Page 75 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

T he blood moon hung low in the night sky, an ominous orb glowing crimson—a portent of birth and death, of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. Tonight, the veil between the physical and the spiritual world was perilously thin.

In the small cottage at the edge of the village, the air was thick with heat and the tang of iron.

The gray-haired midwife, Zora, worked with fevered hands as the young woman fought to bring new life into the world.

But this was no ordinary villager to her—this was her only daughter, Anca.

The labor had started normally enough, but as the hours dragged on, her unease grew.

Something was wrong. Anca’s brow glistened with sweat, her face twisted in anguish.

It had been nearly a full day since her waters broke, and the child refused to come.

“The babe’s breech,” the old woman muttered under her breath. Her gnarled hands pressed and prodded the swollen belly, whispering prayers—some in Latin, others in the old Romani tongue—until, at last, she felt the baby turn.

“On your hands and knees now, girl,” she ordered sharply. “With the next pain, you push—hard. Childbirth is no work for the weak. Do it now, or the babe won’t last much longer.”

Her daughter clung to the bedpost, knuckles white, a strangled grunt escaping as the contraction tore through her. Her face flushed deep red, the veins on her forehead standing out like dark rivers beneath the skin.

“There—yes! The babe is crowning,” the old woman cried, sliding her hands into position. “Don’t falter now—one more push!”

Anca’s scream split the air as she bore down with the strength of the desperate, and the child slipped free into her grandmother’s waiting hands.

“I have a granddaughter,” the old woman whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “A beautiful, healthy girl… she looks so much like you did, the day you came into this world. A head full of hair she has, as black as a raven’s wing.”

She wiped the child clean and placed her gently to the young mother’s breast.

“Magdalena,” Anca whispered, her voice raw and fragile from hours of torment. “I want to call her…Magdalena.”

At last, her body began to relax, the tension melting from her bones in a long, blissful exhale. She gazed down at the tiny face nestled against her breast, wonder softening the exhaustion in her eyes.

But the joy was fleeting. The bleeding didn’t stop. Zora worked frantically, packing herbs into a poultice, murmuring incantations, but the color drained from her daughter’s face.

As dawn threatened the horizon, Anca pressed a trembling kiss to the baby’s forehead. “Take care of her, Mama,” she whispered, her eyelids fluttering shut.

By the time the first light spilled over the hills, the young mother was gone.

Mag dalena was not the only child born in the village that night, nor the only one to lose a mother to the cruelty of childbirth. Under the same blood moon that cast its crimson glow over the poorest cottage, death crept silently into the highest chamber of the walled castle at the village’s heart.

There, within stone walls warmed by roaring fires and draped in silks, the boyar’s wife labored through the night.

Drago Bourean, the district’s military leader and master of the castle, paced like a caged beast as his wife’s screams echoed down the corridors.

But all the wealth and privilege of his house could not shield her from the same grim fate.

By dawn, she too lay pale and still, her life bled out upon fine linen sheets.

Her son—who would be named Caius, was strong and healthy. A perfect heir. He was as different from Magdalena as two babes could be. His hair shone like burnished gold in the torchlight, and his eyes—an impossibly vivid blue—would not dim nor change with age as most infants’ did.

Though born less than a mile apart, they had come into two entirely different worlds. She, the granddaughter of a Romani midwife in a drafty, dirt-floored cottage; he, the son of a nobleman destined to command armies and inherit vast lands.

Yet the blood moon, a cruel and watchful sentinel in the sky, had bound their fates together, in ways no one in the village—not peasant nor boyar—could yet imagine.