Esera knew she had a lot to be grateful for. She had known that as long as she could remember. No one would ever let her forget it. But as long as she could remember, there had been something niggling at the back of her mind, some desire to protest whenever someone told her how grateful she should be for her life.

Growing up in an orphanage in Deep Illumination, the only thing Esera had known about her family was that they had given birth to her. The only thing she knew about her past was that her name was not considered so exotic as to need changing, when she was taken to the orphanage at three years old.

Esera had been a quiet child, forcibly. She had been a good student, particularly interested in human anatomy. She had wished, once, to be a doctor or a medic. The priest who ran the orphanage had dragged her into the main room to make sure all the other children saw her beating.

When she had been eleven, Esera had been apprenticed to a midwife. It was the only women’s profession in the Lord’s House, reserved almost entirely by servant girls like Esera who were too young to be married, and first wives who had lived long enough to no longer be able to bear children.

The inherent foulness of the female body extended most significantly to the very act of childbirth. Men could not allow themselves to be in the same room as their labouring wives, but some would stoop to use the services of a midwife.

Esera had wondered, idly, if in the case that she wasn’t able to have children, she might be able to keep being a midwife. Her mistress, a woman called Arala, had leaned down and given Esera a very sympathetic kind of look. ‘If they didn’t kill you, you’d just be a slave. At best.’

Still, Esera was not relieved when she finally menstruated for the first time a month after her fifteenth birthday. Could there really be anything so much worse than being expected to do that for the rest of her life?

Despite the labours of her mistresses and fellow apprentices, she had seen dozens of women killed by childbirth in those four years.

Unlike a slave girl who menstruated for the first time, Esera was not going to be married off immediately. It was one of the few privileges she shared with those girls who were children of first and second wives. There was no such thing as a woman who was a citizen, but that was the closest one could get.

Having managed to find an apprenticeship, Esera had been spared the worst of the drudgery of a servant in the Lord’s House. Her mistresses had given her and her fellow apprentices as much drudgery as they could, supposedly to help prepare them for married life. Esera hadn’t minded, she had enjoyed having a purpose.

The only time it so much as occurred to Esera that she might try to escape from the Lord’s House was on the morning of her wedding. She had known, her whole life as an apprentice, that it would not last. Even if she lived long enough to become infertile naturally, she would be enslaved rather than become a midwife again.

But seeing the plain, white dress she was expected to wear to meet her husband had done an astounding job of bringing home the reality of the day. The only thing she could say about it was ‘Best birthday present a girl could hope for.’

Arala had given her a tight hug. ‘The only birthday present a girl can expect,’ she had muttered.

Esera should have been grateful, of course. She knew that. Her husband was a fairly handsome man called Algon, a soldier who was only twenty-five years old. In her time as a midwife, Esera had seen age gaps as wide as sixty years.

In his white, dress uniform, freshly shaved and hair freshly cut, a smile on his face, Algon was the perfect picture of a man. A perfect representation of someone Esera should be glad to have for a husband.

Esera should have been grateful. Algon was among the best examples of a man she had even heard of. He was a clear communicator, he gave two warnings before he struck her for doing the wrong things. Sex was extremely quick. And he was barely at home.

Arala had warned Esera, frequently, of the dangers of first wives. As a former first wife, Arala knew the problems well. But once again, Esera should have been grateful. Her first sister wife, a woman only two years older than her, called Ilbira, was not only friendly, but deeply excited to have someone else around.

Certainly Esera was expected to do the majority of the chores, but Ilbira spent most of her time taking care of her son, so it was hardly unreasonable. Ilbira even let Esera eat in the same room as her, and use her leftover soap.

It took just over a month for Esera to appreciate why Ilbira was just so enthusiastic about Esera’s arrival. Algon had managed to stay home just over a month after his wedding, but had been called away to his duty in the military, yet again as Ilbira put it.

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Algon had locked the front door from the outside, and taken the key with him. Esera and Ilbira were unable to leave the house at all. They were stuck there, thankfully with each other for company, for the entire three months it took for Algon to complete his patrol along the southern border of the Lord’s House and return.

Algon stayed home for a month, continued to be the perfect picture of a husband for the entire time, and locked them in again when he left for his next patrol. Esera got very close to breaking a leg off the dining table to bash the door open.

The only thing that stopped her was the morning sickness. It struck intermittently, and usually around noon, just in time to stop a pecking Esera from breaking something. Ilbira was excited enough about this development that she actually took back some of the chores from Esera.

Esera was showing just enough after three months that Algon skipped the extremely quick sex. He even gave her a third warning for talking to Algiran, Ilbira’s son, during dinner. Esera resisted the urge to bash him over the head with that table leg, understanding fully that pregnancy was the time when she would be most vulnerable to her unclean nature and the Mistress’s influence.

She weathered being stuck in the face to further the effort of teaching Algiran the word ‘mother’ as she sat on a stool near the dining table where Ilbira and Algon were eating. It didn’t bruise.

For the first time in her life, no one told Esera that she should be grateful. Two weeks into his stay at home, Algon received new orders. He did not tell his wives what those orders were, as that would be improper, but he left the next morning. Esera was grateful.

After four months locked in the house, Esera made an interesting discovery. A letter arrived, which Ilbira said had never happened before. The discovery was the Ilbira couldn’t read.

As an apprentice midwife, Esera had been taught how to read when she was eleven, and she had quite taken to it. Though there was only one book in Algon’s house, Esera enjoyed reading enough that she had been more than happy to read it to Algiran.

The letter that arrived at Algon’s locked house was a formal letter of summons, written on Algon’s behalf. He had been injured in battle and so it had been decided, by someone, that his wives ought to move to Outer Light to give him comfort in this difficult time.

It was not a question.

Esera, Ilbira, and Algiran left the next morning with the second round of soldiers headed for Outer Light. After four days of walking, which Algiran enjoyed much more than anyone else in the whole group, the three of them were herded into an apartment only slightly smaller than the house they had left.

Algon was laid out, heroically, on the master bed, left arm, left leg, and torso wrapped in clean bandages. Not that he did anything when he was at home typically, but he somehow managed to do even less while he was injured, and for the four more weeks after that that he was waiting for the next army to set off to crush the heretics out in the wastes.

Once Algon had left with the army, Ilbira confided that she’d preferred him this time, not wanting to do anything. Even given the brevity of sex, she preferred to be without it. Esera made another interesting discovery: Ilbira hadn’t known about sex before she got married.

With increasingly limited time and nothing much else to do, Esera spent the last eight weeks of her pregnancy doing her utmost to both teach Ilbira how to read and the basics of midwifery. Even if there had been midwives in Outer Light, which there were not, there was no chance one would have been summoned for Esera. Second wives didn’t get that kind of help.

The only interruptions to Ilbira’s training were the constant weddings that, to Esera’s surprise, she and Ilbira were actually allowed out of the apartment to attend. News came back every few days of more men killed in the fighting, and those wives who had been moved to Outer Light had to get remarried as quick as possible, as long as they weren’t currently pregnant.

So a lot of the guards and soldiers at the mine, who may otherwise have never managed to get married at all, finally got some wives.

Every day Esera dreaded getting another letter to inform them that Algon had died in the siege. Ilbira would have to get remarried immediately, and Algiran would be sent off the an orphanage. Esera would give birth, sit around in a locked room for a month or two, and then get remarried herself.

It helped very little with the anxiety that Algon survived long enough for Esera to go into labour. What helped a huge amount with the anxiety was just how much information Ilbira retained. How obedient she was, carrying out Esera’s instructions.

Despite the number of births Esera had assisted with, the number of births she’d seen, she was still surprised by how much it hurt to give birth. On the other hand, she was impressed by how quickly she got it done. Only two hours of proper labour was much better than she’d dared to hope for.

By the end of it, Esera got to hold a crying, wriggling little beast to her chest and smile dazedly. A little girl. She felt like a good weight. She was warm and gooey. She settled down quickly and breathed easily.

Esera decided that she would name the girl Ilbesa, and didn’t think very much about why she’d chosen that for a name.

Ilbira rocked back on her heels with a long sigh and a slight frown.

Esera didn’t have the energy to actually ask what was wrong.

‘I was hoping you could hold on another nine days,’ Ilbira said. ‘Then we’d have the same birthday.’

Esera smiled. ‘Let’s say it’s an early birthday present, then. So a girl doesn’t only get a single birthday present in her life.’

For a late eighteenth birthday present, Esera got liberated from the Lord’s House exactly eight days after her husband was killed in the last-ditch attempt to break open Lookout. Esera could have chosen to stay, as some few of the wives in Outer Light did.

Ilbira had made up her mind immediately and it had taken Esera only as long as it took Ilbira to tell her so to make up her own mind. Esera certainly didn’t want her daughter to have the same life as Ilbira had.