What Five Days of Rain Had Done to the Hollis Girl’s Cord

I went back to Guild Row this morning, five days past the breech I turned there in the dark, because a cord left wet too long is the one part of a good delivery that can still turn bad quietly. Yeva Hollis’s second child weighed, by my own scale, within an ounce of what she weighed at the first bell five days ago — neither gaining nor losing in a way that worried me, which at five days is itself an answer. She fed at the breast while I waited, both sides, without the hitching cry that means a nipple catching wrong or a belly cramping.

The cord stump was dry at the base and damp an inch above it, where the swaddling cloth had sat wet against her navel since before dawn — the rain finds its way into linen left on a sill to dry and never quite does. No redness around the base, no smell, no warmth to the touch that shouldn’t be there. I unwound the wet layer, had the household’s girl bring a dry one from the chest rather than the line, and told Yeva Hollis plainly: dry the inner cloth by the fire tonight and every night until the stump falls, because a cord that stays wet a week in this weather is not a folk matter and will not wait for anyone’s ninth morning.

Yeva Hollis is healing cleanly herself — no fever, the bleeding slowing as it should by the fifth day, one breast firmer than the other, not yet hard enough to call anything.

Marfa Suslova’s red cord was on the child’s wrist when I lifted her arm to check the pulse at it; I did not ask what it counts and did not need to, since it told me nothing the scale hadn’t already. Four mornings left before the Temple calls her something. The body decided she was thriving five days ago and has not changed its mind since, which is more than I can say for most of what this city waits nine mornings to agree on.