There is someone standing behind her and a little to her right, waiting to be noticed, smiling slightly. He picks a flower.

When she notices him, she whirls around, relaxing slightly when she sees he's holding a flower and not any kind of weapon. 

"Hello, stranger. What brings you here?" 

"Picking pretty things out in this lovely field of wildflowers," he says, twirling the stem in his hand, "of course." He tosses her the flower. He's got his bangs low over his dark eyes, and a rakish smile.

...She smiles and ducks her head. "And a lovely morning for it, too," she says, ignoring the gathered clouds over head. "My name is Eleanor, might I have yours?" 

"Michael," he says, "it's a pleasure to meet you."

"Likewise. What's a pretty thing like you doing wandering alone on a fair May Day morning?" 

"Hoping like attracts like," he smiles.

"Well, I am a perfectly respectable junior midwife from yon town," she says primly. "I know exactly what I'm doing out in the forest," she says, gesturing at her basket of flowers. "You, on the other hand, are an intriguing mystery." 

"Oh, I'm from a bit north of here is all, but I've been doing a bit of wandering to soothe my itchy feet," he says.

"Oh, dear, itchy feet? Maybe I can help you scratch..." 

He turns out to be barefoot, when he picks up one leg out of the flowers. "Do you suppose so?" Toes wiggle at her.

She giggles, and reaches out to tickle the foot with the flower he gave her. 

"Ah!" he exclaims dramatically, flopping over backwards. "Relief at last!"

She laughs, and flops over beside him. "You're cute." 

"I'm ecstatic to have charmed someone herself so fair."

"You'll make me blush." 

"Will I?" He grabs another flower, a pink one, and holds it to her cheek. "And then you'll match this blossom in color as well as beauty."

She wiggles a little, ducking her head and smiling. 

The flower bats her face gently. "Tell me, Eleanor, are all your friends and family back in town anxiously awaiting you? Are they even now running to and fro, looking for you under laundry baskets and behind cows and in the rafters, asking each other 'oh, where is Eleanor, has anyone seen Eleanor' -"

"Oh, I just live with Old Maude, the senior midwife. We live a bit apart, I don't get out nearly as often as I should. In fact, I've specific instructions not to come home too early today." 

"Oh dear! Turned you out, has she?" Flower bats against her chin, her throat, her collarbone.

She arches her neck and stretches, her toes tangled with the hem of her dress so the stretch exposes a little more cleavage. "It seems so. Whatever shall I do?" 

Flower bats a bit lower. "Well, I'd never dream of telling you to go against her specific instructions. I guess you'll just have to stay out here. But I'll keep you company." He scoots a bit closer. His breath smells sweet.

Oh, marvelous. 

She leans in to kiss him. 

He's an excellent kisser, though he must be chilly on this overcast day.

His lips are awfully cold. Well. This is a problem she is qualified to solve.

She doesn't make much progress on that but he's pretty good at distracting from such things. Though his hands are also cold.

This will cause a startled giggly shriek but does not put any kind of significant damper on her enthusiasm. 

Oh good! Then he can be very distracting with his chilly hands indeed until they have been at every lace and button on her person.

Ohhhhhhhh. 

Her hands are much warmer, but they can perform much the same tasks, albeit with slightly less deftness. 

Fortunately the wild plants are quite tall around them.

And she knows much better places to gather plants than any of the other girls in the village. 

He must have slept outside, he's chill all over. But somehow she can't find it in her to mind too much. 

He's a very attentive partner, noticing every little jump in heartbeat, every little indrawn breath, taking just the right cues from them, nibbling on her neck - nibbling a little bit harder -

--Fucking ow??? 

She stops him cold. Where his skin meets hers, it blooms--red???

"What the fuck," she demands. 

"- Eleanor, dear," he murmurs, "what are you doing?"

"Tell me what you did and why it hurts so much!!!" 

"It's nothing to worry about, now suppose you let me go and -"

"Not while it hurts like this and I. Don't. Know. Why," she hisses. 

"It was an accident, of course -"

"What kind of accident." 

"Just bit a little harder than I meant to -"

"Getting bit does not hurt this much!"

"If you'll just take a deep breath or two and let me go -"

She makes him get off her. She leaves one of her hands on his shoulder. She does not let him go. 

"Come on, Eleanor, don't you think this is an overreaction to a scratch?"

"Not when it hurts this damn much!"

"Well, I couldn't have predicted you'd have such sensitive skin, now, could I -"

She gives him a supremely unimpressed look. 

"Let me go, Eleanor..." His eyes are very dark indeed, now. There's a bit of a growl in his voice.

"Tell me why it hurts," she says, unconcerned by his growling. 

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're whinging about."

"Your mysteriousness just got a lot less attractive and a lot more urgently solvable," she informs him. 

"You must have some kind of skin condition. I needn't go on nibbling as it's turned out you don't like it."

"I'm not actually stupid." 

"I never said you were, but you're certainly far out of line, whatever you're doing to me here. Let me go."

"Why are you so cold? You shouldn't still be this cold. I didn't think much of it before..." 

"It's a chilly day. Some people are warmer than others."

She puts a hand on her neck and pokes at the cut. "You should not have been able to bite me that hard by accident. I know my own skin; I go herb-gathering in these woods all the time. I've gotten more scratches from the scratchy poky things that grow here than most people dream of. You are an enigma."

He's breathing a bit rapidly.

"Why don't you want to tell me?" 

"Let me go," he growls.

"No." 

SNARL.

"Give me a good reason," she suggests. 

HISS.

She considers him, then makes him open his mouth, sticks the end of a fallen branch in it, and makes him bite down. 

The branch doesn't even snap. It's bitten through like butter.

"...My." She gives him back control of his mouth and examines the bitten end of the stick.

GROWL.

The stick is... dissolving slightly.

Her hand goes to her neck again. 

The pain is fading, a little, and it doesn't seem like her flesh is melting. 

"What were you trying to do to me," she breathes shakily. She sets the stick down carefully. 

RrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRAARR, says Michael.

She suddenly feels less secure just from her hand keeping him under her power. 

She does not know what he is exactly and she does not like not knowing but he bit her with those teeth that are doing that to that stick. And that snarling does not look like she would be safe if he had freedom of movement. 

"Witch," he spits, and then it's back to snarling.

"--Like you're one to talk!" 

RAWR.

Yeah, okay, she gave him his chance and he wasted it on a hypocritical insult. She makes him stop breathing. 

This prevents further rawring but does not make him stop glaring.

...She...doesn't think fairies don't need to breathe? She hasn't heard a fairy tale where they don't, that she can recall. That suggests that her guess of "demon" is more likely to be correct, which is unfortunate since she doesn't actually know if demons can be killed and also she's pretty sure they're more dangerous than fairies. She doesn't have any crosses on her and she can't cross herself because her right hand is the one holding him still. 

She tries to make him break his own neck. 

He can do that. He's still able to blink, though.

...Creepy!!! Can he still. Move things that are not his head. 

Yup. Even with his head pointing at that freaky angle.

...Can he...rip his own head off...? 

Yup.

The head displays impressive jaw strength, once she's not touching it any more, and flips itself into the air at her.

Gyeek! Definitely a demon!

She makes the body catch it and rip the jaw off. 

Now she has a body, a head, and a jaw. None of these things can move on their own (since she's touching the body) but the head can still look at her.

That's disturbing! Really disturbing!

She makes the body start taking itself apart, every joint separately so none of them can jump at her. Starting with the feet, so it can use both hands. 

Once it's got the legs off completely she holds one of the hands tightly and checks how much the torso can flop around with just spine motion. 

Kind of a lot, though it doesn't have great aim.

How much can she break the torso using the arms? 

Some, enough to reduce it to fairly helplessly twitching.

And then she has one of the arms tear the other one off, with her hands on both, and the one she tore off she has break the other one off the torso one joint at a time, and then she piles up all the pieces of body, with the head on top facing away from her, and takes her flint and steel out of the herbalist's pouch lying discarded on the ground with the rest of her clothes, and lights the pile on fire. 

It burns.

Once the fire's nice and high she tosses the arm she was holding into it, then steps away quickly lest it escape, now on fire. 

It does flail a bit but does not put itself out, just scorches some grass. Fortunately it's a dewy day.

She keeps watch by the fire until it's burned itself out, making sure it doesn't spread to any of the trees or go underground to flare up later at the worst possible moment. 

And then--

Well, she sort of wants to go home and curl up in bed and cry, but that never solved anything, and anyway, Maude wouldn't be happy to see her back so soon. She puts her clothes back on and collects Michael's and folds them up and stashes them in her basket under the flowers, and goes to pick some more. When she's done with that she goes to the village square and weaves garlands with the other girls, accepted into their company on this day in a way she isn't, for most of the year. They decorate all the houses, and then there is dancing and drinking and general making-merry, and by the end of the day she can almost put the devil she met in the forest out of her mind. 

Almost. 

His clothes are nothing special but it would be a waste to burn them but they're a demon's clothes; she dithers over them, the next morning, before resolving to sneak them into the church's donation box. If the church itself doesn't cleanse them enough to be worth wearing by a human being, the priest will probably notice. 

After that she has nothing but a small, oddly-cool scar on her neck to remind her that her encounter on May Day morning was real. Other than that, it just goes in the box of things she doesn't talk about, like the power that let her prevent him from dragging her down to hell with him, or whatever it was he intended to do. She doesn't have to think about it, in her busy days of harvesting herbs or concocting herbal remedies or going out with Old Maude to deliver babies. 

It doesn't occur to her that anything is amiss, when she starts craving eggs. They keep hens, after all, so it's not much of an inconvenience, even if Old Maude good-naturedly complains about having fewer to trade for other kinds of food. 

She barely notices, when her period doesn't come. It's never been the most regular, anyways, and she simply assumes she's late and is vaguely thankful for being able to put it off for a while. 

It isn't until she gets dressed in the morning and finds that her apron-strings have less string left over after being tied that it occurs to her that lying down with a demon might have consequences. 

She doesn't tell Old Maude. She didn't tell her about her meeting with the demon, and she has no idea how to broach the subject now. She keeps eating eggs and frets and goes to church on Sunday, and...she doesn't feel anything. No aversion, no burning in her stomach when she accepts the sacrament, no pain or hesitation or anything. If she is carrying a demon's child, it's not showing itself to be demonic...

And should it? Demons are fallen angels, after all. She recalls a passage in Genesis, from before the Ark, about sons of God going to Earth and siring children on human women, and those children were heroes, men of renown. Should her own child be any different? Certainly it isn't a normal child--she shouldn't be showing this quickly after conceiving, and it must have been that May Day encounter, she hasn't lain with anyone else since last May Day. But it doesn't have to be an evil kind of not normal. 

She tells Old Maude, lays out all her logic. Maude tsks at her for not sticking to kinds of fun that won't result in pregnancy--and she has a point, Eleanor has to admit that--and she's skeptical of Eleanor's claim that the babe must have been conceived on May Day, but she agrees to help Eleanor hide her condition from the rest of the village. What she'll do after that they don't decide right away, though Old Maude thinks she ought to give the babe up to the church. They're looked at oddly enough by everyone else without adding a bastard child into the equation. Eleanor...is reluctant to do that, but if she can claim the babe is a foundling and not her own get it might be to their advantage. 

Eleanor doesn't find out about the craving for blood until she's tasked with killing a hen that had stopped laying for Sunday dinner. Twisting the head off a chicken is nothing she hadn't done before, but never before had the scent of its blood hit her like that. She has the bird's neck to her lips and is gulping down as much blood as she could suck out of it before she can entirely realize what's going on. 

...She doesn't tell Maude about that. She's not entirely sure what to think, but...damn. Blood is not supposed to be that delicious. Well...pregnancy is supposed to cause strange cravings. 

She continues to not tell Maude about that, and doesn't kill an extra chicken just to suck its blood down--they only have so many, and she wants those eggs. But she raids the pantry for all the blood sausage they have--it's so good, she barely even feels guilty--and Maude can know about that, it's a reasonably ordinary pregnancy craving, and can be enlisted to go into town and half-bribe half-blackmail the butcher into handing over more. 

She makes sure to eat any green things along with her diet of mostly eggs and sausage, but as her belly continues to swell at an unreasonable rate so that Maude has to admit that something funny is going on here, she feels no shame in indulging herself. Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. 

When she feels the child quicken in her belly, she has to sit down with her hand pressed to her stomach for a few minutes. Her baby. Her baby her baby her baby--

She picks out names, not telling Maude because Maude is still holding out hope for the "leave the baby on the church steps" plan. Madeline if it's a girl, Samuel for a boy. 

She gets flashes of hot and cold--not, she thinks, a normal pregnancy symptom, but then this isn't a normal pregnancy. She takes to wearing layers she can shuck or don on a whim, and heats bricks in the fire for when she feels especially cold, and otherwise bears it. 

It is May fifteenth when the baby snaps a rib. 

She's glad she's alone, when it happens; she doesn't want Maude asking questions that might make her decide the baby is hellspawn after all, and her immediate reaction when it happened wasn't to do damage control, but just to curl over in pain. Which, of course, makes her rib hurt worse. 

She pokes at it experimentally and hisses. Yes, that's broken. She's not sure if it's broken clean through or just cracked, but it's definitely broken. Some amount of rib pain during pregnancy is normal, she knows, but this...? 

The baby kicks again, and it doesn't happen to hit a rib, this time, but it jars the existing break enough to bring tears to her eyes and a hissed yelp from her throat, and she knows, suddenly, that if she doesn't do anything to stop it there will definitely be more broken ribs

and

she

reaches

inside

and

makes

it

stop. 

She lets go a moment later, surprised, then reaches inside again and carefully, carefully, takes control of the baby's body. She makes sure it keeps breathing--she doesn't know for sure if babies need to breathe, in the womb, or if they feed on their mother's breath like they do with their mother's food, but she isn't willing to risk it. She focuses on the tiny life inside her--so tiny, so precious, so much more pleasant to think about than her throbbing ribcage, so important to make sure the child doesn't kill either of them. 

She lets the baby control its own movements, for the most part--she doesn't know if doing otherwise would hurt it, has never controlled one person for so long before. But she sharply limits how fast it can move its arms and legs, how hard it can kick or punch her--she still loves the tiny flutterings she can feel as it moves, as long as she can make sure the rib incident doesn't happen again. And it would--she catches abortive movements that would definitely have broken bone if she hadn't stopped them, and she wonders if the mothers of the men of renown in the Bible survived bearing them. 

She hopes so. She knows even mothers of purely mortal babes don't always make it, and most of the danger there is in the bearing itself, not the carrying, but she grows weaker each day. She knows the child must be born soon, surely; her belly has already swollen to a size that on another woman would suggest eight months, though she knows it to have been less than three weeks. 

She eats ravenously and Maude, increasingly concerned, does not begrudge her. The rest of the village has been told that she is sick, which is why she hasn't been attending church or showing her face in the village even as much as she normally does, and on the rare occasions that someone comes to visit them, her pallor and lassitude under the heaps of blankets that obscure the shape of her abdomen leave them plenty convinced. 

Her belly swells, and she is increasingly concerned; there is variation in the ultimate size of the child, of the mother's belly, of course, but surely...

It is May thirtieth when something happens. 

The baby had been getting increasingly squirmy, and she's been monitoring it carefully to make sure it didn't break any more bones, but that was all. 

The stab of agony as the baby bites against the inside of her womb is unexpected. 

She stops it from doing that again, breathing hard and trying to figure out how much damage was done. Not...too much, she thinks. 

The baby. Will not. Stop trying. It becomes ever more frenetic, and she has to spend every ounce of her concentration on keeping it from tearing her apart. 

It doesn't take her long to figure out that she's not going to be able to maintain this when she falls asleep. 

The baby needs to come out now, but her breasts haven't been filling the way they should, she doesn't know if there's anything she can do there to induce labor--

She swallows, and moves the baby, and carefully, carefully, lets it bite against the amniotic sac at the base of her belly over the cervix. Which...doesn't feel like a soft membrane. 

The baby bites through, and fluid gushes out, but the contractions don't start. She's crying, now, and--

There's no turning back. She swallows. There is no way but forward, and if--if she doesn't survive this, at least, the baby can...

She moves the baby's arms to push the hole in the--amniotic shell?--wider, and something inside her cracks, and she sobs, and there are no contractions, the only way to get the baby out is under its own power--

Her pelvis breaks and flesh tears and she screams, but she does not falter in her manipulations of the baby's limbs, and eventually she is lying helpless and broken on the floor but the baby is out, the baby will be okay, and that's what matters. 

Things are going dark, and she wishes at least she could hold them...

She feels a sharp pain against her leg, barely perceptible against the background of sundered flesh and bone, and then a warm tiny hand, and she thinks at least that's better than nothing...

And then her legs twist back into place, and the pain fades. 

She sits up, carefully, and reaches out. 

The baby is bloody and pink and tiny and perfect. And a girl. Madeline. She scoops up the child, carefully, and the baby squirms some more and turns her head and sinks her teeth in Eleanor's arm. 

Eleanor makes her let go, wincing slightly at the sharp pain, and Madeline gives a soft cry and pats the arm, and the wound heals. 

...Oh. 

"My little angel," she breathes, and cuddles the baby close. Madeline makes another attempt to bite, and Eleanor gently nudges her mouth away with her talent. 

"At least you've got a full set of teeth," she murmurs. "I'm afraid I don't have any milk for you, little one. We'll just have to see what you can eat." After a moment, she lifts one hand slightly from the baby's side. ...There's no visible mark...

Oh. 

The baby is even pinker than normal. 

A normal mark is white. The mark she left on the baby's father was red. She spent weeks using her talent on the baby inside the womb...

"Well. At least you're not all red," she sighs. "Let's get you cleaned up." 

She washes the baby--and herself--and changes into clothes that are neither torn nor bloodied. The baby reaches for the bloody clothes, but Eleanor puts them aside for rags. 

She gets the pot of porridge that Old Maude left bubbling over the hearth fire off it, and ladles out a bowl. 

The baby, it transpires, will eat oatmeal without too much fuss if little enthusiasm, and periodically has to be physically prevented from biting. Well, that's alright; some fully-human babies are biters too, it's only this one's unusual strength that makes it a problem. And it's a problem she can handle. She wouldn't want to see some other woman try to handle this, but...well, some other woman wouldn't have survived Madeline's father. 

She has a few hours to enjoy snuggling her warm cozy baby and feeding her oatmeal before Maude comes home. 

"Hello, Maude!" she calls, once she's sure her mentor is alone. "Meet little Madeline." 

The baby wriggles in her arms. She feeds her another spoonful of porridge, which distracts her for a moment, before she reaches out towards Maude. 

Maude approaches carefully. 

"I suppose I shouldn't have been away for so long, with you so far along, but it seems you've made it through alright..." she trails of, examining Eleanor critically; she seems a lot more mobile than a woman just out of childbed ought to be. 

"My little angel," she says warmly, "can heal."

"Can she now," Maude says. She examines the baby with the same critical eye. The baby waves her arms at her. Maude holds out her arms, and Eleanor places the child in them, keeping a hand on the baby's thinly-haired scalp to ensure that she won't accidentally hurt Maude with her astonishing strength. 

Madeline waves her arms some more and pats at Maude, and the older midwife makes a startled noise. Eleanor looks at her questioningly. 

"It doesn't hurt anymore," Maude says, surprised. "My knees, and my back, and my right shoulder...nothing hurts." 

A smug smile slowly spreads across Eleanor's face. "I did say she can heal." 

"You did." Maude sighs. "I suppose this means we can't leave her with the church."

Eleanor had had no intention whatever of doing so anyway, but she's not going to quibble with Maude about exactly why she isn't giving up her little girl. 

"We'll say she's a foundling," she says instead. "Everyone saw me on May Day with a perfectly flat belly; even the sharpest-tongued gossips will have little to say to that. Little that will harm us, in any case."

Maude sighs again. "I suppose you're right. We'll have to tell the priest, sooner than later, to get her christened." 

"Mmhm," Eleanor says absently, distracted by getting more oatmeal in her less than thrilled baby.