A race to the by four women

Four women, including both of the two twins of King Richard and the oldest daughter of King Thomas and your father’s old concubine, report going into labor together. You can tell that your mother and sister must have cheated because seconds after that report hit your ear, the report of them going into labor also reaches you, and the odds of that happening considering when they reported missing their bleed are low.

Your doctors place all six in the room. All the nobility and the two other kings demand to be present to confirm who wins. When you get there, they are already arguing about what point in time you should count a child as being born.

Sir Dietrich ends the argument, “For the sake of the ladies and the health of the unborn child, I MUST DEMAND silence. As such, the next person to speak up without my or my king’s approval will forfeit their claim and await the news of others’ victory in the courtyard. As for your concern in this country we have long counted a birth complete when the last part of the physical child has left the mother’s body. The after birth is not counted, and that’s how we will be going today, understand.”

For once, even the kings are silent, and they all nod and start their silent hopes.

It is a carnival of agony and anticipation. The midwives and royal physicians, their faces sheened in sweat, scurry from bed to bed in the makeshift birthing hall. Your mother and Princess Elizabeth are on the far left, their beds shrouded in fine blue drapery, the noble twins of King Richard set up at the center with their matching pale faces and tightly-braided hair, King Thomas’s eldest was to their right, gripping the sheets in both fists like she might wring the last drop of life from the world, with your father’s concubine receiving the least help, all the way to the right with as much space between her bed and King’s Thomas eldest bed as possible. As if being close to her would cause a negative to fall on them.

The labor becomes a silent, teeth-bared war. Every woman on those beds understood that her life and her country’s status depended on her ability to push. As such, they all refuse to be the first to break; instead, they labor in a kind of grim sisterhood, the air thick with sweat and the stench of oncoming birth.

From across the room, you watch as the twins grasp each other’s hands, as if determined that even in this, they would not be separated. Your mother, though nearly twice their age, and the only one on the bed who has done this before, matches their effort, grunt for grunt. Princess Elizabeth bites down on a leather strap and stares you down, her blue eyes wild with the knowledge that if she wins, or her mother wins, her family will maintain their claim over the Queen’s throne.

The midwives shout encouragements only in whispers. The two foreign kings stand at the edge of their respective daughters’ beds, red-faced and trembling with hope and shame. Your concubine, alone on the end, catches your gaze once—for a moment, you almost see her as more than a tool of your father, more than an afterthought, but then she looks away, returning to the ancient, wordless focus of all birthing women.

You cannot watch, but you cannot look away. This is what you have made, what Sir Dietrich’s iron logic and your own cowardice or cleverness have wrought. Generation will be decided by inches and seconds, and all you have left to do is witness.