The Second Turn Nadya Almost Finished

Yulia Brasova came to the Guild Hall two days past her fortieth week, and the door told me nothing wrong: full term, high head at the last exam three weeks earlier, a labor that had started ordinarily before dawn. By the fourth hour her waters broke clear and the pains changed shape — not stronger, only wronger, spaced unevenly instead of climbing — and my fingers found what the shape had already told me. Shoulder first. An arm folded across the chest. No skull anywhere near the outlet.

Nadya was in the room already, eleven months under my hand now and one turn behind her since the sixteenth. I put her fingers where mine had been and covered them with my own, the way I did for the first, and let her find the angle for herself. The rotation came easily through the second contraction. Yulia’s belly moved the way a held door moves once the latch gives, and for a moment the whole of it looked ready to repeat as cleanly as the first had.

It did not repeat cleanly. Partway through the third contraction the cord slipped forward under the descending shoulder — a loop my fingers found before Nadya’s could have known to look for it — and there was no time left in that room for a hand to belong to anyone but the fastest one. I took it back whole. Not gently, not as instruction, only the correct motion, as quickly as I had it. Freed the loop, completed the turn myself. Yulia delivered a son within the quarter-hour, red and loud, cord pulse strong throughout.

Corvus wrote, of the first turn, that the fear does not move at the wrist and is earned by four more turns, some of which will not go this well. This was the second. He was right about the count sooner than either of us expected. What Nadya learned today is not the turn — she already had that. It is the exact second a turn stops belonging to the apprentice, which cannot be handed to her either. She will need to find that second herself, again, at least three more times.