow never uprooted by wind or decay. He did not know why he needed to see it. He only knew that he did.

The moon, a thin sliver of silver, slid in and out of cloud cover, brightening in brief pulses as the wind drove the sky fast and low.

He thought he caught sight of the tree. Just for a moment.

Another push. Another cry. The midwife urging her on.

Finally, the husband turned.

His wife lay on the narrow bed, propped against flattened pillows, fingers twisted tight in the blanket beneath her. Her skin was a warm stone-brown, flushed and slick with sweat. Dark hair, usually braided and pinned, clung in loose, damp strands to her cheeks and throat.

She did not look to him for comfort, nor did she want it. She had been in pain for days, pain that came in strange waves, leaving her shivering from the inside out. At times it felt as though the child inside her sank too deep, slipping into some cold hollow she could not name.

The midwife knelt between her bent knees, grey hair tied back, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her hands were steady, shaped by thirty years of delivering quarrymen’s sons and dockworkers’ daughters.

When the contraction passed, she glanced up at the husband. “Not long now,” she said, perhaps hoping he might make himself useful.

Instead, he huffed. He crossed to the dresser, took up the bottle of gin, and poured himself a shot. His broad shoulders blocked the flicker of the hall lamp behind him. His skin was the pale shade of quarried limestone, his hair the dull white of weathered chalk, plastered to his forehead from his dash through rain and wind to fetch the midwife.

“Here comes another one,” the wife said, her voice tight.

“Don’t push yet,” the midwife instructed. “Just breathe. Hold on.”

“How much longer is this going to take?” the husband snapped. “You’re scaring the punters. Get it over with.”

He feinted a step forward, but his boots remained heavy, rooted to the floorboards. He was paralysed, and the helplessness only fed his anger.

“Enough,” he said as his wife cried out, a single piercing sound that cut through the thunder outside.

His voice was flat, as though her pain offended him, as though the noise threatened to crack something inside his carefully mortared walls.