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[gypsy_merrique]

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She swam up from the depths of sleep with a speed that was almost frightening, and it took a few moments to realize what brought on such a sudden awakening. Eyes wide and bright in the candle-lit gloom, the pain came again.

It was sharp, like a band of pressure across her middle. Merrique looked around the quasi-familiar room of this house in which she'd been staying when Walter was not around. Ever since the long ago day he had mentioned concerns he had for her safety, the two had kept her whereabouts relatively quiet. Only when properly looked over did she roam Umbra and her areas.

Much as she adored Walter, one thing she did not adore were politics and those that proclaimed to be practitioners of it, and she only half absorbed his words when he went on about alliances and protectorates and hostile territories. To many gypsies (Merrique included), such politics were daily reminders of the way her people's rights were often so brazenly trod upon. Too few were those like Angelique risen to such stations of import. But it did catch her attention the evening he said he feared for her life, and their unborn child. For a man as stalwart as Walter to make such a statement, he must have felt or heard something best left unsaid to Merri.

The hot, and often stubborn, gypsy blood that surged in her veins made it nearly impossible for Merrique to tolerate any type of bodyguard--seen or unseen. Perhaps it was the realization that an enemy could be as clear or as obscured as one meant to help that was most unsettling to her.

And so it was, she chose solitude when circumstances demanded Walter's absence. Merrique shook her hair out, and lifted the bedside candle. She went to the window and looked out at the nearby mountain that stood as a quiet sentinel to the dark beauty that was Malas. Looking out into the ever-twilight, she wondered if it angered Walter that nobody, not even he, knew where this house was. Perhaps she would bring him here. The mountain was so beautiful. Powerful.

The pain suddenly came again, just as sharp, and she realized that the sensations were symbolic of the child she would soon bear. Merrique had attended enough births to know that it could be days before the birth came.

But it would come soon. Oh, so soon.
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. . . But the dark is very trustworthy.
It's always as dark as you thought it was.
And you don't have to work at staying there.
All you have to do is survive it.
And I've been doing that forever.
from the novel "Dark Debts" by Karen Hall