My mother had sought warmth elsewhere. Not once, but several times. Desperate, lonely, starved for any human connection, she had opened her door to traveling merchants, wandering craftsmen, men who passed through the village and would not stay. They gave her moments of comfort, of feeling seen, of feeling like a woman instead of a nursemaid to a corpse. And then they left.
Three times before me, those encounters left her with child. Three times, she carried hope in her belly—hope that this baby, this piece of warmth she had stolen from an uncaring world, might be the thing that saved her.
Three times, she looked at those infants after they were born, saw the faces of the men who had used her and left her, and could not bear what she had made.
The midwife's voice dropped to barely a whisper when she told me this part. The first baby, she said, was born sickly. It would have died anyway, probably. But the second—a healthy boy with his father's dark eyes—simply stopped breathing one night, and only the midwife noticed the faint bruising on his tiny neck that no one bothered to question. The third was a girl, born blue and still, and my mother had wept and wept, but the midwife had seen the way her hands trembled, the way she could not meet anyone's eyes.
"The guilt ate her alive," the midwife said, her old eyes wet with unshed tears. "She killed them because she couldn't bear to look at them—at the proof of her failures, her desperate grabs for love, her shame. And then she had to live with what she'd done."
I stared at her, my child's mind struggling to comprehend such darkness.
"But she kept me," I whispered. "Why? Why did she keep me?"
The midwife shook her head slowly. "I don't know, child. Maybe by the time you came, she had no more strength left for killing. Maybe something in you was different—the way you looked at her, the way you fought to live even when your leg was broken and the fever raged. Or maybe..." She paused, searching for words.
The midwife reached out and touched my cheek with a hand worn rough by decades of delivering babies and laying out the dead.
"Your mother is a broken woman, Giana. What was done to her broke her. What she did broke her more. But you—you survived. You keep surviving. And I think, in her own twisted way, she needs you to. You're the only proof left that she was ever more than just a nursemaid to a dead man. You're the only warmth she has left, even if she doesn't know how to show it without burning you."
I didn't understand then. Not fully. But I carried her words with me, turning them over in the quiet moments, trying to make sense of a love that looked like hate and a mother who destroyed the things she made.
The guilt had consumed her. That was the only explanation that ever-made sense. The guilt of the affairs, the guilt of the three tiny graves hidden at the edge of the village where no one asked questions, the guilt of knowing her husband lay dying in the next room while she carried other men's babies. It had curdled inside her, turning into something black and poisonous, and by the time I was born, there was nothing left of the woman who had once laughed and sung while she worked.
Only this shell. Only this sickness. Only me, to bear the weight of it all.
I never told the King any of this. Not then. The shame was too great, the wounds too fresh, the story too tangled with pain to be shaped into words. I simply climbed the mountain, day after day, and let him be my escape from the truth I couldn't face.