She didn't sleep too well that night, but she never did after any encounters with Daniel Brandon.
Perhaps it was the cruel way he had murdered the surgeon that pushed her over the edge and into a disgusting replication of her most horrible memory.
Surgeons had been involved in that as well.
"This is arcane technology, not anything we would be willing to use on anyone of lesser value," the woman wearing the black hood said.
Mariana couldn't see her face. She never could, but she could always remember what her former lover looked like, even in dreams.
She was sitting on the edge of a mattress that was on a platform of stone. Even in dreams, she could feel the pain in her lower body. It was so bad that she couldn't speak, a piercing feeling, like a dagger opening her up. It was almost frustrating that she wasn't bleeding. Death would have been easier, but she would die, anyway, with this sickness constricting her organs, making her eyes water.
She was sobbing.
Mariana hated to be so weak in front of him.
"Any cost…you hear me, at any cost," Daniel said. He looked like it was his own flesh burning from the inside and not hers.
He had loved her once. He had loved her enough to cast aside a fortune and pay for the surgery she needed to survive.
There was something wrong with her belly. She had not been able to eat during the week of the flareup. No one told her what was going on - and yes, now she was losing her lucidity to the frightening realism of the dream. She was living her worst days over and over again.
"We will not drug her with the paw. She has demonstrated a considerable sensitivity to all substances that can disrupt her breath, except those we can't afford with the money you have given us. Instead…we will enchant her so that she will not feel any pain."
This was supposedly the greatest intersection of witchcraft and medical science, an art so advanced that no outsider could ever be allowed into its sphere of influence. Mariana didn't feel lucky.
The pain was so bad, worse than any cramps she had ever felt, that she wished for death to come quickly. It did not matter if she would ever be reborn. A mere nonexistence would have been bliss.
Candles were glowing blue in the room that was mostly covered in thin plates of black stone. Something about that didn't feel quite right to Mariana, but when she tried to focus on the unnatural color of the flames, the pain in her stomach and her intestines pulled her right back into her suffering.
"She will be present mentally, but she will be unable to move. Understanding all of these things, can you still say you want this to happen, cor?"
To be called a cor was a compliment unfit for the king of all pirates, but apparently Daniel let that go straight into his head. Mariana shuddered. She hated being like an animal, too much in pain to reply with witty remarks.
Daniel nodded.
"At any cost, I told you already. Save her. She's the only thing I care about."
That, if anything, should have cured her. Love was supposed to be the medicine for everything. She had nothing to lean on, though. Her entire body felt like it was collapsing and decaying while she was still alive.
She wept on the stone platform as the hooded women took the mattress away.
Then they brought out the black candles.
Originally, these women had operated her in complete darkness, which had been an amazing display of professional skill in itself. However, the fact that they did not blow out the blue flames reminded Mariana that she was living in a nightmare right now, not in the real world.
She could see every instrument so clearly right now.
She wondered if it was her capability to give birth that made her belly ache like this. Always a rather waifish, she had grown into a woman without ever suspecting that there was anything wrong with her. She knew that she had different priorities when she compared herself to Daniel - Mariana would have loved to settle down in a place where no one knew her name, to raise a family and herd goats or something like that. Daniel had convinced her that it was good to burn bright and leave a legacy. He had tried to become a scholar of some kind, but with that restless soul of his, the love he had for wisdom and books stayed as a superficial hobby that only served to prop him up as the most magnificent and dreaded pirate on the high seas. Mariana, too, only used books as tools, but she would have loved to have something different, maybe just a few golden rings on her fingers while she was digging into fertile soil that she owned with her husband.
Yes, they had talked about getting married, even before their first kiss.
Now, though, it wasn't just her capacity of family-making that was threatened, it was her entire life. She had let herself into this world of riches and adventures and she regretted it so much. Perhaps it was the debauchery that had cursed her womb.
Idle speculation wasn't enough to keep her mind busy as the witch surgeons used their corpse candle to immobilize her.
She felt every last thing.
Everything they did to her body.
It was torture.
Her stomach would recover, that much was clear after the most nightmarish part of the nightmare was over. Her mind would not. They stitched her up and healed everything so nicely that she would not even have a scar. She was not in pain anymore, in fact, she was absolutely thrilled to experience a healthy body. A lingering thought reminded her that she was now carrying a memory of these women treating her like a test subject, a cadaver, but that was a small price for a life free of agony.
Then she remembered what came next.
Before Daniel even said anything, the tears came.
"I was afraid I'd lose her," he admitted. "If I'm truthful, I cared more about my future heirs than whether she would…you know…"
"She can hear you, you know. It isn't a good thing to imply that."
"Oh. Yes."
She woke up crying, with her eyes puffy, knowing that she had never been anything to him but a promise of a legacy.
Of course a pirate king needed a legacy.
Of course she was nothing. A daughter of a butcher and a remarried widow. What was she, if not an investment, a tool?
Swallowing once, she wiped her face with the scarf Daniel had given her.
A dark thought formed inside her mind.
Perhaps it was a good idea to become a privateer, after all.