Marion: Blood and Heir

The longer Marion looked down at his face, the more it seemed … worth it. Not all of it. Not nearly all of it. She was lightheaded and exhausted, hair sticking sweaty to her face, but the longer she gazed down at her tiny, tiny tiny son — smaller than Hansel had been, but that wasn’t unexpected — maybe — maybe too small, for a human baby — the less bitter she felt. It wasn’t a fair trade. None of it was fair, and it would never be fair to look at him that way — as a consolation prize.

He was so very small. He didn’t cry loudly or move around much. There was just something so keenly real about him, now, in his smallness, and his quietness, and his stillness, something that passed into surreality, and he wasn’t a symbol anymore.

She might name him Leigh. It was a name humans and orcs both used. He had his father’s blond hair — ah, maybe it would darken; she could hope — but his father couldn’t fucking have him. He was hers. All hers.

###

“Need a son,” Elijah said.

Marion didn’t look up from cleaning the counter. “We have a son.”

Hansel was in the room. Elijah was drunk at the kitchen table and being fucking cruel while the boy he would work to death kept working, standing on a stool at the sink to wash the dishes they’d had dinner on.

“Need my *own* son,” Elijah growled. His arms were folded on the table and his face was planted on them. “Need … need an heir. Carry on th’ fam’ly name.”

“Hansel has your name,” she told him. He wasn’t a Bell. Nor was she, anymore. They’d never had the chance to be anything else.

Elijah snarled wordlessly and lurched upright. “Y’know what I fuckin’ mean, woman.”

Marion stopped. She stared at the counter and grit her teeth.

“Been years,” Elijah grumbled. “Had a fuckin’ deal. Actin’ all uppity. Like I ain’t give you time. You had plenty a’ goddamn time.” He flung it at her all accusatory.

A dish slipped out of Hansel’s hands and splashed into the water. He was trembling, eyes fixed down. Marion closed her own eyes for a moment, took a breath, and shook everything off, made it all still. She went to Hansel and kissed his temple, and he cut his eyes at her fearfully, not scared of her but of the man behind him.

He was too young to really understand, but he knew well enough that Elijah was drunk and angry and loud, and she could hardly blame him for being scared. Elijah didn’t hit them, but he made it seem like he would. Too much a coward to follow through. All he was good for was terrorizing an eight-year-old boy, and he relished the measly power he had.

Elijah Granger didn’t scare Marion. He disgusted her. The idea of touching him disgusted her. But she could shake that off, too, make it all go still and away.

“Go play in the barn a while, sweetheart,” she told Hansel gently. She brushed his hair back and kissed his forehead, too. “The grown-ups need to talk about grown-up things.”

Scared as he was, he faltered. “The dishes.”

“I’ll take care of them, honey. Go on. It’s okay.”

###

Marion’s mother wouldn’t tell her what to do. Elijah and her father wouldn’t even come into the room. Marion felt like her guts had ripped out, and she felt like there was too much blood on the sheets, but her mother wouldn’t tell her. All she could do was cry and shiver, and hold her baby, and he cried, too, bawling at being in the world.

She thought he was the wrong color. She didn’t know if orc babies were — were supposed to look like that. She kept thinking the blue-gray color was corpse-like, and she kept thinking that couldn’t be right, and she kept asking her mom:

“What do I — M-Momma, is — is he okay? What do I do? Momma, please —.”

Her mother was silent and tense, her lips a grim line as she bustled around the room doing everything but looking at Marion and the baby, everything but speaking.

Marion gasped and hiccuped, and she rocked him. She’d had a name picked out for him, but she was so sure he was going to die. Was it bad luck to name a baby, or not name them, before they died? Silvanus, she didn’t know. Her mother left the bedroom, left her alone, and over her own cries and the baby’s screams she could still hear raised voices in the other room. She couldn’t make out the words, but Elijah’s anger was clear.

It could be that Elijah was mad about the boy being … wrong. He’d agreed to marry her because he thought the boy would grow up fast and strong to work his farm. If he died, then Marion was useless until she could bear him another boy — a human boy, one who grew up the same speed as any other human boy. Or it could be that he was mad about the boy not being dead yet, because he’d realized he didn’t want to share his roof with a beast.

Marion tried to stop crying, and coo and shush her son instead. She held him carefully but the rocking was jerky, pained, her muscles all sore. She told him she loved him. She told him she was sorry.

The voices outside halted abruptly, then got even louder, and the door banged open and she heard her father bellowing *knife-eared bitch* before the Lady of the Wood swept in. The door shut behind her in a gust and she looked down at Marion shaking in her birthing bed, cradling a wailing newborn, with the same impassivity she always had.

“He’s hungry,” she said flatly. “You need to nurse him.”

Marion peeked up at her. The Lady was … benign, as a rule, but she was intimidating. Marion had this sense that the Lady might take her son away if she thought he wasn’t being taken good enough care of, might leave a spelled rotting log in his place, or some clawing forest creature masquerading as a boy. She held him closer. No one could have him; he was hers, he was hers, he was all that she had.

“My milk never came in,” she said in a small, quietly defensive voice.

The Lady wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Come to me next time. I can remedy that.”

*Next time?* Marion wanted to say.

The Lady reached into her rustling robes and pulled out a couple of large, plump red berries and a moss-green handkerchief, which she wrapped the berries in securely before crushing it in her hand. The berries popped and stained the handkerchief dark purple, and she held it out to Marion.

Her voice was a touch softer. “Let him suck on that. It’ll tide him over.”

A little hesitant — hands shaking — Marion did as the Lady said, holding the sticky handkerchief to the baby’s lips until he latched onto it. He went quiet, finally, eager and hungry. Marion let out a relieved, shuddering sigh without meaning to, and the tears came back, but they weren’t so violent this time.

She shifted her son in her arms and sniffled, voice high and cracking. “Thank you.”

She expected the Lady to leave. That was what she normally did — came and went at her own whim, never stayed longer or allowed anyone to be in her presence for longer than was absolutely necessary. Instead, the Lady sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly. She watched Marion.

“Has he got a name?” she asked.

Marion nodded. It was too terrifying to say out loud. Too much to make real. If you named a thing, you had to keep it, and she was so afraid that he would die, and she would always know his name, always have him in her heart. She wished she could be heartless instead.

He looked like his father, a little, she kept thinking.

“Hansel,” she said, broken. “I … I would’ve wanted him to be Hansel Novad, I …” Granger, instead. He’d be Hansel Granger, and until she died she’d be Marion Granger. She started crying helplessly again, rocking her tiny son, her poor son, her fatherless son.

The Lady of the Wood put a hand on her shoulder. It was a cool, calming touch. “It’s a good name,” she told Marion, firmly, and stayed with her a while.

###

Marion’s father referred to him as *the Granger boy*, but he wasn’t a boy. She was sure that he was quite a bit older than her, and that under normal circumstances her family would deeply disapprove of it all.

These weren’t normal circumstances, though.

Elijah Granger came across town to visit, in a nice enough coat and with his hair and beard all combed and his hat in his hands. Marion watched him and her father talk. Not talk so much as barter, really, bargain. She’d heard farmers doing it in town, evaluating the worth of dairy cows and beef cows, of mules and workhorses.

Elijah Granger didn’t say a word about how Marion was spirited and clever and beautiful, not like any other suitors ever had (like they had before, anyway). He was a very practical man. A dispassionate man. She supposed that was why her father liked him; he didn’t profess to care about Marion’s mind or her will, and he wasn’t interested in her body, either. He was interested in what was inside her body.

She sat on the stairs where they couldn’t see her and curled her arms around her stomach, feeling ill.

Elijah Granger told her father that he could solve the problem they had. Everybody knew that Marion was used goods now, and that she’d be lucky if anyone wanted her. Elijah didn’t want her — and Marion thought perhaps that helped sell her father, too, or maybe she only hoped it. No, Elijah was the last Granger in town and he hadn’t gotten himself a wife yet, hadn’t gotten himself any children, and he needed help running his dairy farm. He said that everyone knew about how orc children were big and strong well before human children.

Elijah Granger said that he’d take the problem of Marion off her family’s hands, and he’d put her child to work out towards the edge of the town where no one would have to look at it too much.

He called her baby *it.*

He called Yehuda’s baby *it.*

Before the end of the day, the two men had reached an agreement, and Marion’s opinion was never asked once. Her mother packed a couple of bags for her and didn’t look at her.

###

Marion felt ill.

She’d felt ill for weeks. Ever since that night on the hill. She was beginning to accept that this was just how she felt, now, how she’d always feel, how she was bound to feel after what she’d seen. What’d been done. Her arms were bruised where her father had held onto her. He’d made her watch, and she’d fought and screamed and screamed, she’d clawed at him, she’d even gotten free of him once.

From the way he moved, she could tell — later, when she replayed it in her head over and over and over — that he expected her to run away, not run towards the hill. He caught her anyway, gripping her tighter, and that was when he’d left the bruises.

She could still feel the blistering torchfire. She could still hear the roaring of the crowd. She could still smell sweat and smoke and fear — and that was the most awful thing, how they’d all looked afraid, they’d all acted like they were brave for doing what they’d done, for taking some kind of fucking stand. They were excited and nervous. They didn’t even have the decency to recognize that they were the monsters; they all — to a man, to a woman, to a child — thought that they were doing the world a service.

He called for her, hoarse and raspy in the smoke, and she called back. She could see him whipping around, trying to find her, struggling against ropes and hands, desperate.

Her father put a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming his name again. He denied Yehuda even that much.

Marion felt ill. She couldn’t seem to stop feeling ill. She refused to cry at all, refused them the satisfaction of thinking she was broken — *ah, the Bell girl, always so spirited, so full of herself, we put her in her place, eh?* — no, not that, never that. But she felt sick all of the time, and she only picked at her meals because the smell made her want to vomit, and she threw up almost every day regardless.

Her mother realized it first. She tried to feed Marion a remedy for her ailing stomach — she never looked at Marion anymore, just handed her things — but Marion frowned at the herbs, recognizing them. She realized it then. Her heart plummeted, and she couldn’t breathe, and she almost cried — almost.

She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

She pushed herself up from the dirt she’d been vomiting in, and stamped with muddy boots back into the house, and threw the herbs into her mother’s face. “How fucking dare you,” she said coldly. “How fucking dare you.”

“Mary.” Her mother started gathering the leaves up again, her voice empty and calm. “Be reasonable.”

“You don’t get to fucking tell me to be reasonable. Not after what you all did.”

“You know I had no part in what happened to that boy.”

It was true enough; her mother hadn’t been at the hill that night. Granted, it was likely only because she had a weak stomach and a nervous disposition. She wasn’t innocent. She could have stepped in. Any of them could have stepped in, spoken up, at least tried. They were all fucking complicit. As far as Marion was concerned, they were all fucking murderers, down to a one.

The fact that any of them had to gall to be afraid, to be nervous, to be proud, to tell her to be reasonable …

“You’d have a fucking part in what happened to *this* boy!” Marion screamed at her. “Acting like you’re goddamn blameless —.”

Sometimes when she got very angry, she blacked out. She just saw red and her heart slammed in her ears. When she came to her senses again there was blood under her fingernails and her mother was crying.

Marion thought, Good. *Someone should be.*

###

The longer Marion looked at his face, the more she thought that she might be … okay. Shepherd Hills had never suited her much. But the Novads — they suited her well. They moved about, and they had books and odd, interesting things that they picked up here and sold there. Among them, they spoke all sorts of languages from all sorts of places. The old, old man, he liked telling her about Calisham, but he only did it in orcish and with a twinkle in his eye, making her learn it and try it out, thick and halting on her tongue.

Yehuda laughed at her accent. He teased her and kissed her face. His voice was so soft she couldn’t half hear it all the time, but she always listened, because he always said such wonderful things to her.

The boys in town were cowed by her. *The Bell girl, all spirited and uppity.* Thinks she’s something. They were afraid of her and covered it up with meanness, and — well, it was hurtful, yes, she wouldn’t deny it. She tried to shake it off and make go away, but she couldn’t, always. It was always kind of there.

Except when Yehuda ran his warm hands through her hair and whispered — ah, he always whispered, like it was a secret — about how fearless she was, and how quick-witted. He liked everything about her that everyone in town frowned over. Wild, that girl, they said. But they thought the orcs were wild, too. Supposed that was why she fit in with them.

Marion had a little dream about running away with Yehuda. She hadn’t told him yet, but she was going to. It made her nervous, because she thought he might say no, or his mother might nix the idea, but Silvanus —

The way that boy looked at her like she was the world. Like she was his and he was hers, already. It put her mind at ease, the way he murmured to her and stroked her hair, and touched her like she was delicate as he called her strong, and told her she deserved such sweetness, such softness. She couldn’t half believe Yehuda was even real.

She was going to tell him that she loved him, soon. It was a scary thing to say, and she was antsy about it, kept chickening out and not doing it, devolving into nervous giggles instead and just letting him smile at her and kiss her nose and her cheeks and her lips, let his tusks bump into her face gently.

She was going to tell him that she loved him, but she hadn’t, yet.